“Jews, will not, replace us, Jews will not replace us.“
They chanted as they marched, what seemed like hundreds of them. To many, this seemed surreal; where did they come from.
They chanted anti-Black invective as well. They came to make a statement because of the removal of Confederate statues, which reminded African-Americans and decent people of conscience of a period the nation should soon want to forget.
Before it was all over, a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of anti-hate demonstrators, and Heather Heyer, a young white woman, was dead, and several others were injured.
Where, you ask, do these hatemongers come from? Their faces seemed fresh but contorted in hatred. They were young, and they seemed like the boy next door.
They are the boy next door. Most black people are not inner-city dwellers; in fact, most African Americans live above the poverty line and outside of the inner cities.
So yes, they are the boys next door, and they are filled with the hate their parents taught them.
According to the Atlantic, Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, looked at numbers from the 2010 to 2014 American Community Survey and found that 39 percent of African Americans live in the suburbs, 36 percent live in cities, 15 percent live in small metropolitan areas.
So for African-Americans, these hateful creatures are not from someplace far away; they live right next door. And so you wonder to yourself, “I thought we were past this?
The rise of Barack Obama to the presidency created a backlash of epic proportion. We witnessed a dramatic increase in white right-wing militias, and a steady rise in antisemitism. We also witnessed an unprecedented increase in threats made against President Obama, the likes of which had never been seen before for any other president.
Police departments have been infiltrated by white supremacists groups as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and a general across the board sense of hostility coming from the political right.
There has been a mad rush to purchase weapons in unprecedented amounts in addition to all of that. Today there are more guns in the hands of Americans who love them than there are people.
According to CNN, there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns (the law doesn’t allow it). High-quality telephone polls from Gallup and the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that 42% of people in the US live in households with guns. According to the General Social Survey, which has a much higher response rate than telephone polls and interviews people in person, a relatively lower 32% of Americans said in 2016 that they lived in a household with guns.
The Washington Post said, different national polls tend to show slightly different rates of gun ownership. The latest household gun ownership rate in the General Social Survey, in 2014, was 32 percent. The October 2015 Gallup survey showed a higher rate of 43 percent, including guns kept on property outside the home.
We can extrapolate from the reporting of those two organizations that gun ownership seems to be centered between a third to forty-three percent of the population.
This means, there are over (320, 000,000.00 ) guns in the hands of roughly one hundred and seven million people.
Those people are generally white, and conservative, make no mistake about it.
With all of the foregone, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the threat while nationalism poses to Americans of all color.
It is important to remember that when they kill those opposed to them, they do not distinguish between black, brown, or white. Heather Heyer was a young white woman. The Jewish people who were attacked in their California place of worship two days ago are white. The Jewish worshipers in Pennsylvania were white.
Most schools shooting victims are white, even as the perpetrators are overwhelmingly white and influenced by white nationalism.
Americans are not safe even in worship places, be they Blacks as in Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina or Jews In California, and the threat cannot be ignored.
In recent weeks there Black Churches were burned within quick succession of each other in Louisiana.
I wrote at the time, that as authorities quibble over whether the cases were linked, those of us who are paying attention recognized that the reason hardly anyone is ever held accountable for these heinous crimes, is that some law enforcement officers are either responsible, or they know who the culprits are.
In the fifties and sixties, the kidnappings and murder of blacks in the south were largely done with the full knowledge and coöperation of cops.
Two days later, we learned that the son of a local Sheriff was arrested for the crimes.
Authorities apprehended Holden Matthews, 21, in St. Landry Parrish, Louisiana, after they identified him as the suspect in allegedly setting the fires over a span of 10 days.
Now, to deflect from the seriousness of the crimes and the hateful nature of his actions that precipitated the fires, Matthews was quickly charged with simple Arson, and they began circulating a narrative that he was associated with Black metal, a distant genre of devil-worshipping death metal music. Black metal has roots in the Norwegian heavy metal scene that reportedly was the inspiration for several church burnings in the early 1990s.
A clever though transparent attempt to ensure that this monster is not given the full extent of the law as he should for a hate crime of this nature.
Rockingham County Fire Marshal Robert Cardwell (left), Rockingham Sheriff’s Detective Lori Pegram, and Assistant Fire Marshal John Cruise (right) lead Harley Kendall Fulp following Fulp’s arrest for arson concerning the fire at Gideon Grove United Methodist Church in December, 2012.
In many cases, law enforcement and criminal arsonists are indistinguishable.
None of the foregone begun on Donald Trump’s watch, but it has darn sure thrived and grown under his nurturing, except of course, if it is a case in which a Muslim person is a perpetrator of a violent, violent act. Then everyone gets to talking about terrorism.
Donald Trump’s wrath is reserved solely for those who commit acts of violence against white people, worse if they are immigrants.
Otherwise, they are wonderful people.