FBI report shows thousands more hate crimes in Trump's first year, a record high

[Wanderfound]

@KludgeGrrrl

And blaming the sad state of current affairs on Trump is overly facile. For sure he is making it worse, but in many ways he is one of the logical conclusions to the policies of division that the right have been using for decades. He didn’t come out of nowhere.

The roots of this go all the way back to the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of Indigenous America.

@Wanderfound

Racism is certainly not unique to the USA; America inherited the white supremacist tradition from the European imperialists. But while the Caribbean slave revolts eventually forced the Europeans to abandon slavery, the more successful suppression of resistance on the US mainland allowed it to persist.

Then, of course, the Slaver’s Revolt. That was a chance to really fix the problem, but it was thrown away in 1877. The power of the slavers rebuilds, transforms into a more modern proto-fascism via the KKK, and then gets locked into place in 1919:

The 1919 Red Scare - the craziest year in American history

That gets us to the suppression of US socialism and the establishment of the nationwide security state. The US almost went full fascist in the 1930’s, but Pearl Harbour and Roosevelt’s scheming put a stop to that.

After the war, Cold War competition forced a few decades of Bismarckian social concessions. The end of the Cold War dropped that limitation, and it’s been brewing towards the current catastrophe ever since.

The Trumpists aren’t an aberration from American history. They’re the natural consequence of it.