Tag Archives: Ku Klux Klan

This Isn’t The First Time …

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Opinion writer Charles Blow, writing for the New York Times, gives us some historical precedents to the extremism we are seeing today and it makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read.

Extremism Is on the Rise … Again

By Charles M. Blow

02 November 2022

After all this country has been through — from Donald Trump and his election denial, to the insurrection, to what prosecutors call the “politically motivated” attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband — it still appears poised to elect candidates next Tuesday who deny the results of the 2020 election. There are 291 election deniers on the ballot. And Trump — the greatest threat to democracy — may make a comeback in 2024.

It’s hard to believe even though it’s happening right in front of our eyes.

In a major speech Wednesday night, President Biden described election denial as “the path to chaos in America.” “It’s unprecedented,” he said. “It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.” But in truth, the extremism, racism and white nationalism are neither un-American nor unfamiliar.

I am personally fascinated by precedents and historical corollaries, the ways that events find a way of repeating themselves, not because of some strange glitch in the cosmos but because human beings are fundamentally the same, unchanged, stuck in rotation of our failings and frailties.

The presidential election of 1912 offers a few lessons for our current political moment.

William Howard Taft had been elected president in 1908, succeeding the gregarious Theodore Roosevelt, the undisputed leader of the progressive movement of the age, who endorsed Taft’s presidential bid. But Taft was no Teddy. Taft was, as University of Notre Dame professor Peri E. Arnold has written, “a warmhearted and kind man who wanted to be loved as a person and to be respected for his judicial temperament.”

I hear echoes there of the differences between Presidents Barack Obama and Biden.

Progressives at first seemed satisfied with Taft’s election, as they expected him to simply carry Roosevelt’s legacy forward. But they soon grew disaffected, as did Roosevelt.

It wasn’t that Taft was ineffective; he just didn’t do all of what those progressives wanted, much like Biden hasn’t checked the box on all progressive priorities. Riding a wave of progressive anger, Roosevelt challenged Taft in 1912, and when Roosevelt didn’t secure the nomination, he ran as a third-party candidate, taking many of the progressives with him.

That split all but guaranteed that their opponent, Woodrow Wilson, would win, becoming the first president from the South since the Civil War.

Wilson had not been a favorite to win the nomination of his own party — he only secured it on the 46th ballot after quite a bit of deal-making. But once he reached the general election, he sailed to victory over the quarreling liberals. He would go on to campaign on an “America First” platform, which for him was primarily about maintaining America’s neutrality in World War I. But as Sarah Churchwell, author of “Behold, America,” told Vox in 2018, it soon became associated not just with isolationism, but also with the Ku Klux Klan, xenophobia and fascism.

In Wilson’s case, extremists took his language and twisted its meaning into something more sinister. When Trump glommed onto that language over a century later, he started with the sinister and tried to pass it off as benign.

Of course, Wilson was no Trump. Trump is one of the worst presidents — if not the worst — that this country has ever had. Wilson at least, as the University of Virginia’s Miller Center points out, supported “limits on corporate campaign contributions, tariff reductions, new and stronger antitrust laws, banking and currency reform, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, a single term presidency.” He was a progressive Southern Democrat. The newly formed N.A.A.C.P. actually endorsed him.

But there are eerie similarities between him and Trump. Wilson was a racist. He brought the segregationist sensibility of the South, where he had grown up and where Jim Crow was ascendant, into the White House. He allowed segregation to flourish in the federal government on his watch.

And while Wilson didn’t support shutting down all immigration, as long as the immigrants were from Europe, he did embrace ardently xenophobic beliefs. In 1912, he released a statement, saying:

“In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration). The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.”

It was Wilson who screened “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House, a film that pushed the “Lost Cause” narrative and fueled the rebirth of the Klan.

Trump hosted a screening of “2,000 Mules” — a fact-checker-debunked documentary that purported to show widespread voter fraud carried out by “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes with harvested ballots during the last presidential election — at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has called the Southern White House. That film has helped boost his followers’ belief in his lie about the 2020 election.

Allow me a quick aside to dissect the dehumanizing language of the “mule.” Mules were synonymous with captivity and servitude, and as such, a comparison between them and the enslaved — and later, oppressed — Black people was routine. In fact, in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote that the Black woman is the mule of the world.

Then came the invention of the “drug mule,” a phrase that first appeared in this newspaper in 1993. Later, the media would often use it to describe Hispanic women.

Now we have ballot mules, an extensive cabal of liberal actors bent on stealing elections.

Once you animalize people, you have, by definition, dehumanized them, and that person is no longer worthy of being treated humanely.

I say all this to demonstrate that we have been here before. We have seen extremism rise before in this country, multiple times, and it often follows a familiar pattern: One party loses steam, focus and cohesion; liberals become exhausted, disillusioned or fractured, allowing racists and nativist conservatives to rise. Those leaders then tap into a darkness in the public, one that periodically goes dormant until it erupts once more.

I fear that too many liberals are once again caught up in the cycle, embracing apathy. My message to all of them going into Election Day: Wake up!

Black History Month — Mississippi Murders

Posted on by under Black History Month, education, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

Mississippi has almost certainly been the home to more Civil Rights-related murders than any other state in this nation.  One that comes immediately to the minds of most people are the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by members of the KKK, some of whom, ironically, were also members of law enforcement in June 1964.  The three were civil rights workers who had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote and it was for that reason they were murdered.

Their story, as most of you know, was immortalized in the film Mississippi Burning (1988), starring Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman, as well as numerous other books and documentaries.  Nine men, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were later identified as parties to the conspiracy to murder Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

In 1967, more than three years after the murders, seven men — Cecil Price, Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billy Wayne Posey, Horace Barnette, and Jimmy Arledge – were tried on charges related to the murders, but none were charged with the actual murders and none served sentences longer than six years.  Mississippi, folks, home of the KKK, of white supremacy.  The white judge in the trial was a known opponent of the Civil Rights Movement; the jury was all-white, and one juror even said later that she “could never convict a preacher”.

In 2005, after investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell1 for the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger unearthed new witnesses and evidence, a new trial took place, this one for three counts of murder against Edgar Ray Killen, the man who had masterminded the plot to murder Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.  He was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to three consecutive 20 year sentences.  He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.  The others, including those who actually pulled the trigger, remained free after serving their short sentences, allowed to walk on the same sidewalks as everyone else.

Throughout those years, white supremacy still reigned in Mississippi and to some extent still does today.  Say what you will, a leopard does not change its spots and people with prejudices and hatred in their hearts pass those prejudices on to the next generation and so it becomes an endless chain, a vicious circle.

Though there have been many high-profile murders of Black people in Mississippi, the other most well-remembered is that of Medgar Evers, a civil rights worker with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) who was shot and killed right outside his front door on the night of June 12, 1963.  His killer was a known white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith.

De La Beckwith was quickly arrested after his gun with his fingerprints was discovered to have been the murder weapon, but two trials in 1964 ended in hung juries and De La Beckwith walked free.  Two law enforcement officers lied and said they had seen Beckwith at a service station some 90 miles away around the time of the murder, but their story was never credible.  Still, an all-white, all-male jury couldn’t find their way clear to convict a blatant killer.

An interesting aside:  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. attended Mr. Evers’ funeral and was stopped by police at the funeral.  I’ve been unable to find out why, but we can logically deduce it was because of the colour of his skin and his efforts to end the segregation that was so prevalent in Mississippi.

The same investigative reporter, Jerry Mitchell1, who delved deeper into the killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner did some similar digging into the Evers murder and eventually discovered new witnesses and enough new evidence to open a new investigation that led to a new trial of De La Beckwith in 1994.  It came out then that De La Beckwith had actually bragged about killing Evers, whom he had referred to as a “chicken-stealing dog.”  In this third and final trial, De La Beckwith was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison where he died in 2001 at the age of 80.

These are but a couple of the many brutal murders that have taken place in Mississippi for no other reason that the victim was Black.  Racial hatred … there is no room for it in this country, and yet it persists in this, the 21st century.  After all these thousands of years that humans have inhabited planet Earth, wouldn’t you think humans would have learned that there is no reason to believe that a person with lighter skin is somehow better, has more value, than a person with darker skin?  My friend Brosephus stated at the beginning of Black History Month that “Black History is American History” … and we know he’s right, but it seems like there are a hell of a lot of people who didn’t get that memo!

Inflation, a volatile situation on the Ukraine border, a deadly pandemic that has, as of this moment, taken millions of lives, at least 953,000 in the U.S. alone, a stagnant worker’s wage, a climate crisis … there are so many things we need to be concerned about, need to find solutions for, but for some people bigotry and hatred are the number one priority.  I used to think humans could do better if only we tried, but in light of events of the past 7 or so years, I’m not so sure anymore.

1 Race Against Time:  A Reporter Reopens The Unsolved Murder Cases Of The Civil Rights Era, Jerry Mitchell, Simon & Schuster, February 4, 2020

Daryl Davis Is Still Going Strong

Posted on by under education, History, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

In 2017, Keith and I both wrote about a man named Daryl Davis, a Black man who is doing more than his share to help white supremacists stop being white supremacists, one at a time.  If you’re interested, here are links to Keith’s post and mine.  Last weekend, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof’s column looked to Davis and his technique in hopes of taking a page from Davis’ playbook to find ways to deal with people on the other side of the many divisive issues we are confronted with today. I think it is well worth considering …

‘How Can You Hate Me When You Don’t Even Know Me?’

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

One of the questions I’m asked most is: How do I talk to those on the other side of America’s political and cultural abyss? What can I say to my brother/aunt/friend who thinks Joe Biden is a socialist with dementia who stole the election?

I’ve wondered about persuasion strategies, too, because I have friends who have their pro-Trump or anti-vaccine biases validated every evening by Tucker Carlson. So I reached out to an expert at changing minds.

Daryl Davis, 63, is a Black musician with an unusual calling: He hangs out with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis and chips away at their racism. He has evidence of great success: a collection of K.K.K. robes and hoods given him by people whom he persuaded to abandon the Klan.

His odyssey arose from curiosity about racism, including about an attack he suffered. When Davis was 10 years old, he says, a group of white people hurled bottles, soda cans and rocks at him.

“I was incredulous,” Davis recalled. “My 10-year-old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me, who had never spoken to me, who knew nothing about me, would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin.”

“How can you hate me,” he remembers wondering, “when you don’t even know me?”

Davis began to work on answers after he graduated from Howard University and joined a band that sometimes played in a Maryland bar that attracted white racists. Davis struck up a friendship with a K.K.K. member, each fascinated by the other, and the man eventually left the K.K.K., Davis said.

One of Davis’s methods — and there’s research from social psychology to confirm the effectiveness of this approach — is not to confront antagonists and denounce their bigotry but rather to start in listening mode. Once people feel they are being listened to, he says, it is easier to plant a seed of doubt.

In one case, Davis said, he listened as a K.K.K. district leader brought up crime by African Americans and told him that Black people are genetically wired to be violent. Davis responded by acknowledging that many crimes are committed by Black people but then noted that almost all well-known serial killers have been white and mused that white people must have a gene to be serial killers.

When the K.K.K. leader sputtered that this was ridiculous, Davis agreed: It’s silly to say that white people are predisposed to be serial killers, just as it’s ridiculous to say that Black people have crime genes.

The man went silent, Davis said, and about five months later quit the K.K.K.

Davis claims to have persuaded some 200 white supremacists to leave the Klan and other extremist groups. It’s impossible to confirm that number, but his work has been well documented for decades in articles, videos, books and a TED Talk. He also has a podcast called “Changing Minds With Daryl Davis.”

“Daryl saved my life,” said Scott Shepherd, a former grand dragon of the K.K.K. “Daryl extended his hand and actually just extended his heart, too, and we became brothers.” Shepherd ended up leaving the Klan and gave his robes to Davis.

Davis’s approach seems out of step with modern sensibilities. Today the more common impulse is to decry from a distance.

The preference for safe spaces over dialogue arises in part from a reasonable concern that engaging extremists legitimizes them. In any case, society can hardly ask Black people to reach out to racists, gay people to sit down with homophobes, immigrants to win over xenophobes, women to try to reform misogynists, and so on. Victims of discrimination have endured enough without being called upon to redeem their tormentors.

Yet I do think that we Americans don’t engage enough with people we fundamentally disagree with. There’s something to be said for the basic Davis inclination toward dialogue even with unreasonable antagonists. If we’re all stuck in the same boat, we should talk to each other.

“Daryl Davis demonstrates that talking face-to-face with your ideological opponents can motivate them to rethink their views,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “He’s an extraordinary example of what psychologists have repeatedly shown with evidence: In over 500 studies, interacting face-to-face with an out-group reduced prejudice 94 percent of the time.

“You won’t get through to people until you’ve earned their trust,” Grant added. “You’re not likely to earn their trust until you’ve met them face-to-face and listened to their stories.”

There’s a reason we try to solve even intractable wars by getting the parties to sit in the same room: It beats war. If we believe in engagement with North Koreans and Iranians, then why not with fellow Americans?

At a time when America is so polarized and political space is so toxic, we, of course, have to stand up for what we think is right. But it may also help to sit down with those we believe are wrong.

“If I can sit down and talk to K.K.K. members and neo-Nazis and get them to give me their robes and hoods and swastika flags and all that kind of crazy stuff,” Davis said, “there’s no reason why somebody can’t sit down at a dinner table and talk to their family member.”

Understanding Our Past — CRT: Part I

Posted on by under education, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

Okay, folks … it seems that there is much confusion surrounding the concept of Critical Race Theory or CRT.  The confusion is twofold:  genuine confusion by people who truly do not understand the theory, and fake outrage by racists and Republicans (largely one and the same) who are trying to make a point to their mostly white base.

Today’s post, the first in a two-maybe-three-part series, looks at what Critical Race Theory is … and what it isn’t, and the evidence to support it.  Then, I hope to deconstruct the outright lies that are being told by the politicians and the likes of Fox News that are creating a furor in this nation … mainly among racists and bigots, but also among those who simply don’t understand what it is and why the theory is accurate.  This is by no means intended to be an academic work, but merely a layman’s view of what CRT is and how it is affecting this nation today.

Let’s start with a simple explanation of Critical Race Theory.

The simplest explanation is that racism has been a part of this nation since its founding, and today, even in the 21st century is systemic, meaning it is built into our institutions such as law enforcement, schools, the courts, etc. in an attempt to maintain the dominance of white people in society.  Sometimes it is blatant, but since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, more often it is subtle or implied, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

CRT does not, as some would have you believe, posit that all white people are racists, but rather that this nation’s history of racism lives on in many today, even though some may not realize it, and that it is imbedded in our laws, our society, our system.  Think about it … from the earliest days of white people coming to these shores, racism has been cruelly executed.  Think about what the white European settlers did to the indigenous people who had been here for thousands of years before the white people showed up and literally imprisoned them and kicked them off their land … killed them.  Read Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle.

And then, in 1619, the first slaves were imported from the African continent to do the hard work.  White men owned those dark-skinned men and women … owned them like they might own a painting or a cow.

More than 200 years later, at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect and declared enslaved people in the Confederacy free—on the condition that the Union won the war.  Still, slavery remained constant until the war was won by the Union troops and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1865 …

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

President Lincoln did not live to see final ratification: Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and the necessary number of states did not ratify the 13th Amendment until December 6th of that year.

Then came the Black Codes1, Jim Crow laws2, and … the Ku Klux Klan3 (KKK).

  1. Black Codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labour purposes.
  2. Jim Crow laws existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968. They were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.
  3. The Ku Klux Klan was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a private club for Confederate veterans. The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Under Jim Crow, segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows. Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped. Some states even required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states. It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

And no, my friends, this wasn’t hundreds of years ago … Jim Crow laws were still in effect when I was young, and only legally ended in 1968.  Less than fifty years ago.  But … in many ways they are still being practiced, just not quite as openly or blatantly.

And what of the KKK?  A relic of past history?  Guess again.  Some 42 different Klan groups were active in 22 states as of June 2017, a slight increase from early 2016, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League.

Now, sit down for a minute and take a few deep, calming breaths, for this is some disturbing information I’ve just laid on you.  None of it was likely news to you, but … seeing it all in print, realizing that yes, Virginia, racism is alive and well in the United States today, can take the wind out of your sails.  Racism in the U.S. is not a thing of the past, not something we’ve overcome.  Sure, we’ve made some progress, there are anti-discrimination laws on the books to protect minorities from being denied jobs, education, and housing … but that doesn’t mean that people don’t find a way around it.  Racism is, like it or not, part of our past and our present … the goal here is to ensure it is NOT part of our future.

My goal is two-fold:  to clear up some of the misconceptions floating around today, perpetuated by the uneducated or those who have ulterior motives, and to show why and how we, as a nation, can be so much better than we are today.  I will have Part II to this series in the next day or two and will try to tie it all up in Part III by the end of the week.  But folks, don’t let anybody tell you that this is not a racist nation … hell yes, it is.  Many of us are not racist, don’t understand those who are, but sadly the racists are often the ones calling the shots, making the laws, setting the rules, teaching our children – hence, systemic rasicm.

Cartoons – An Endangered Species?

Posted on by under Political commentary, Rants, Social commentary

What do a frog, a swastika, and a Confederate flag have in common?  Answer:  they are all on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of hate symbols.  As are the numbers 12, 18, 511, 737, and 100%. *  What?  Wait a minute.  Isn’t 737 the name of an airplane?  And 100% … I use that all the time!  What is going on here?  And a frog?

pepe-1The frog is Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has become a popular Internet meme.  The Pepe the Frog character did not originally have racist or anti-Semitic connotations.  Internet users appropriated the character and turned him into a meme, placing the frog in a variety of circumstances and saying many different things. But then, as the meme proliferated in on-line venues such as 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, which have many users who delight in creating racist memes and imagery, a subset of Pepe memes came into existence that centered on racist, anti-Semitic or other bigoted themes.

“In recent years, with the growth of the “alt right” segment of the white supremacist movement, a segment that draws some of its support from some of the above-mentioned Internet sites, the number of “alt right” Pepe memes has grown, a tendency exacerbated by the controversial and contentious 2016 presidential election.  Though Pepe memes have many defenders, not least the character’s creator, Matt Furie, who has called the alt right appropriation of the meme merely a “phase,” the use of racist and bigoted versions of Pepe memes seems to be increasing, not decreasing.” – Anti-Defamation League 

So who, we might ask, is this alt-right that is to blame for turning an innocent cartoon into a symbol of hate?  The alt-right has no official ideology, although various sources have said that it is associated with white nationalism, white supremacism, anti-Islamism, antisemitism, antifeminism, right-wing populism, nativism, and the neo-reactionary movement.  That sure as heck is a lot of “anti”!  Here is what some journalists and analysts have to say about alt-right:

  • David A. French, writing for National Review, called alt-right proponents “wanna-be fascists”
  • Benjamin Welton, writing for The Weekly Standard: ” … turns the left’s moralism on its head and makes it a badge of honor to be called ‘racist,’ ‘homophobic,’ and ‘sexist.”
  • Cathy Young, writing in The Federalist, called the alt-right “a nest of anti-Semitism” inhabited by “white supremacists” who regularly use “repulsive bigotry”.
  • According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breitbart News has become a popular outlet for alt-right views.

A good article in The Economist begins:

“UNTIL August this year, the Alt- (short for alternative) Right did not matter much. Two things happened to change that. First, Donald Trump appointed Steve Bannon, a former executive-chairman of Breitbart, as CEO of his campaign. Breitbart is a website that has published stories praising the Alt-Right. Then Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Reno, Nevada, in which she denounced Mr Trump for bringing the Alt-Right and its admirers into the mainstream of American politics. Many hundreds of thousands of Google searches followed. People claiming to speak for the Alt-Right were delighted by the attention. What is this Alt-Right thing? And why does it matter, if indeed it does?”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) defines the alt-right as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”

Alt-right appears to be loosely organized, primarily an internet group, and there are undoubtedly far more dangerous groups out there at this time.  But I am concerned when there are so many haters of everything that is not in strict accordance with their own philosophy.  Their “ideology” combines the worst of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neo-Nazis, the white nationalist, anti-Semitic and Christian identity groups all rolled into one.  I am concerned that this group, along with several others, including the KKK, have endorsed presidential candidate Donald Trump who has not disavowed their endorsement(s). I am concerned, and more than a little angry, when a perfectly harmless cartoon frog suddenly becomes a symbol of hatred, when perfectly harmless numbers and keyboard characters that we all use every day, suddenly represent evil.

sonic-1Symbols are powerful communication tools. They convey considerable meaning in an immediately recognizable form, and the power they can have is tremendous. Consider the reverence or passion that the American flag, the Star of David, and the Christian cross evoke, and the impact of symbols is readily apparent. The alt-right’s use of Internet memes to advance or express its beliefs, often on websites such as 4chan, has been widely reported. What is next?  Will we soon see Sonic the Hedgehog sporting a Hitler moustach, or Bugs Bunny with a white hood over his head?  Pikachu with a Star of David with a red slash through it?  The possibilities are limitless.

This, then, is the legacy of the Trump campaign.  The obvious intent being to reverse all the good that has been done by such honourable figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, John F. Kennedy, Thurgood Marshall, President Barack Obama and many others too numerous to name here.  The obvious intent being to undermine the strides toward “all men are created equal” that we have struggled for since the inception of our democracy.  Make no mistake, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBT … they are ugly.  People who support any of these -isms or identify with groups who support them are ugly.  That is a universal truth, make of it what you will.  Donald Trump has brought about this toxic environment and it is gaining momentum.  We must stop it, but I fear it will take time and in the interim, lives will be lost.  This is about more than just a cartoon frog.  Think about it.

* For a complete list of the ADL’s hate symbols with explanations of each, click here.

pepe-2