DEMS MUST ADDRESS DOMESTIC TERRORISM AND SAFETY IF THEY WANT TO WIN
Democrats have a real issue to run on in 2020: safety. Can any American say with a straight face that they feel safer today than they did on January 20, 2017, when Barack Obama left office? In three years, we have seen more Jewish-Americans killed by hate crimes than in all of American history. And we are by no means alone in being victims of hate crimes and domestic terrorism.There isn’t a week going by where we do not hear about an attack or a thwarted attack on a house of worship: churches, mosques, synagogues. Mass shootings by assault weaponry have become common-place, and Americans are not safe in churches, schools, shopping malls, nightclubs, casinos, even walking down the street. Even police are attacked and murdered with alarming increasing frequency.
This is a real issue for this years’s elections. It will be of particular significance to Republican-leaning women voters, who may decide who wins in Rust Belt and other swing states. Women voters are traditionally more put-off by crude and disrespectful candidates, and are more concerned about quality issues like health care, education, and of course, personal safety. Especially children shot dead in their classrooms by people armed for war.
Leaders should be held accountable for such a sorry state of affairs. Trump and the Republicans must be held accountable for their divisive rhetoric, their refusal to acknowledge the rise of white nationalist terrorist groups or their violence, and the increasing use of antisemitism and racism as their normal political patter. It may have been that Trump intended his words for the far-right, that constitutes a significant portion of his base and includes hate groups. (Not that this would be acceptable for a President.) Once you let hate and violence out of the bottle, it’s not so easy to put it back in, and we now have a wide range of terrorists and killers coming out of the woodwork, due to the climate created by Trump and the GOP. The law of unintended consequences at work.
When so many Americans are being singled out for harm and death, and there is no let up in the violence or in Trump’s divisive rhetoric, it is folly to ignore the President as a cause. Americans should engage in a serious discussion of the impact of a President who says that there can be good people among Nazis and white supremacists, that we need less immigrants of color and more people from Norway, that Jews who don’t support him and Netanyahu are disloyal, that women of color who don’t agree with him should be thrown out of America, that children should be separated from their family and locked in cages, who brags about sexually assaulting women, and who refuses to accept the FBI and DHS report that the number one threat of terrorism in America comes from white nationalist groups.
And of course, we must address Trump’s lies that media which tells the truth about him are enemies of the nation, and that law enforcement that ferrets out his crime are plotting a coup. Trump and his party must be held accountable for their words and actions. We should also ask why is it that just about every white nationalist, racist and neo-Nazi supports Trump.
Many in Trump-world will simply deny it all, or sneer that we just are not clever enough to understand the true meaning of his lies and racist screeds. But there are saner and more reasonable people out there who have doubts, and those who don’t want their children to grow up in the kind of would Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Steve King have in mind.
Making us safe and ending this terrifying spree of domestic terrorism and hate crimes should be front and center for the Democrats in this year’s election. It’s a winning issue. Trump and the GOP have no defense on this one. We had nothing even remotely like this before Trump came along. It’s theirs, they own it. We can change things if we stick together: Jew, Muslim, Christian, all races, all ages, all genders and sexual orientations. Let’s reclaim America and make it safe for everyone.
