Tag Archives: editorial

As I write this, El Paso, Texas, the 22nd largest city in the United States, is mourning, in shock, and attempting to return to a sense of normalcy. It’s going to be a long haul. Yes, Ursula and I are fine. We were grocery shopping at a westside El Paso Albertson’s when the word spread of this apparent right-wing terrorist attack.

Well get back to this terrorist attack later, but for now I’d like to list just some of the ways this wonderful city have been victimized since the elevation to the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Let us begin:

Victimization 1:

The ‘alternative fact’ that El Paso was an unsafe city known for rampant crime before a border wall was erected here in 2008-2009

But let’s get something out of the way first. The alternative to a fact is fiction. And a fiction presented as fact is a lie. The crime rate in El Paso peaked in 1993, some sixteen years before a border barrier was completed. The El Paso Times compiled the statistics, and this is a chart derived from those numbers:

You’ll note that violent crime in El Paso bottomed out in 2006, and actually went up slightly following completion of the wall in mid-2009. So, the president, trying desperately to rationalize a monument to himself along the southern border, chose to disparage El Paso as a den of violent crime, when in fact El Paso is routinely listed as one of the safest cities in the U.S., and has been since the late 1990s.

Victimization 2:

The Trump Campaign stiffs the taxpayers of El Paso for $470,417.05

On February 11 of this year, the Trump Campaign held one of Donald Trump’s notoriously raucous and frequently racist MAGA rallies in El Paso. The itemized bill for the campaign’s expenses for that rally are presented below:

Note the invoice date, March 27, and the due date of April 26. In mid May, the city sent the Trump Campaign a dunning letter giving the already delinquent deadbeats thirty days to pay up or suffer the consequences of a 21% collection fee. That collection fee is now in effect, and the total now owed the city of El Paso is an astounding $569,204.63.

City officials still await so much as an acknowledgement that the money is owed.

Victimization 3:

Hundreds of detained migrants released onto the streets of El Paso with zero advanced notice. Two days before Christmas. Another 180 more released on Christmas Day:

On December 23 of last year, with no warning to civic leaders or local charities, 214 asylum seekers were dumped by the Trump Administration onto the streets of El Paso. And while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claimed this was but an oversight, we all know better. No such ‘oversight’ would have occurred in, say, a battleground state such as Florida, Nevada, or Arizona. This was a political decision to stick it to a largely Democrat supporting area. Similar releases occurred in the Las Cruces, New Mexico area, in a state that was won by Hillary Clinton with an 8.2% margin. Coincidence? I think not.

Victimization 4:

Inspiring racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis to the point where El Paso has now endured the 8th worst mass shooting attack in U.S. history.

Yesterday, August 2, the Walmart Supercenter located adjacent the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso came under terrorist attack. The person arrested for the shooting claimed that a Romanian WASR-10 was the weapon he planned to use, and video footage seems to bear out that an AK-47-type weapon, which would include the WASR-10, was indeed used.

The suspect appears to have traveled from his residence in Allen, Texas. That’s a 650-mile/1,046-kilometer trip. Think about that for a moment. Why travel 650 miles when Allen is only 25 miles north of target-rich Dallas, a city considerably larger than El Paso, and a metro area many times larger when you take into account Fort Worth and surrounding communities.

When I heard this, I immediately suspected the reason even before we knew much about the suspect. So, what’s the answer? It’s this:
Assuming a populated target matches closely the demographics for El Paso, a random killer spraying bullets indiscriminately into a crowded store will discover that approximately 81% of his victims are Hispanic.

I managed, after some online detective work, to acquire a copy of the suspect’s ‘manifesto’, a hate-filled diatribe of racist views that uses much of the same language as President Donald J. Trump. I’m not going to post images of that screed, just as I’ve refused in this article to mention the name of the suspect lest he get some twisted satisfaction of having his name out there one more time. Instead, I’m going to select from this abhorrent white supremacist, anti-immigrant harangue those words and sentiments identical to those used frequently by President Trump.

Yes, the suspect takes to task both political parties, but his sentiments are almost word-for-word straight out of President Trump’s tweets and rallies. In his racist diatribe, the suspect took the following straight from the Donald J. Trump playbook of racist grievances:

• I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic displacement brought on by an invasion. (How many times as President Trump characterized the southern border situation as an, “Invasion”?)
• Due to the death of the baby boomers, the increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right and the ever increasing Hispanic population, America will soon become a one party-state. The Democrat Party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate. They intend to use open borders, free healthcare of illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters. (Note the Trumpian words and phrases: ever increasing Hispanic population; open borders; political coup; importing and legalizing millions of new voters)
• This is an encouraging sign the the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the proper incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide. (Another ‘incentive’ would be the Attorney General of the U.S. implementing in April, 2018 a zero-tolerance policy designed to facilitate family separations)
• Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas changing policy to better suit their needs. They will turn Texas into the instrument of a political coup, which will hasten the destruction of our country. (The sentiment of the current Republican Party, and the Trump Administration, is to suppress minority voting around the country under the guise of ‘voter security’, even though the only organized, wide-spread election fraud during the last election was perpetrated by Republicans in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Yet, despite that, the rhetoric targeting minorities continues.)
• Our government has killed a whole lot more people for a whole lot less. (Remember the following rationale for not criticizing the Russian nerve agent attack on U.K. soil? “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think, our country’s so innocent?“)

Some additional quotes that show the sick mind of the suspect, but which do not directly tie with tweets or statements from President Trump:

• Even if they are shameless race mixers . . . .
• I am against race mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity problems.
• 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics form interracial unions at much higher rates than average.

And then, after all the direct evidence to the contrary, much of it presented above, we get this little disclaimer at the end attempting to absolve the president from responsibility:

• My ideology has not changed for several years (by way of context, the suspect is 21). My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump (not bloody likely considering the similarities in tone and language; and he would have been in this teens when these views solidified without Trumpian inspiration?). I putting (sic) this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric (so, the suspect readily admits that he is indeed familiar with this rhetoric; it’s simply not rational to believe he wasn’t influenced by it). The media is infamous for fake news (where have we heard that term before?).

My take on all this:

Will this be a massive turning point in President Trump’s support? Not so much. Many still supporting the president do so fully aware that they are supporting someone who actively courts racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. We see evidence of that courtship on an almost weekly, and sometimes daily, basis. I do believe, however, as more comes out on the human piece of excrement who perpetrated this vicious terrorist attack, that just enough Texans may be swayed to potentially cost President Trump her 38 electoral votes, and with those electoral votes go any chance he may have for reelection. So, ironically, the outcome of this attack in ‘reliably red’ Texas may be 180º out from what the suspect intended. I also believe that, because of his repeated inability to criticize the president, Texas Senator John Cornyn may very well be vulnerable in his reelection bid next year.

Meanwhile, let us watch how exactly President Trump passes out cans of gasoline and books of matches at his MAGA rallies: