Reportedly, tens of thousands of Trump supporters gathered on the weekend of November 14, in Washington, D.C., to protest the alleged fraudulent win of Trump’s opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, in the Presidential Election of November 3, 2020.
The allegations of voting ‘fraud’ and ‘stolen election’ were of course Trump prompted and promoted for the entire time that Trump has been in politics, with his simple premise that only his victory over his opponents is legitimate, and anyone else’s over him is ‘rigged’.
That obviously ludicrous and dishonest sentiment is nevertheless easy for his supporters to grasp and accept, and elevate him to ‘Messiah-status’ with his far-right, conservative, evangelical support-base, that includes some of the most dangerous Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, armed militias, and extremist conspiracy groups, and obstructionist Republicans.
This ‘Base’, being unhinged from reason and moderation due to their particular brand of extremism and ideology, thrill to Trump’s flaunting of truth, convention and even the Constitution, as they have already chafed under any type of constraints except their own idea of what is right, regardless of convention, Democratic Rules and Constitutional Laws.
In that Trump fronted ‘freedom from conventional reality’, and embracing his consistent promoting of ‘alternate reality’, his supporters ignore repeated official statements and proof of secure free and fair elections, and court verdicts dismissing their claims of fraud, and still trumpet his false claims of voter fraud, ballot tampering, miscounting, and ‘stolen elections’.
According to reports, the people attending these demonstrations in support of a legally out-voted Trump, included the anti-government group, The Oath Seekers; the far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters; and conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Republican Congressmen. Among them all were white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, racist, bigoted evangelicals, and all those that believe that America is primarily for White Americans, and those immigrants that are allowed to come in to provide essential services, are unworthy of ‘being real Americans’, or holding any real wealth or political power.
This is the racist face of America that had been masked for so long under the familiar and false American platitudes of ‘peace, democracy, truth, freedom, and equality for all’. Trump has unceremoniously ripped that mask off and exposed America for what it always was, untruthful, conflicted, war-like, unequal, racist, hypocritical, condescending, and un-democratic. America was born in bloodshed and has grown up in endless wars, with itself and others.
That previously shrouded true American identity is now its Trump-exposed reality. Its multi-tiered popular vote excluding democracy is an insult to the concept of democracy; and, its internal political, social and racial divisions are a clear contradiction to its very name, the ‘United States’, and under Trump a threat to its national security.
For decades, the World ignored America’s contradictions and hypocrisies, because even in its deeply-flawed state, it still managed to give the impression that it was the ‘United States’ – freedom-loving, equality-seeking, democratic, rules-based, fair, and racially accepting.
Everyone of course ignored the early genocidal treatment of its indigenous people, its endless wars, and the horror of its historic brutality and merciless slavery of Black Americans, the prejudices of which are still prevalent and thrive even today. That historic racism against Black Americans, and the exercise of active and ever present brutality, necessitates protests and movements like ‘Black Lives Matter’, triggered by the inhumane wanton killings of present day unarmed Black men.
Those protests and that movement in America elicited a response from Trump supporters, with their own slogan, ‘All Lives Matter’, which rather imbecilically ignores the whole idea of ‘Black Lives Matter’, because in comparison to ‘All Lives’ - Black Lives really didn’t matter.
For ‘All Lives’, there wasn’t the reality of hundreds of years of severe prejudice and persecution which included slavery, brutality, lashings, rape, lynching and hate-filled cold-blooded murder. Only ‘Black Lives’ experienced the callous disregard of their lives at the hands of the White Americans, based strictly on their race and their skin colour. And while White Americans are also killed yearly, its not for their race or colour, but for other reasons not to do with race and colour.
The fact that this has to be even explained to Trump-like people underscores their incredible shallowness of concern for the Black Americans, who even today were (at times on camera) callously gunned down, choked, strangled, lynched, assaulted, incarcerated and persecuted with near-impunity by police, and others.
The fact that this centuries old treatment has not happened to the White, or immigrant Brown races in America, is wilfully lost on the ‘All Lives Matter’ crowd.
Additionally, the blatant double-standards and rush to judgement concerning Black people in American courts is simply appalling, as the disgracefully skewed incarceration rate shows.
So, when people respond to ‘Black Lives Matter’ with ‘All Lives Matter’, (or Blue Lives Matter) considering none of these other ‘colours’ have faced and experienced hundreds of years of systemic racism and violence, one can only quote the socially astute (and very funny) American comedian Ron White: “You can’t fix stupid”.
These glaring racial inequalities are bad enough to encourage despotic regimes like Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China to point to the on-going American injustices, in order to push-back against American criticism against their very real own human-rights abuses.
Now, as Trump rejects the lawful result of the Presidential Election, and the democratic will of the American voter, he and his supporters attack the only remaining convention left in the US, the peaceful transference of power after every election. And in doing so, they (Trump and his supporters) give further ammunition to the autocratic regimes to point to the hypocrisy of the ‘democratic America’ in order to justify their own authoritarianism.
When America’s persisting ‘sins’ are used by autocratic regimes to justify their own shortcomings, then America’s thin veneer of civility, and its hereto decades of thick slap-on of democratic self-righteousness is wiped away to expose its historic heart of darkness which Trump and his supporters are now promoting as the real America, and demanding through the overthrow of an ‘open, free and fair election’ to reinstate their own would be despot.