At our lowest, and getting lower

Last week, I, among others, lamented the impending destruction of the U.S. Department of Education by the Trump Administration, and the harm such a completely ass-backwards act will do to the future of our country.

In my commentary, I shared how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged that education be the beacon light of freedom for African-Americans during the hard fought 60’s civil rights movement. That visionary hope and wisdom was what my community sorely needed then, and vitally needs even now.

Needless to say, my invoking Dr. King elicited the following interesting response from a smug, self-described MAGA follower who wrote, “ Dr. King would be horrfied (sic) by the desentigration (sic) of  black culture into single motherhood, crime, and criminal worship. And you'll never convince a thinking person otherwise.”

Hopefully, this MAGA person is not referring to him or herself as a “thinking person,” otherwise they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to misspell two simple words in one sentence. It’s been my experience that “thinking” people don’t do that while criticizing someone else in writing.

And as for Dr. King being “horrified” by the “disintegration” of black culture into “single motherhood, crime, and criminal worship,” then imagine how truly shocked the civil rights leader would be that the nation he fought so hard to free from racial tyranny, and gave his young life to put on the proper and moral path, would instead TWICE elect a extraordinarily morally decrepit and racist president who stands indicted in two federal and two state criminal cases; was convicted of 34 felonies; later pardoned hundreds of convicted white supremacist insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the US government, which led to the deaths of four brave police officers, while he cowardly watched it all on TV from the White House drinking a Diet Coke; has separated immigrant children from their mothers; has imprisoned innocent people without due process because he didn’t like what they were saying; has lambasted our brave, deceased U.S. military personnel as “suckers and losers”; falsely accused black people from another country of coming here and “eating our cats and our dogs”; and has had four children by three wives.

Think Dr. King would be proud to stand anywhere near a proven criminal and degenerate president of the United States like that who is currently presiding over the wonton destruction of our nation and culture? 

In the illustrious words of my illiterate MAGA commenter, “You'll never convince a thinking person otherwise.”

Now, the reason for my skewering this MAGA person isn’t just to hang him/her out to dry, but to make the following point: amazingly, it’s only taken a little over two months since the inauguration of Donald Trump to bring this nation down to its intellectual knees.

When your nationally elected leader is corrupt, and has surrounded himself with people who actively seek ways for him to be even more corrupt, your country is in serious trouble.

CORRECTION - make that …OUR country is in serious trouble!

We’re at our lowest point, and getting even lower literally every day with Trump in the White House.

How can I tell?

Because of what now passes for “intelligence” around here these days.

You see, my MAGA follower was Exhibit A in the case against Trump’s governance.

Believe it or not, I’m not troubled by MAGA follower's disparaging words about my community. He or she is not the first to try to erroneously brand my entire community as a bunch of lazy criminals who are not inclined towards a proper two-parent household.

Problem with MAGA follower's racist analysis is that it’s demonstrably false.

Sure, there are far too many African-Americans who lean towards crime. But that axiom goes for a lot of communities beyond my own - Italians, Chinese, Hispanic, etc. And that’s what happens when you dump generation after generation of human beings into poverty-stricken urban centers with no jobs, no opportunities and no hope, and then legislate against them so they have little opportunity to overcome social and legal barriers.

I know. I grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY. What is never said is that the majority of Black, white and Hispanic people living under those conditions are good people, just trying to make it the best way they know how. And many have. I did. My family did.

But that’s the culture of Trump’s MAGA movement - browbeat and lie about people in order to gain some perceived psychological and political advantage over them, especially if you’re really afraid of them.

        And when you need to act like you're superior to someone, you're really afraid of them.

Ask the New York Times, CNN or CBS News. How many times has Trump called those organizations names, falsely claimed their readership or viewership had disappeared, and that they were about to go out of business? It’s for the same reason why that ignorant MAGA follower spewed bullpucky about Black people.

Trump’s perceived enemies have power that neither he nor his MAGA movement ever intend to publicly respect.

With the news media, in Trump’s MAGA world, we’re all liars and dishonest bastards, the lowest of the low never to be trusted or believed if we say anything negative about him.

With Black people, in Trump’s MAGA  world, unless we’re confirmed true believers, we’re not white, and are too self aware. We know more about this country's racial history than our white counterparts. That’s why, Trump says, so-called “radical leftist” history, which is really just unvarnished American history he and the MAGA movement would prefer people don't pay attention to, should be discounted, diminished, and in fact, literally outlawed.

NO critical race theory, no diversity, equity and inclusion should ever be allowed.

And get this…make sure you erase whatever history you have on Black or female national heroes like Colin Powell and Jackie Robinson, or brave military women like Susan Ahn Cuddy, the first Asian American female officer in the U.S. Navy and first female gunnery officer in the U.S. armed forces. They weren't white, so they all must have been subversives. Telling our white children about their stories only awakens them to America’s true racial history.

You know…that dreaded left-wing word - "woke."

We don’t want that, Trump’s MAGA America says. We want to keep our population ignorant so that our billionaire buddies can pay no taxes and get away with it. We want to keep everybody ignorant so we can hold onto power. We want to attack those who oppose us. Threaten our critics with prison or ruin.

In order to take and maintain control of America, Trump says, we have to redefine it so that up and down literally mean the opposite of what they should mean.

Trump now has us hating the very things that made us strong - our diversity of people, talent and ideas. Our welcome to the rest of the world to come here and learn from the most noted scholars and accomplished professionals, now is only extended as long as they bring wealth with them.

Trump wants us all to be asleep and unaware. He wants a proliferation of the MAGA mentality - talk first, think later, if at all. 

And he’s not finished. We’re only seeing the beginning of his Project 2025 lunacy. Trust me, this madman has plenty of Sharpies, and plenty of blank Executive Order forms to last for the next four years, if not longer.

So yes, America, right now we are at our lowest point.

And the worst of it is, there’s no question that Trump plans to take us even lower.

All because Einsteins like my MAGA follower voted Trump into office, suckered by the false promise of a better, greater America…and cheaper eggs.

        Hey, got a timely riddle for you:

        Besides Pete Hegseth, who's dumb, careless, and so dangerous, he has no damn business in the Trump Administration job he was never qualified for?

        The national news media reported the perfect answer this week:

        "Mike Waltz, President Trump’s national security advisor, inadvertently included the top editor of The Atlantic Magazine in a Signal app text chat group revealing the U.S. attack plans on Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month."

        The crime here isn't so much that a journalist was accidentally included during a group text chat of top administration officials right before an impending military attack - that was certainly bad enough without question -  but that those top Trump Administration officials, including the chief of staff, vice president, defense secretary, national security adviser, CIA chief, secretary of state and other Cabinet officers, held that group text classified military attack chat on a commercial public app on unsecured phones in unsecured places, where any of our enemies could intercept the classified info with little or no effort.

       Amazingly, one of those Trump officials was actually in Moscow during the unsecured pre-bombing group text chat. Think the Ruskies had a difficult time tuning into his iPhone?

        Gee, wonder how many times these MAGA morons have pulled this idiotic crap before?

       California Democratic Rep Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, tweeted, "Everyone on the public WAR PLANS group text should immediately lose their security clearances and be fired. Their idiocy just put a giant target on America. We are not safe."

        By the way, true to form, Trump's people tried to smear Atlantic Magazinejournalist Jonah Goldberg - the reporter accidentally included in the supposed-to-be top secret group text chat - after their major screwup was revealed, just to cover their ignorant, arrogant rear ends.

        So how low have we fallen? Simple, there will be NO accountability for what national security experts say was one of the most egregious national security failures in our history. I don't care how much Fox News tries to soft soap this!

        In Trump's world, no one did anything wrong, except the press for accurately reporting it. No contrition, no honesty. Only weaselly, slithery con jobbing!

        Gee, think DEI hires could have done a better job?

        Hey, MAGA follower, please share your "superior thinking" about that!!!

Let’s be clear…..Donald Trump is literally destroying the better, greater America we had. No it wasn’t a perfect America. We certainly still had some pervasive problems we needed to deal with. And I suspect that as long as we have breath in our bodies, we will always have problems of some sort. But this despot is actually creating more problems just to remake our country in his sick and depraved image. Anytime you have a president who won’t even obey the federal courts, except when it suits his purpose, you have someone who can’t be trusted to honor or respect the one thing that keeps us all from tearing each other apart.

The rule of law.

We’re at our lowest, steadily headed for lower, folks.

MAGA follower, aren’t we lucky to have millions of “thinking” people like you, to help us get there!!!