A climate of hate.

Yesterday, another angry bigoted white male, spurred on by a climate of hatred and intolerance---- a climate created in part by his president--- decided that it was alright to take an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and slaughter eleven innocent people while they took time to worship.  And while he carried out his cowardly act of terror, he could be heard yelling that "all Jews must die"

This murderer, Robert Bowers, believed that Jews were funding the migrant caravan heading to America (Gee, I wonder where he got that from?),and his social media posts were full of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia. (Sound familiar?) 

What's frustrating is to hear pundits and folks in the main stream media highlight the fact that he was at times critical of Mr. trump. So what? Hey, no one is more critical of the Eagles than I am, but they are still my team. Some of Obama's biggest supporters were also his biggest critics, because he didn't go far enough with some of his policies. The fact that this guy criticized Mr. trump doesn't mean that trump didn't create the climate that he could thrive in. His only issue with trump is that he didn't go far enough with his bigotry and intolerance. 

Mr. trump, just days ago, declared that Nationalism is a good thing, and it is in this climate that we got another bigoted murderer in Kentucky attempt to go into an African American church and do what the shooter in Pittsburgh did yesterday (he settled for killing two elderly African Americans in a supermarket), and like the Pittsburgh shooter, he was full of hatred.

Now all the usual suspects on the right will play the false equivalency game. "Hey, they heckled  republican leaders while they are in public spaces. The rhetoric on both sides needs to be tones down."  Not so fast. The last time I checked, no one died from being heckled. It's just not the same. And whether they like it or not, the leader of this country belongs to their party and the tone that he is setting is what is contributing to this climate of violence and hatred.

There is no denying that incidents of hate have gone way up since Mr. trump's election. It's as if he has given a green light to racists to act on their anger and hatred for others. 

Some writers have been more nuanced than I have when blaming the president for this environment, but the conclusion is the same.

"Most likely, we’ll never know whether one fewer inflammatory tweet or one more conciliatory speech from the president might have averted the massacre in Pittsburgh. And yet, Trump’s reckless determination to crank the temperature of American politics up to the highest possible setting was likely a contributing factor. And that’s why the best analogy for understanding Trump’s responsibility for the rising tides of civic violence in our country may hail from the world of science. 

Scientists cannot definitively determine whether any one particular storm is caused by climate change. But they know that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased due to global warming. In the same way, it is impossible to definitively ascribe any one particular hate crime or terrorist attack to extreme political rhetoric. But it is clear that the kind of violent and dehumanizing language that is the hallmark of Trump’s political style is likely to increase the number of such crimes. That is enough to make the president morally culpable for an overall increase in civic strife, even if we cannot know whether he is causally responsible for this or that specific act of violence."  [Source]

Oh, we know, and so does he.

*Pic from cnn.com