In December 2015 14 people were murdered in San Bernardino by home-grown Islamists. Life for American Muslims would never be the same again as hate and violence was directed at them like never before. United States of Hate: Muslims Under Attack, BBC 2018
It’s become normal to label a whole community as terrorists. ibid.
55% of Americans have expressed some kind of negative views towards Islam. ibid.
What a place! This is completely epic. I’m in Alaska … I’m travelling the length of the Americas starting at the top and heading to the toe … through North and Central America. It’s a journey of 5,000 miles through some of the biggest landscapes on Earth: it’ll take me to places of myth and wonder. The Americas with Simon Reeve, BBC 2019
I visit a huge rewilding project out on the vast prairies. The Americas with Simon Reeve II
The Rockies stretch more than 3,000 miles from the frozen forests of Canada to the harsh deserts of New Mexico. ibid.
Montana has the highest suicide rate in the United States. ibid.
Thousands of people are jailed here after being fined for being homeless, just for sleeping in a park, for loitering, for standing around in public. ibid.
One of the richest places on Earth … northern California … This is the land of the redwoods, some of the oldest trees on the planet. The Americas with Simon Reeve III
Half a million Americans are homeless, and the problem can often be seen at its starkest in the shadows and backstreets of the City of Angels. ibid.
Fires are burning in cities across America, with storefronts smashed amid clashes between cops and protesters against police violence. It comes days after the Coronavirus death toll in our country passed the grim milestone of 100,000, after a month in which 40 million people went on to the unemployment – exceeding the depths of the Great Depression.
With the country in crisis after a month from hell, President Trump’s public schedule for this last day of May is blank. But when he’s not MIA, the President’s comments have only deepened our division, with tweets like ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’, coming one day after he retweeted an account saying ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’
President Trump has sowed the seeds of conflict and now we are all reaping the whirlwind of chaos. His inability to empathize with others, his instinct to play white identity politics, his essential disinterest in uniting the nation, have brought us to this breaking point. CNN online article 31 May 2020
CNN: As I wrote this, the US Capitol building was being stormed by right-wing protesters trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
This was an attempted coup, encouraged by the President of the United States, in an attempt to derail today’s congressional certification of the electoral vote that will lead to Joe Biden’s inauguration in two weeks.
Donald Trump’s legacy is American carnage. Our country is far more divided and violent and deluded than before he entered office. His misrule has led to this moment, but it is not his responsibility alone. Trump’s fear-fueled lies and extremism and conspiracy theories have been indulged for too long by partisans. His rhetoric has directly led to death threats against election officials who have done their job honestly and independently. Now we are all reaping what they’ve sown, as the President watches it all burn from within the White House. But then, there are some men who want to ruin if they cannot rule.
Make no mistake: this is sedition. And it’s coming at the hands of self-styled super-patriots who have been amped up by the President’s lies about non-existent mass voter fraud to excuse losing a free and fair election by a large margin.
They are not conservatives – they are radicals. Because patriots don’t break the windows of the US Capitol building and storm inside when they lose an election. No hostile foreign power has done more damage to what President-elect Joe Biden called ‘the citadel of our democracy’ since an invading British army burned down the Capitol in the war of 1812. But certainly, the enemies of democracy have taken great comfort from their actions today.
We are still in the fog of war. But some things are clear. The politicians and hyper-partisans who have coddled this President’s autocratic impulses have enabled this assault to our democracy. The Republican members of Congress – like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – who have tried to benefit politically from contesting the election results without any concrete evidence of fraud are culpable in this violence because they have stoked its fears. So is Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who demanded ‘trial by combat’ to resolve the election dispute at a ‘Save America’ rally this morning, after his legal team lost some 60 cases in court because of an absence of evidence. CNN online article 7 January 2021, ‘Donald Trump’s American carnage ends with a coup attempt’
The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal and mismanagement. taibbi.substack online, cited Keiser Report 2020
Unfortunately, voters had other problems. By 2016 Americans had lived for a generation under an economic model dominated by huge transnational companies that sold weapons into holocausts of urban violence, rejoiced in addiction to opiates or carcinogens as a revenue model, bled virtually all the savings of the American middle class (targeting minorities especially) through a succession of speculative bubble schemes, and relentlessly lobbied to be exempted from taxes, environmental laws, criminal penalties, and even their own business errors, through bailouts approved by the ‘politicians’ they sponsored in both parties. ibid.
The first Coronavirus case in America was confirmed in mid-January in Washington … By the start of June, over two million people had tested positive. Over a hundred thousand had lost their lives. Covid 19: World in Danger, Discovery 2020
The pandemic has caused an economic crisis in the United States. Over 40 million Americans have lost their jobs. The effects of the virus have been felt all over the country. ibid.
All of that turned out to be a technocratic illusion when nature set loose a terrible disease; it took advantage of the very connectivity we have manufactured. In Seattle the day of reckoning was January 20th when America’s first patient tested positive for Covid-19. On that same day in Seoul the first case in South Korea would also be confirmed. Korea moved quickly to contain the disease and save its economy using a variation on an American plan. But in the United States politics got in the way of science allowing the virus to spread invisibly and fast. Totally Under Control: Trump and Covid-19, BBC 2020
In early 2020 Trump was indifferent to the looming pandemic. ibid.
‘We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. And we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.’ ibid. Trump, interview World Economic Forum
At the first briefing they announced no concrete programs to contain the virus inside the borders of the United States. Instead, they offered a variation on a familiar Trump refrain – build a wall. ibid.
We knew in early February, but Federal officials refused to recognise only a vast infrastructure for mass testing could spot and contain a virus that was moving invisibly across the country. ibid.
Under the booming economic wave was an invisible undertow of disease. By early February economic models indicate there were thousands of cases spreading through Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. ibid.
‘Yeah, we’re very much involved, very cognizant of everything going on, we have it very much under control.’ ibid. Trump, pre-India trip
Because the US failed to control the virus, state governments moved to lockdowns to avoid runaway contagion and to stop hospitals becoming overwhelmed. ibid.
Because test kits were in short supply, access was limited to patients who were dangerously close to respiratory failure – the death rate began to rise. ibid.
‘Anyone who wants a test can get a test.’ ibid. Trump
Trump: Frankly, the testing has been going very smoothly …
cf.
Fauci: The system is not really geared to what we need right now. That is a failing …
cf.
Trump: No, I’m not taking responsibility at all. I’m doing a great job. ibid. press conference
Worried about the economy, Trump tried to limit lockdowns but the virus was out of control. By April over 3,000 New Yorkers had died, surpassing the death toll of 9/11. ibid.
Or was driving up the price [PPE] the whole point? ibid.
‘The US government was handing a huge amount of business to these five companies that were chosen fairly arbitrarily.’ ibid. critic