Donald Trump isn’t even trying to hide it anymore
Donald Trump and his hired henchman William Barr are trying to downplay the existence of white supremacy in our country. Congress has repeatedly requested information on statistics, only to be told the information wasn’t available. Yahoo News has busted that theory in shocking fashion. According to Yahoo, the Trump administration has been sitting on this information all along and has refused to provide it to Congress.
According to the documents obtained by Yahoo, all race-based domestic acts of terror in 2018 were perpetrated by white supremacists. This is the very information that Congress requested but did not get. The map that accompanies the piece shows “32 domestic terror attacks, disrupted plots, threats of violence, and weapons stockpiling by individuals with a radical political or social agenda who lack direction or influence from foreign terrorist organizations in 2018.” Obviously, these people were driven by something other than the normal terrorist, and in this case, the vast majority are white supremacists. Yahoo sent questions to the DOJ regarding the failure to release this information to Congress, to which the DOJ has not responded. This is frightening. Our own government is hiding information from us that can directly impact our safety and wellbeing.
When he heard about this information that had been withheld from Congress, Cory Booker said that he is “troubled by the lack of transparency,” especially when you consider that Congress asked for the information, and it wasn’t provided. Dick Durbin’s office has been vocal about this lack of transparency and that it’s “not surprising” that the information has been withheld. Even more frightening, the Trump administration and Barr have watered down the FBI’s domestic terrorism categories from 11 to 4, combining several into what they call “racially-motivated violent extremism.”
What this does is hide white supremacy among other categories so that it no longer sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb that it is. In a letter sent to William Barr and Christopher Wray, the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee members voiced their concerns about these new categorizations with good reason. According to this letter, white supremacists have been combined with “so-called ‘Black identity extremists,’ a fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents.” All of this following testimony, under oath, that the FBI “could not say how many [incidents] involved white supremacist violence, other than to acknowledge they were ‘a majority’ of the incidents.” They can say they didn’t lie under oath, but they are splitting hairs, especially given that they do, in fact, know how many. As Congress points out, “if we do not understand the scope of the problem, we cannot effectively address it,” and therein lies the problem.
If anyone still believes that Trump is not a supporter of white supremacy, he or she is a damned fool. Why is this administration hiding information that could have helped to prevent the massacre in El Paso? Do they really hate brown people so much that they are willing to help white supremacists murder them? This is likely the most disturbing information to come out of Trump’s White House to date. Our only hope is that we can turn this thing around after he’s gone. If not, we’re going to have what many believe Trump wants: civil war.
Shirley is a former entertainment writer and has worked in the legal field for over 25 years