Governed by lunatics
by Tom Sullivan
Friday morning began with news of 49 dead at New Zealand mosques after a white supremacist's murderous, made-for-Internet, shooting rampage. Friday night, Rachel Maddow reported that Donald Trump's Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd, kept a spreadsheet tracking the menstrual cycles and pregnancies of unaccompanied minor girls in ORR's custody. Like a villain in a dystopian novel, Lloyd reportedly used the tracking system to block the girls from 12 to 17 from seeking seeking abortions.
One byproduct of the week's news will be deepening outrage fatigue.
By late Friday, the alleged New Zealand shooter had flashed a "white power" sign while in handcuffs. The president of the United States, cited in the suspect's online manifesto as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” dismissed the worldwide rise of white supremacist violence as no big deal, merely "a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."
The manifesto condemned immigration as "an invasion on a level never seen before in history.” The U.S. president bookended that statement on Friday by echoing it:
Hours later, a shockingly similar phrase came from the president. Trump, after vetoing a bill that would've blocked his national emergency declaration to access border wall funding, briefly condemned the shooting before pivoting back to border talk. There are "crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border," Trump said, adding that "people hate the word 'invasion,' but that's what it is."Inspired by the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, the list of Trump's white nationalist riffs is lengthy. Chauncey DeVega lists just a few that mass murderers from the U.S. to Canada to New Zealand found inspirational.