While, in the wake of the El Paso murders, the media and most of our politicians are acting shocked-"shocked, I tell you!"-that there are armed racists in America who are trying to terrify people of color, the reality is that it's pretty much always been that way here in the United States.

From the first colonization of North America, guns have been the principle instrument to enforce white supremacy. This racialized violence isn't new.

The Republicans have some big bold ideas. At least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, because Republicans have the big idea that only white people should vote. Here's another.

CNN and so-called conservatives keep worrying about how we're going to "pay for" things like Medicare for all and free college at the Democratic Debates. It's the completely wrong frame and question.

Supposedly Stalin said, " A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

Tim Wise, who helped run a campaign against David Duke, points out that when they tried to talk about the issues and ignored Duke's appeal to racism, it depressed the white anti-Duke Vote.

Thomas Friedman, the confused billionaire, told us decades ago that "free trade" is what made the Lexus a successful product when, in fact, it was decades of Japanese government subsidies and explicit tariffs that did so.

It's often said that if Trump is reelected, it'll be the end of democracy in America. But how could Trump get reelected, and how could democracy get wiped out in the USA?

Turns out, there's an actual project to rewrite our Constitution, turning America into a corporate-run oligarchy.

Trump's son Eric said on Fox News that he's loving the Democrats being upset about Trump's racist language. He argued that it's playing right into their hands.

On Tucker Carlson's show, David Horowitz said, "The creation of America was probably the greatest gift given to Black people in 3,000 years..." He added that "the people who hate America on the left, and this embraces so much of the Democratic Party these days, have conducted a 50-year, 60-year attack on Christianity in this country."

America has always been a racist country, but until recently (in the modern era) we didn't discuss it in "polite" company. Now, social media has created a "hive mind" among us, so the racism that was always there is clear and obvious. And Trump knows it, and is using it to connect with others in his part of the hive.

Edmund Burke is often quoted as saying that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Conservatives are silent as Trump's tweet telling women of color to go back to their ancestor's country amplifies the sort of thing that people like David Duke and the Klan have been saying forever.

It's just as explicitly racist and fascist as was his "very fine people on both sides" comment.

When Donald Trump was doing a reality show for NBC, he was messing with a few peoples lives - and apparently delighting in it - but the impact was minimal. Now he is quite literally running a daily reality show out of the White House and messing with the lives of all Americans and the planet more broadly.

Russian president Vladimir Putin recently suggested that "liberal democracy" is "obsolete." He may be onto something, at least from the point of view of conservatives and neoconservatives in the United States and Europe. Indeed, a liberal democracy has been under attack for sometime.

It looks like Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP are encouraging other countries to hack our upcoming 2020 election.