Donald Trump is looking to monuments to the traitors of the Confederacy to revive his flagging support, with a new Department of Homeland Security task force to protect statues, monuments, and memorials. DHS created the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) in response to Trump’s June 26 executive order. Presumably a few days were spent coming up with the acronym PACT.
Just as Trump spent the month of June ranting about, threatening, and attacking Black Lives Matter protesters, he spent the last moments of the month defending the Confederate names of some U.S. military bases. He tweeted a threat to veto the defense authorization bill if it included Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s amendment to rename “Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars.” So being named after generals who lost a war they started over slavery was somehow responsible for winning two later wars in which many Black people fought for the U.S.?
Trump is really clinging to these Confederates, and no wonder. The issue gets to so many things he loves: racism, police brutality, a sense of himself as the stern authoritarian leader.
”DHS is answering the President’s call to use our law enforcement personnel across the country to protect our historic landmarks,” acting Secretary Chad Wolf said in a statement. “We won’t stand idly by while violent anarchists and rioters seek not only to vandalize and destroy the symbols of our nation, but to disrupt law and order and sow chaos in our communities.”
First, Confederate statues are not symbols of our nation. They are symbols of another nation created to fight our nation in defense of slavery.
Second, that “violent anarchists and rioters” and “vandalize and destroy” and “disrupt law and order and sow chaos” language is like one blast of the racist dog whistle after another. We don’t see this kind of language or action when police murder one Black person after another—no yelling about violent police and disrupting law and order and sowing chaos from Team Trump. No big task force to put a stop to police violence Right GD Now through “the deployment and pre-positioning of Rapid Deployment Teams (RDT) across the country to respond to potential threats” to Black lives as these monuments to slavery are getting.
The entire existence of this PACT task force is yet another monument to racism.
