“By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”



—W.E.B. DuBois, 1919.



It's just that kind of morning, when you got to sleep thinking about one mass shooting, this one in El Paso, and you wake up hearing about another, this one in Dayton. It's just that kind of morning, when you go to sleep thinking about 20 dead inside a Walmart in Texas and wake up hearing about nine dead outside a bar in Ohio. It's just that kind of morning. It's morning in America.

Thanks to Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, we are being reminded that this is the 100th anniversary of a series of events that the country has done a damned fine job of forgetting. In the summer of 1919, in the wake of World War I and with the Red Scare already warming up, the forces of white supremacy engaged all the private and public resources of American society and government in an all-out assault on African-American citizens. It was called the Red Summer and, by the end of it, there had been 25 white-supremacist assaults all over the country. African-American citizens, almost 400,000 of them soldiers who had survived the hell of the Western Front and who had learned to fight there, defended themselves, which only intensified the attacks.

In Elaine, Arkansas, a white mob attacked a group of black sharecroppers who were attempting to organize themselves for better working conditions, and a three-day slaughter ensured, abetted by Army units dispatched to the town, allegedly to keep order. Woodrow Wilson, that thin-lipped overrated bigot of a president, sat idly by while riots reached the steps of the Capitol and 40 people were killed. Chicago exploded after a black teenager was killed. In Omaha, a lynch mob ran riot, demanding the blood of an African American accused of rape. Before finally hanging the unfortunate prisoner, the mob nearly lynched the city's mayor. In all, there were 43 formal lynchings, 13 of which involved the murder of African-American veterans. That was 100 years ago, and, Lord, we've come so very far, haven't we?



Because what happened in El Paso on Saturday, when a white supremacist named Patrick Crusius brought a military-style weapon into a Walmart store and left 20 people dead and 26 wounded, was a lynching. He might have been alone, but his gun was his rope and his bullets were Crusius's mob. He drove eight or nine hours from Dallas to El Paso. He came prepared with eye and ear protection for his mission. He wasn't angry. He was coming to make war on the invading enemy. Pissant war, to be sure. Paranoid war, definitely. But war nonetheless. Patrick Crusius killed 20 more people than died at Fort Sumter. He married the lynch mob to war-fighting, the same way it happened at Wounded Knee or the Warsaw ghetto. With our modern technology of death, we have created one-man einsatzgruppen. Our atomized culture has atomized mass murder. You can be your very own lynch mob.



20 people were killed and 26 were injured in El Paso. At least nine were killed and 26 were injured in Dayton. Mario Tama Getty Images

As the day went along, we learned more about the rats running around inside his skull. He clearly had marinated his brain in the fevered rhetoric of the modern white-supremacist right. He posted a "manifesto" online that evinced this quite clearly.

"In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."

This is the common parlance of modern hate; the white supremacists at Charlottesville chanted, "You—and, occasionally, 'Jews'—will not replace us." These are the forces summoned up blithely by the current President* of the United States in recent days because he has no concept of politics without them, and no concept of patriotism in him at all. He is running around the powder magazines of American history, giggling, with a blowtorch in each fist. I honestly don't believe he knows the peril he has brought on the country. I also honestly believe he could care less.



This is the common parlance of modern hate; the white supremacists at Charlottesville also talked about invaders and invasion. These are the forces with which the Republican Party has engaged blithely, supporting this president* in everything he says and does. They are running around the powder magazines of American history, giggling, with blowtorches in all of their fists. I honestly believe they do know what they're doing. I honestly believe they could care less.



This is the third mass shooting in a week, and the 249th of the year. This one was in Texas. In Texas, a sharp-eyed cop could have spotted Patrick Crusius entering the Walmart and asked, "Dude, how come you need a military-style weapon to go to Walmart?" And because this is Texas, an open-carry state, Crusius could've told the cop to pound sand and then sued him for violating Crusius's civil rights. And then he could've gone in and killed people. Here is where I could wax angrily about this country's lunatic attraction to its firearms, but what would be the point?

These unfortunate exercises of our Second Amendment freedoms come as regularly as do the summer thunderstorms now, and there's no apparent willingness to change that situation on the part of anyone who has the power to do so. The gun debate has gone sterile. In the face of El Paso, and in the memory of Las Vegas, and Newtown, and now, overnight, in Dayton, I got nothing here any more. All I do know is that the gun debate is now taking place in a murderous, half-mad country with a half-mad president* at the helm who needs the country to stay half-mad so he can get re-elected and, thereby, stay out of jail for another four years. He will summon up his own Red Summer, if needs be, and only rhetorically, one hopes. One man is a lynch mob these days. Progress.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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