El Paso is Trump and Trump is El Paso

Let us be clear: white supremacy defines the United States far more than democracy ever has. It is an ideology embedded and entrenched within the country’s institutions and is the bulwark of its dominant cultural values. How could it be otherwise when it comes to a nation that was born in the genocide of its indigenous people and developed on the back of the African slave trade?

Moreover, the morally depraved gun culture in the land of the free, leading directly to the normalisation of mass shootings, is a symptom of Old Testament obscurantism, rampant individualism, along with the exaltation of hyper-masculinity and vigilante violence churned out by Hollywood as if on a permanent loop. Add to this toxic and lethal cocktail the religion of unfettered capitalism and its barbaric separation of society into winner and losers, and what you have is a society and country teetering on the brink.

Indeed the only thing keeping the US from imploding in the second decade of the 21st century is neither fidelity to the Constitution or to the Bill or Rights, but the repression of evermore militarised police departments and a justice and prison system that are the acme of cruelty and brutality.

Trump, it bears repeating, is America with its mask removed. He is not the aberration or departure from business as usual that his liberal detractors…