Dear Editor:

The first half of one of the more shameful chapters in American history has just ended with the election of a Republican white woman in Mississippi, an alumna of a segregationalist academy who boasted she would happily attend a public hanging, if one of her supporters invited her to it. Her racist victory caps two years of what Bill Maher has called “a slow-moving coup” against the United States government:

The ‘election’ of a minority candidate who ran a despicable campaign, aided by white nationalists, right-wing hate mongers, conspiracy theorists, and agents of the Russian government;

The deliberate and malicious use of lies to deceive and confuse the public, while covering up official crimes and misdeeds;

The denigration of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, when they failed to kowtow to an uninformed, unfit president;

The systematic dismantling by executive order of the laws and policies that brought us out of the Great Recession and were directing our economy toward environmental sustainablity;

The packing of federal courts and the Supreme Court with extremist ideologues, confirmed by a one-party-controlled legislative branch, representing a minority of the US population;

The vicious attacks on our free press, launched by daily presidential tweets and Nuremburg-style, re-election rally speeches;

The direct and implied White House support for violence against journalists, political opponents, asylum seekers, and peaceful protesters, both foreign (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Philippines) and domestic (Charlottesville, US border with Mexico);

And the reckless disruption of the international institutions, alliances, and treaties that are responsible for the peace and prosperity of the postwar world.

History will not judge us kindly for allowing these assaults on our American values of freedom, justice, truth, and defense of oppressed people. Perhaps the Blue Wave of November 2018 is “the beginning of the end” of Trumpism, as Winston Churchill once wrote of another shameful era.

Bill Hammond
Trevett