This is a great short clip of an interview that actor Bryan Cranston had with Chris Wallace a few weeks ago. Not only is Make America Great Again a direct lift of Adolf Hitler’s slogan, Make Germany Great Again, due to slavery on this continent, taking America back to a time of “greatness” could mean taking it back to a time of slavery and that is anything but “great.” That was America at its worst.

This is what all the fuss over CRT is about. Nobody teaches Critical Race Theory except at the graduate level, but it became a buzz word in the south during the last election. Yessir, everybody from Marge Greene to Hucky Boo Boo Sanders to Ron DeSantis wanted you to know that they were on the job to keep this awful wokeness away from school children. It was never in the hands of school children to begin with.

Bryan Cranston nails the issue quietly and simply.

It has never been great for African Americans in this country. It was that way from the beginning. Do you recall Frederick Douglass’ 4th of July speech?

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just.

This isn’t the whole thing. If you’ve never read it, hit the link. You’ll want to read it in its entirety.

This is Cranston debating the same thing with Bill Maher. Yes, Maher points out, things have gotten much better. We’ve had a Black president in this country, we have a Black (and female) VP now. That would not have happened when I was a kid, or in college, or even when I was in my 30’s. Many incredible changes have been wrought and we are here to see them.

I agree with that, and I agree with Cranston that this MAGA, taking America back in time to some white Disneyland, 50’s sitcom version of life, that never existed in the first place, is pure fantasy.

This culture has come a long way. It’s also got a long way to go.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. One reason I bring up nixon’s criminal actions to criminalize black activists and anti war college kids in 1970 by placing cannabis in schedule one, is the impact on the black community. It doesn’t meet either criteria for schedule one, but has criminalized millions since then. Given most arrests are for possession, and black folks are the largest percentage arrested, it destroys families, incarcerating people harming no one, and locks them out of employment. It’s just another way white lawmakers have damaged the black and young citizens. Meanwhile those same lawmakers allow tobacco, etoh, the pharmaceutical industry to kill tens of millions, yet no one using or abusing those substances goes to jail. There is no justification for this evil hypocrisy that continues to this day. It’s just fucking evil. Meanwhile the SOB who did it violated the trust of the highest office with his criminality. He gets pardoned. He got all the benefits of an ex-president. He got a fucking library. The fact the American voters have allowed this to continue for 53 years shows we have no real moral integrity, and don’t honor science. It shows how comfortable we are allowing the law and the lawmakers to destroy people for profit and political office. We somehow believe we can act like this without unintended consequences. One of which, is the disenfranchisement of the black community. Another is the disrespect it ferments among the young. Lie to me about weed and I’ll wrongly assume you’re lying about the other substances. As a young teen, I’ll vape, & take substances that could lead to addiction, especially tobacco and etoh. The entire deal stinks to heaven. Land of the free? Bullshit! We lock up more citizens than any country on earth, millions unjustly. And we wonder how we got to the point we elected a serial lying criminal. I don’t. A land of legal hypocrisy is one headed for disaster. The black community already has known this since 1619. White people have no fucking clue, and a huge percentage don’t want one.

    16
    • I don’t know if you have ever listened to Gil Scott Herron. He has some outstanding words, like about Nixon getting pardoned, but “no pardon in the ghetto.”

    • A minor point – the Presidential Libraries Act requires a library and also requires the former President in question to PAY for it. So there’s that. (and that is also why I do not believe there will ever be a Trump** Presidential Library. He never pays for anything.)

  2. Well of course the maga slogan came from Hitler. One of the few real books Trump probably ever read was a book on the Third Riech that he was known to keep on his nightstand. Probably what he considered his Bible. Trump is a pig. That’s exactly where Trump wants to go. Back where whites were great and the other races knew their place. Trump is a racist pig. The sooner everyone admits this the sooner we can at least settle the maga issue.

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