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9 days ago, on the evening of Sunday October 21st, Brian Schatz, the United States Senator from Hawaii, wrote a tweet that has proven itself prophetic. I actually saw it that evening and retweeted it. Looking ahead into the week that we just experienced, Brian tweeted the following words, “I just have a feeling that this coming week is going to be wacky and not in a good way. No matter what madness may come, let’s just keep talking to voters everywhere about health care and fighting corruption.”

 

Now I believe in feelings and hunches. I believe in instincts. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, he breaks down how the thoughts and gut feelings we have in the blink of an eye are actually amazingly complex. Brian Schatz felt something. I know it’s hokey for me to talking about his sixth sense, but we’re in a peculiar time.

 

This past week was one of the worst in modern American history. An avid Trump supporter mailed pipe 14 bombs to CNN and a mix of prominent Democrats and outspoken Trump critics. After he was arrested, security professionals wrote me to tell me that they saw this man regularly tweeting and talking about me on his timeline.

 

On the same day the bombs started arriving at their destinations across the country, a heavily armed racist white man in my home state of Kentucky tried to enter a Black church, presumably to shoot and kill the people inside, but was met with a lock door. He then went down the street into a nearby grocery store and shot and killed two black grandparents – one right their in front of the grandchildren. Before he was caught by police he assured an armed white man that he’d never shoot white people.

 

Then, on Saturday, the unthinkable happened. Driven by white supremacist and Neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, many in which Donald Trump himself has advanced, a bigot with an AR-15 walked right into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and slaughtered 11 elderly Jewish parishioners.

 

Staring all of that in the face, Donald Trump woke up yesterday morning and blamed the news media for the “great anger” across our country when he tweeted, “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.”

 

It’s difficult rank Trump’s most dangerous tweets, but this one must be high on the list. In a week where CNN, former presidents, vice presidents, attorney generals, sitting congressmen, and others received live bombs in the mail from one of his supporters, in a week where white supremacists shot and killed Black folk in Kentucky and Jewish folk in Pittsburgh, he called the media “the true Enemy of the People.” It’s breathtaking. He is signaling to the most disturbing forces in this nation that he supports them.

 

Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke proudly retweeted it. Last week, Duke gleefully opined his pride in Trump’s public embrace of nationalism – admitting that it was indeed an embrace of white nationalism.

 

As always, the bigots and racists and white nationalists love Trump.

 

It’s easy for some people to say, “ignore him.” And I think I could if he was just the host of Celebrity Apprentice who was conning people into taking classes at Trump University. But he’s the President of the United States. He is deeply influential with a potent core of Americans. And some of those prominent supporters are openly and publicly admitting that they aim to be violent. Yesterday morning prominent Trump supporter Katie Hopkins unapologetically blamed the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on the rabbi. The woman who tweeted that has nearly 900,000 followers.

 

Listen to me.

 

In Brazil this weekend, a man more conservative that Donald Trump was just elected President. He’s a monster. A former military leader who openly said he might have to kill 30,000 people to get the country in line. He’s an openly homophobic bigot and he got 55% of the vote.

 

It was Dr. King who admonished us to remember that “everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

 

I am very, very concerned about the state of our nation and the direction our world is going in. The attack on the synagogue on Saturday was the deadliest attack against Jews on American soil in the history of this country. That’s the time we are living in.

 

We now have 7 days until Election Day. About half of the country is still able to vote early for these final 7 days. If that’s you, keep on pushing. Vote if you haven’t voted already.

 

Now I have a special request I’m going to make.

 

I’d like for you to consider taking a day off on Election Day so that you can spend the entire day volunteering helping get people out to the polls. Even if that literally means you calling and texting everybody in your contacts, all of your Facebook friends.

 

On next, every single vote is going to matter and so many of the most important races are going to be really damn close. Go ahead and take that day off and on this Thursday I’ll give you some instructions on where to volunteer.

HEAD BACK TO THE BLACKAMERICAWEB.COM HOMEPAGE

Shaun King: The Worst Week In Modern American History  was originally published on blackamericaweb.com