The above picture is not of a garden-variety Neo-Nazi, Klan supporter participant at an anti Black Lives Matter protest. Apparently, this individual (whose name I’ve redacted) giving the Nazi salute and not wearing a COVID 19 mask is the Director of Physician Recruitment at a hospital in Montclair, NJ. Or WAS–the picture made her superiors uncomfortable enough to take away her employment. Rah-rah, happy ending, nothing to see here.

NOT BUYING IT.

There were a bunch of cases nationwide during the failed ‘War on Drugs’ where patrolmen were found falsifying arrests and evidence about drug arrests. Tulia Texas was found to be an arrest mill for African American citizens, with ‘ambitious’ officers being caught falsifying evidence and sending hapless citizens to the slammer for decades. The ACLU took the issue up and it became a Cause Celebre. There were scenes like this all over the US, and one by-product is that police officers (or DA’s) found to be falsifying evidence in one case had all of their previous arrests and prosecutions opened up to being overturned. Following me so far?

So the criminal justice system has a mechanism for addressing arrest falsification–one conviction means everything the individual has done is re-opened and examined for mishandling. What about “conventional” employers? Our ‘Sieg Heil’ woman controlled critical hiring at a hospital or hospital chain. She probably had wide discretion on who was or was not in serious contention for jobs at her hospital. Now that we know where her sympathies lie, would any applicant passed over have valid reason to approach an attorney for redress on employment discrimination?

And now we have a huge rabbit-hole. What about employment agencies? Do they honor the employer’s wishes (always spoken, never on paper) to hire a white workforce?And it doesn’t stop there. How many of those fascist protesters during the Charlottesville Riot in 2017 put down their armbands and tiki torches and went back to their ‘normal’ jobs the following Monday? Did their co-workers know where their real feelings lay? One of the more frightening aspects of Dylann Roof’s racist mass murder is that he’d voiced his desires to start a race war to a roommate or two and other people. And NONE OF THEM found his murderous comments worthy of reporting to law enforcement. I wrote about it here. Is the problem that white supremacy is so ingrained in the American psyche, we’ve ignored the psychopathic warning signs?

Director Spike Lee got it right in his fact-based film BLACKKKLANSMAN, based on the true story of an African American police officer who successfully infiltrated a local Klan group and thereby prevented a terrorist bombing of African American students at a local college. The issue left unresolved (but hinted at) is why the FBI wouldn’t pursue the leads that the young policemen had found that could have brought an end to the Klan’s leadership. We know now that J Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director was an unabashedly racist man. Hoover died in 1972, but Things didn’t change after he left.

And this isn’t new. An anarchist/leftwing hacker by the name of Jeremy Hammond ended up in the slammer a decade ago. His high crime was fomenting outrage at the white supremacy movements exploding around the country. His outrage drove him to hack KKK and Stormfront (neo-Nazi) membership lists and find out membership rolls. He then cross-referenced this info with public lists of law enforcement executives–and when he found matching records, he doxxed the miscreants. There were apparently over 100 matches. I wrote about Hammond’s hardships about six years ago. Again, you’d think that the criminal justice system could have picked up where Hammond left off. But no. Is the FBI’s lack of pursuit of white supremacists groups like the Klan and Storefront a sin of Omission, or of Commission?

When I was still optimistic about the 2016 election, I hoped that Trump’s elevation to the nomination would at least do those of us on the left the favor of dismissing the GOP’s defenses against charges of Institutional racism. I was right that we’d see the racism; I was wrong that uncovering it would lead to Trump’s loss. But Trump’s presidency has lead to undercover racists and Fascists to feel safe to openly express their feelings. It probably felt safe for a Director of Employment at a hospital to go to a BLM counter-protest and raise her arm A La Hitler even when cameras were about. There are LOTS of undercover fascists among ‘Muricans, and getting rid of all of them is going to be White People work.