It's Just That Kind of Morning. It's Morning in America.

Two mass shootings in less than 24 hours. We've come so far, haven't we?

It's Just That Kind of Morning. It's Morning in America. "By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land." —W.E.B. DuBois, 1919.   It's just that kind of morning, when you got to sleep thinking about one mass shooting, this one in El Paso, and you wake up hearing about another, this one in Dayton. It's just that kind of morning, when you go to sleep thinking about 20 dead inside a Walmart in Texas and wake up hearing about nine dead outside a bar in Ohio. It's just that kind of morning. It's morning in America. Thanks to Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, we are being reminded that this is the 100th anniversary of a series of events that the country has done a damned fine job of forgetting. In the summer of 1919, in the wake of World War I and with the Red Scare already warming up, the forces of white supremacy engaged all the private and public resources of American society and government in an all-out assault on African-American citizens. It was called the Red Summer and, by the end of it, there had been 25 white-supremacist assaults all over the country. African-American citizens, almost 400,000 of them soldiers who had survived the hell of the Western Front and who had learned to fight there, defended themselves, which only intensified the attacks. In Elaine, Arkansas, a white mob attacked a group of black sharecroppers who were attempting to organize themselves for better working conditions, and a three-day slaughter ensured, abetted by Army units dispatched to the town, allegedly to keep order. Woodrow Wilson, that thin-lipped overrated bigot of a president, sat idly by while riots reached the steps of the Capitol and 40 people were killed. Chicago exploded after a black teenager was killed. In Omaha, a lynch mob ran riot, demanding the blood of an African American accused of rape. Before finally hanging the unfortunate prisoner, the mob nearly lynched the city's mayor. In all, there were 43 formal lynchings, 13 of which involved the murder of African-American veterans. That was 100 years ago, and, Lord, we've come so very far, haven't we?   Because what happened in El Paso on Saturday, when a white supremacist named Patrick Crusius brought a military-style weapon into a Walmart store and left 20 people dead and 26 wounded, was a lynching. He might have been alone, but his gun was his rope and his bullets were Crusius's mob. He drove eight or nine hours from Dallas to El Paso. He came prepared with eye and ear protection for his mission. He wasn't angry. He was coming to make war on the invading enemy. Pissant war, to be sure. Paranoid war, definitely. But war nonetheless. Patrick Crusius killed 20 more people than died at Fort Sumter. He married the lynch mob to war-fighting, the same way it happened at Wounded Knee or the Warsaw ghetto. With our modern technology of death, we have created one-man einsatzgruppen.Our atomized culture has atomized mass murder.   You can be your very own lynch mob. Read the Full Story To Be an American Now Is to Feel Like a Target Over this weekend—just before the mass shooting in El Paso, TX, which was just before the mass shooting in Dayton, OH, which was a few days after the mass shooting in Gilroy, CA— I've been at a music festival called All Together Now in the south of Ireland. And as I walked into the festival grounds for the first time, an unusual but faintly familiar thing happened: I walked in.   If you're reading this in America, doesn't that sound peculiar to you now? Charmingly passé, as though I'd said we arrived via horse and buggy? When was the last time you went to a big music festival and didn't get searched for guns on the way in? Or a sporting event? Or increasingly, a movie theater? When was the last time you did a goddamn 5K fun run and didn't think for one second about where the shooter might be?   It was actually startling. I asked my friends about it—"Can you normally just…do that?"— and it is a testament to how fundamentally different our otherwise similar lives have become that I had to get specific about "that": "Can you just walk right into an event like this and not get frisked and scanned and have to empty your pockets?"   After a pause and a search for the correct word, one of them patted my back and spoke up: "Yeah, we tend to not annihilate each other over here." Read the Full Story Why American Mass Shootings Keep Happening Are we helpless to stop mass shootings? Is anyone even trying to stop them? The good news is that the answers are No and Yes. The bad news: The person loading up hasn't gotten the news. In the wake of two new mass killings in America—in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio—Tom Junod's October 2014 Esquire story is still too relevant.  Read the Full Story American Gun Culture Is Not Freedom. It Is Tyranny. This is the America we have made for ourselves. You can survive one mass shooting, only to find yourself the victim in another one because you chose the wrong bar on the wrong night to go dancing with your friends. If you're an American, you can be shot anywhere: at school, at the mall, at a concert, at the movie theater, at a garlic festival or a Wal-Mart. To be an American is to know that when you venture outside, you have a better chance than the citizen of any other country in the developed world of being shot by a complete and total stranger with easy access to incredibly powerful weaponry. Read the Full Story Trump's Trade Lie Was Such a Whopper That Neil Cavuto 'Didn't Know Where to Begin' Debunking It "I don't know where to begin here," said Cavuto after airing Trump's remarks. "But just to be clarifying, China isn't paying these tariffs. You are. You know, indirectly and sometimes directly. This latest round of tariffs that kick in on September 1, on $300 billion worth of goods at 10 percent, that will most directly be felt by consumers directly, because that happens on almost entirely consumer items rather than industrial-related items. But just wanted to clarify that; our governments don't pay these things, you do, one way or another." Check out the moment Read the Full Story This Billboard Is a Sign of the Wild and Dangerous Forces Surging Through the Country This country is sitting on a powder keg, and the president has decided his best chance at re-election is to start lighting matches and tossing them about. He's unleashed blatantly racist rhetoric towards a number of sitting members of Congress, most recently Maryland's Elijah Cummings. He has cast independent sources of information in our society—the free press—as enemies of the state. But his most virulent hate speech is often reserved for four congresswomen of color: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. When Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana got involved, he characterized these sitting members of Congress as "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." This was part of a long soliloquy about how they fundamentally hate the country, for which he quickly admitted he had no actual evidence. Well, it seems describing four prominent women of color as the Biblical personification of conquest, war, famine, and death has some consequences. People are listening. Just check out this billboard from Cherokee Guns, a North Carolina gun shop. 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