Let's talk a bit more about this, because this says a lot about how we came to this moment. And let's start with the plain fact that Barack Obama has done jackshit to worsen race relations except to get himself elected as a black man to the presidency. 1/12 https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1266557955438247937

That's all it took. That was his entire damn crime. Obama may be Ivy League-educated, a great family man, humane and smart, a man whose instinct is to heal not hurt. But he was a black man let loose in the White House and that made some people lose their ever-loving minds. 2/12

You see, that's how racism works. If a black man makes you feel uncomfortable, he's responsible. He's causing your racism. In Obama's case, he made himself as non-threatening as any self-respecting black man could possibly be, but it wasn't enough; it could never be enough. 3/12

The truth is that racism is always here among us, like a virus that never goes away, and it makes us all sick. The idea that it doesn't exist unless black people and other people of color provoke it or point it out is one of the more damaging lies in American public life. 4/12

However, if Obama's election set off deep-seated fears and resentments among many white Americans, those emotions were validated, encouraged and compounded by politicians and media figures who recognized opportunity when they saw it. 5/12

Last night on Fox, Tucker Carlson looked into Camera 1 and with his tightly pursed patrician lips he denounced Obama as "America's chief racial arsonist," like he was some nightmare combo of Malcolm X, Nat Turner and the 16-year-old black kid come to date your daughter. 6/12

Let me tell you about Carlson: Carlson is the nerdy guy who mysteriously shows up first at every five-alarm fire, the seemingly innocent on-looker who's transfixed by the blaze yet reeks of gasoline fumes and has a lighter in his pocket. 7/12

Night after night, he gleefully pours accelerant on the racial fears and resentments of older white Americans and then cashes a very nice check for doing so. That's his job, and he does it well. (Corporate America, that's what you're subsidizing by advertising on Fox.) 8/12

All of which brings us to Donald Trump, and to this moment in our history. I've seen conservatives try to explain away their responsibility for the rise of Trump by claiming that Obama did it, that it's Obama's fault. Just as the black man caused racism, he caused Trump. 9/12

There's some truth to that. Donald Trump is the backlash. Donald Trump in the White House is living proof that racism makes people do some of the most stupid, self-destructive stuff that you could ever imagine. 10/12

If you think the looters are crazy for venting their anger and frustration in ways that destroy their own neighborhoods, well, white voters did pretty much the same thing to the whole country in electing an incompetent ass like Trump as our president. 11/12

They were pissed off, and they wanted to see it burn.

Well, they’re seeing it now. 12/12