Few Americans know that with the signing of the First Step Act, the preeminent racist scumbag of our times, Donald Trump, has done more to roll back the New Jim Crow than either of his abysmal predecessors (Bush-Obama) came close to doing.
And there’s no point in bringing up Reagan through Clinton, who only advanced modern slavery, incarcerating (and putting to work) well over a million Americans — disproportionately people of color, especially African-Americans and Hispanics — disenfranchising them, confiscating their basic rights, and denying them services related to housing, higher education, and more… years after they’d “paid their debt” to society (and to Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Proctor & Gamble, McDonald’s Corporation, Fruit of the Loom, ExxonMobil, AT&T, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and other corporate benefactors of America’s captive workforce).
But the truth is that thousands upon thousands of incarcerated people, disproportionately people of color, are now going to be released “early” and have certain of their freedoms restored, thanks to the liberal-reformist crime bill that Donald Trump unequivocally supported and subsequently signed.
Some judicial discretion has been restored. Certain automatic penalties have been repealed. Thousands of prisoners are going to be granted their freedom.
And the president who can take credit for this minor rollback of the draconian “tough on crime” legislation of the 1980s-90s is a nakedly bigoted demagogue.
Talk about ironic!