EXCERPT:
GAY: “We have Donald Trump to thank for this wonderfully disgusting and grotesque outpouring of open racism, the likes of which we really haven’t seen in this country, you know, in a mainstream cultural sense, I would say, since the 1950s, if not the 1920s, before that. So we do have Donald Trump to thank for that, and Trumpism. But I think he knew exactly what he was saying. And you know, it’s funny, because I think — it’s not funny, it’s actually really sad, but if you ask any black American of any age, they will tell you that what it means to be a black American is sometimes just to be gaslit by the rest of the country. To be told that you aren’t seeing what’s in front of your face, what the rest of the country has seen, that it didn’t happen. That actually despite the fact that your people have been oppressed for generations, that you are the threat, right? So you can literally have a white mob attack the seat of democracy, bash the heads of police officers, and still you are the threat, because you’re black. And so it is the blackness and the whiteness that is just the screaming elephant in the room in this case. And I think we’re really confronted now with the fact that a majority of the country, not just black Americans, is now being gaslit, saying, ‘How can this be? How can they be telling us that we didn’t see what we saw before our faces?’ Whenever in the course of American history you have petty, lazy, small, small-minded politicians who don’t want to show real leadership or build real coalitions or offer real solutions to the American people, whenever they are desperate for power, they turn to racism. So this is really a sign, in my opinion, of the desperation of the Republican Party in this moment. This is really the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit. When all else fails, blame black people. And that’s what this is about.”