Today, on our troubled nation’s birthday, I bring you a new and essential fact, news that really matters in the crush of news from Mount Rushmore that doesn’t matter at all.

As the eyes of the nation were glued on the grumpy and irrelevant old men of history celebration in South Dakota, I suddenly became aware of something that tells us more about the new reality of  America than 1,000 parades and military flyovers.

Somewhere between July 13, 2013, when three activists founded it, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and July 4, 2020, Black Lives Matter has become the Largest Movement in U.S. History.

Once again, as has become his custom, our President was facing the wrong way in the wrong place on the wrong day with the wrong props.

He showed his backside and tired old toys to a nation moving rapidly away from him and the racial hatred he has been spewing for days.

And boy, are we getting tired of ill-tempered old white men, dead or alive,  throwing themselves in front of the train.

I, for one, am happy to get out of the way.

Recent polling – including one by Civis Analytics, a prestigious data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic political campaigns – found that between 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.

And most of them were in mostly white-majority counties, many in the heart of what the media have come to call Trump country. It turns out the communities maybe our country too.

According to Civis, the protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests that continue today.

(The Tulsa, Okla home Fire Department reports that just under 6,200 people attended President Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa around the same time.)

These figures would make the recent protests the most massive movement in the country’s history, according to interviews with scholars and crowd-counting experts, reports The New York Times.

“Really, it’s hard to overstate the scale of this movement,” said Deva Woodly, an associate professor of politics at the New School in New York.

But it’s easy to underestimate it, as most of the media did. I was surprised to read it, but I could almost feel it. Black Lives Matters has been dismissed as an unpopular fringe movement for years now.

“I’ve never seen self-reports of protest participation that hight for a specific issue over such a short period,” said Neal Caren, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Professor Caren studies social movements in the United States.

Few cable news organizations even mentioned this report, Fox News didn’t mention it all, and  CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post gave it much less attention than the creepy Rushmore spectacle.

Rushmore turned out to be another bizarre and meaningless SOS from a desperate politician.

H.L. Mencken said a politician could get a thousand monkeys to come to cheer for him if he gave them tickets to the circus, Trump uses fireworks and jets.

At least they filled the seats this time. But this time, it could cost them their health and even their lives.

If you are wondering why this staggering report about Black Lives Matter was not the biggest story in the country for days as the election looms, it’s because it wasn’t part of the circus, stupid.

The circus was at Mt. Rushmore: military bands, military jets, fireworks, huge banners, giant presidential seals. Mussolini would have loved it.

But don’t be fooled. It is the biggest news of the campaign so far. It says more about the country now that a thousand rallies.

Some of the turnouts can be attributed to the pandemic, which kept many people at home. But even so, they came out to protest.

But consider this: some of the biggest and most prestigious sports and businesses in the country use Civis’s polling data to read the public mood and make their important decisions.

This may help to explain the enormous shift in support for Black Lives Matter across the country and from formerly Trump-friendly organizations and boot-lickers like Coca-Cola, the NFL, and NASCAR.

It would be a small risk to bet that these institutions, none of them known for their profiles in courage,  are Civis customers. They must have wet themselves when they saw those numbers.

Colin Kaepernick first took a knee on August 26, 2016.

He made more history than anybody could have guessed. His stand reaches deep into this election.

The President called him a “son-of-a-bitch.” The President will need some valium if he plans to watch football this Fall.

Suddenly, it’s respectable for some of the most powerful and traditionally white businesses in America to discover Black Lives Matter and endorse them.

As important, it’s okay for many of their white customers and followers to join in. That is what makes these numbers so significant; they represent the broadest segment of the American people to ever join together for a single cause.

Black Lives Matter is a global organization based in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Their mission is to challenge white supremacists and build local power to halt violence inflicted on African-Americans or their communities.

What is so relevant about these findings isn’t just the number of people who demonstrated but who is protesting.

More than 40 percent of the counties in the United States – at least 1,360 – have had a protest.

Unlike past Black Lives Matter protests, nearly 95 percent of counties that had a demonstration in recent weeks are majority white, and almost three-quarters of the counties are nearly 75 percent white.

That means the group has drawn vastly more white support than the civil rights movement at its peak, and in rural and suburban counties all over the country as well as cities, including every red state in the country.

This is a mainstream movement now, half as many Americans turned out to support Black Lives Matter as voted for President Trump in 2016. And the protests continue.

I can’t think of another social movement with a fraction of this sweep and range.

While the President has made them a favorite target of his and his followers – last week he said Black Lives Matter signs painted on streets were “hate signs,” the group has been busy forming community-based chapters after the Ferguson, Missouri unrest of 2014.

Each week, his catastrophic spectacles – the Bible, Tulsa – look worse. Add Rushmore to the list, Jacksonville is up next.

Progressive groups too often confuse arguing on Twitter and Facebook with political organizing.

Black Lives Matter uses social media but mostly has focused on grassroots community work.  Getting out there and knocking on doors, as the old party bosses did.

That’s a big lesson for political activists.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network was established quietly soon after Ferguson, and then came the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. This non-profit group gives grants to support grassroots organizing work by its chapters.

The group exists as a decentralized network with over 30 chapters in the United States.

Why wasn’t this Civis research a bigger story, I wondered?

I guess it reminds us that our media are a part of our problem, not the solution. Left and right labels only go so far. People can and do think for themselves.

It is important to understand modern media, almost entirely owned now by corporations for whom journalism is no different than selling cereal or mouthwash.

Trump is a profit machine for Fox, CNN, and other cable networks. He is responsible for dramatic surges in corporate media profits and online subscriptions to the New York Times and The Washington Post.

There are a lot of wonderful reporters at those papers, I worked for each of them, but journalists are not free to say what they know to be true.

Whether people love Trump or hate him, they all want to follow his every move. The angrier and more frightening he is, the more people watch. The people who say they dislike him enable him just as much as the people who follow him.

Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to those media organizations, and they are the best thing that ever happened to him.

But what are media for in 2020?

Once again, a stunning change in the political and social culture of America has occurred with Black Lives Matter, as in 2016. Once again, every major news organization missed it because they hardly ever talk to black people, just as they never talked to rural people.

Our country continuously amazes the people who claim to be telling is what is happening out there.

Sitting in TV studios yelling at each other may make media corporations productive, but it leaves the rest of us groping in the dark as the country is torn to pieces.

You can only learn so much sitting on your ass in Washington or New York.

Trump may be unhinged, but he still understands how to make the media jump through hoops day after day  – his unique presidential brew of bluster, hyperbole,  pageant, controversy, and falsehood.

They bite every time, even when they know he is lying. They pass on the lies, then complain he isn’t telling them the truth. Why should he? This is working out fine.

That is not ethical journalism to me; objectivity can be a good place to hide. I am glad I am free to say what I think, I could never do it in the mainstream media.

But the other big news coming from the Civis research is that this circus is not working for the President in 2020. These remarkable statistics show us that the America of 2020 is not the America of 2016.

We don’t need to take the President’s word when it comes to race or the pandemic.

We see and feel the pandemic for ourselves, and nobody needed to explain or spin the video of George Floyd and the other black men whose death at the hands of rogue police we can see all too clearly.

Perhaps the real heroes here are the cell phones that show us the truth, even when powerful people lie. We believe what we see, not what we are told has been seen. The role of the journalist has always been to see what we can’t see, but we live in a world where we get to see almost everything they see, often before they see it.

I hope I never get over those videos of black men being shot in the back or chocked to death by police officers who must have known better. So should our President.

There is no rational reason for Trump to be race-baiting in this overt and deeply offensive way; I won’t even bother to report his demagoguery. Enough is enough.

He is either committing political suicide or preparing for a post-election life as the next Rush Limbaugh (the current one is ill) from Mar-A-Largo.

I think he would love that; I think he is working on that every day. It would be the perfect life for him as the nest on top of his head disintegrates and he heads for 75.

It seems evident to me, the only plausible explanation for his implosion.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement is so much more important than another bloviation by the President at Mount Rushmore, or his continual -and now suicidal – insistence that the tooth fairy is coming to make the coronavirus go away.

The media kept saying how “grand” the setting was at Mount Rushmore, and how stately.  There must be something wrong with me. I thought the scene was grotesque and almost comically transparent.

The President said nothing that was not hateful, that was true, or that was remotely relevant to what is happening in almost all of our country.

What, I wondered, would he say to the son or daughter of one of those “supporters” if they were to get sick and die after watching his fireworks? The doctors say it is almost inevitable that that will happen.

What would they have died for, exactly?

Covid-19, the doctors say, was at the rally too. It turns out the doctors knew what they were talking about after all.

It made my spine shiver when I heard it. What is grand about that?

The big story is what wasn’t said and what wasn’t done, not what was. There was no mention of pandemics or race.

The media, like the President, is not nearly as authoritative a guide to the American mood as we once believed, and that so many of us depend on.

Our instincts are just as good as theirs; perhaps this is because we don’t live in Washington.

The Black Lives Matter statistics tell us that this organization has become a powerful mainstream movement, as relevant if not more so than either political party, both of which seem exhausted, struggling and out of another time.

Could Donald Trump possibly be any more out of sync with the country?

What a sad time to be so leaderless, to feel so adrift. That’s what I felt watching the video from Mt. Rushmore.

July Fourth is America is a great opportunity for a President to speak to the country.

He could have gone to a hospital to talk to health care workers or even the sick. He could have gathered the mothers of dead black men to the White House and spoken to them.

He could have unleashed the trustworthy Dr. Fauci to tell us what is happening.

He could have modeled Andrew Cuomo and pleaded with us to take care of ourselves and protect others? What more patriotic call could there be than that on Independence Day?

He could have gone to Minneapolis to try and talk to outraged citizens and see if he might do some healing or offer some comfort to the beleaguered police, most of whom are not murderers.

Instead, he was hosting a maskless party on the White  House lawn to put more people at risk and use more fireworks to distract the weak-minded.

The circus just flew from Mt. Rushmore to the White House Lawn. The media was there in force.

The President is in a mood to celebrate. Most Americans are not. Another miscue. For all of our troubles, I don’t believe Americans can all be bought off like children by bright fireworks and fighter jets.

What, exactly, did the President offer the country with his dark laments, his Mussolini backdrop, fireworks, and glowering monuments?

Nothing that will make anyone feel better about the pandemic tearing the South and West apart. Nothing about the great upheaval that has turned Black Lives Matter into the largest social movement in American history.

By Monday, the pretty fireworks will have drifted away. The pandemic and Black Lives Matter will still be here.

A rational politician, a politician who wanted to remain in office, would have found a way to address both of these issues on the national holiday celebrating our birth.

For me, this is a time for hope.

There is a great awakening in America, and oddly enough, Donald Trump is instrumental in creating it. It is not the awakening he wants or seeks, but it’s coming, and is not, I think, stoppable.

America is awoke,  as the kids say, and the American people are paying attention.  They have no choice; they can’t go out much.

Interestingly, the Democratic nominee Joseph Biden isn’t contributing to this awakening in any substantial way.

I had to think about it to even mention him. I’ve never seen a campaign so successful at doing nothing.

Yet he is benefiting from it, widening his lead, solidifying his support. Somebody there knows what they are doing.

Maybe Trump is the Tooth Fairy, he seems to be running both campaigns.

I guess this is why I love politics, even though I left it behind 20 years ago “to sit on my hay mill,”  one reader scolded. You never know.

This column is perhaps the most significant of those I have written in my mind in terms of what this research may mean.

I believe a new country is taking shape right before us.

It is an exciting time to be alive.

On November 3, we begin the long and hard slog to getting our country back. The real work begins.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom,” wrote Thomas Paine,  “must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

Something big and something hopeful is happening—time for the gloomy people to get to work.

It turns out that Black Lives Matter, a lot more than we thought.