Megyn Kelly with her blackface preposterousness, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, and the pipe bomb maniac claw at our national sensitivities

BALTIMORE – The Pittsburgh synagogue killings, and the pipe bomb mailings that preceded them, almost make us forget the fall from grace of television’s Megyn Kelly. But they shouldn’t, for each is built on the same American racial and religious fault lines exploited so willfully by our political leaders.

Kelly, once the $23 million-a-year pop star of what passes for journalism at Fox News and NBC’s Today Show, gets the boot after preposterously declaring that blackface Halloween costumes are not necessarily racist.

NBC declares this kind of language unacceptable. Andy Lack, the NBC News chairman, says, “I condemn those remarks. There is no place on our air or in this workplace for them.”

Uh, excuse me, but what did they think they were getting when they plucked Kelly from Fox, a cable news network that traffics routinely in what Kellyanne Conway once famously called “alternative facts.”

NBC now wishes to be seen as doing the noble thing. They will silence racism whenever they hear its beating heart, they assure us.

The greater truth is this: they found their opening. Kelly’s been a flop since they signed her. What appealed to the viewers at right-wing Fox is a turn-off to NBC’s mainstream audience. NBC wants to find a way out of the three years and $69 million they still owe her – and, by using her racial obtuseness as a handy excuse, they’ve found an angle.

It might have been nice if they’d instead used this as a teachable moment. What the hell, Kelly apologized for what she said. It was offensive and idiotic. So why not spend an hour, or a week, inviting guests onto her show to talk about the great racial and religious antagonisms now afflicting the whole country, and how we all need to be sensitive toward each other?

Maybe some kind of healing might have emerged from such a discussion.

Meantime, we have one more example of the country’s painful racial and religious divisions.

The previous examples started last week with the pipe bomb mailings. The first reported recipient was George Soros, the Jewish Democratic philanthropist who’s been the enduring target of the vilest lies from right-wing Republican sources.

But then came the deluge – one person after another whose main commonality was that they’d all been verbal targets of President Trump.

And he wishes us to believe he’s contributed nothing at all to the antagonisms splitting the country.

This is a president who engages in outlaw rhetoric. As the nation trembles over the possibility of mass mail-order assassination, this man blames “the media” – you know, the ones Trump calls “enemies of the people” – including CNN, which was itself a pipe bomb target.

In the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue killings, Trump calls the assailant “evil.” But that’s the precise word he’s used to describe Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton specifically.

Among the dead in Pittsburgh is a holocaust survivor. What Hitler couldn’t accomplish, modern American hatred has.

The Pittsburgh killer expressed anger toward this Jewish congregation because they’ve aided America’s embrace of immigrants through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

In the same week of pipe bombs and mass murder, this president looks at those other immigrants – many of them women and children – desperately attempting to flee violence and poverty in Central America with their unimaginable thousand-mile walk to the U.S. border, and Trump demonizes them as “dangerous” and somehow imagines Middle Eastern terrorists among them.

They’re all part of the newest American fault line – Megyn Kelly with her blackface preposterousness, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the pipe bomb maniac – clawing at our national sensitivities.

Now is a moment when Americans have to choose: do we add our own claws to the wounds, or do we try to heal them?