On Friday night, thousands of protesters shut down Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Chicago after 32 people were arrested at an earlier rally in St. Louis, according to Vox News in a March 12 article. 

The protests came after a Trump supporter sucker-punched a black man at a rally on Wednesday in North Carolina and the Trump campaign refused to condemn the incident. Following the cancelled rally on Friday, Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he believed the violence and confrontation at his rallies were caused by economic issues and protesters who are “very dangerous people,” not by inflammatory comments that he has made time and time again on the campaign trail. 

This is not the first time that Trump has refused to denounce violence among his supporters; during Thursday’s Republican debate in Miami, when moderators asked him about quotes he had said in support of violent protesters, Trump refused to take back what he said as the audience cheered.

It is laughably untrue whenever Trump claims that his rhetoric does not inspire violence, that the hateful things his supporters do and say are caused by economic stress — that the protesters bring violence upon themselves. The facts disprove this narrative. For example, in August 2015, two men in South Boston severely beat a homeless man with a metal pipe while saying Trump’s inflammatory statements about Latinos were correct. What was Trump’s response? He told CNN on Aug. 18 that he would “never condone violence,” not that he thought that the men’s actions were abhorrent or that he regretted making his original comments, only that he did not actively support beating a homeless man who looked Latino. 

There is an argument that Trump was not directly responsible for this incident in Boston: How was he supposed to know that his supporters would become so impassioned that they would commit violence? 

The answer to this is simple: There is clear evidence that Trump’s campaign has directly inspired violence and targeted racial minorities — even at their own rallies. At a Feb. 29 rally at Valdosta State University in Georgia, a group of black students were forcibly escorted out of the rally. 

According to a March 1 Washington Post article, the black students had quietly taken their seats to participate in a silent and non-disruptive protest when local law enforcement told them they had to leave the rally. In a March 4 Talking Points Memo story, Stryde Jones, a captain with the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department, said that Trump staffers explicitly asked him to remove the silent protesters. 

Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress backed up this account, explaining that “Trump staff wanted them out.” 

It seems that white supremacists are not considered a threat to safety and security at Trump’s rallies — at a March 4 rally in Kentucky, white supremacists were present in the crowd, according to a March 13 Vox article — but a group of black college students silently protesting racism are.

Trump promises to “tell it like it is” and not worry about pesky things like racial stereotyping and political correctness. This is, according to a March 11 New York Times opinion piece, part of his appeal: “The notion that Mr. Trump voices ideas that his supporters are ‘afraid’ to express, vital truths lost to the scourge of political correctness, has been a rhetorical through-line of his campaign,” and both Trump and his supporters believe that voicing these ideas is part of making America great again. 

They seem to think that because it is no longer socially acceptable to sexually harass women or call black people the n-word or label over a billion people as terrorists on the basis of their religion that this new “political correctness” persecutes them in some way. 

Yet even with the rise of political correctness, Trump and his supporters still are not being persecuted for these views. 

Rather, they are saying all of these things, and in Trump’s case, it is winning him elections. 

To say that Trump and his fans are being “oppressed” for not being able to use racial slurs or treat women and minorities as less than equal is absurd. There is a right to free speech, but there is no right to escape all consequences for offensive and harmful speech.

Trump’s campaign touts a slogan “Make America Great Again,” but when was America last great? Was America last great in the 1980s, when tough-on-crime policies began disproportionately targeting black and Latino communities and when President Reagan and his administration joked about thousands of gay men dying of AIDS, as captured on tape and shared in the new short documentary, “When AIDS Was Funny”? 

Was America last great in the 1950s, when racial segregation was the law of the land, the First Amendment did not apply to political dissidents and women could not take out a loan in their own name? 

Was America last great in the 1940s, when American citizens were rounded up and detained on the basis of their ethnicity? 

Was America last great in the 1910s, when child labor was legal and women could not vote? 

Was America last great during the Antebellum, when slavery was legal? 

Because no matter how you spin it, Trump is implying that one of these less-than-ideal periods in American history was the last time America was great.

For whom are we making America great? Are we making it great for the white supremacists who have been flocking to Trump en masse, or are we making it great for the homeless man beaten with pipes, for the 30 black college students booted from a public space because of their race and for the protesters who gathered in the streets to combat bigotry and its harmful consequences?