Story 2 1876
---
see 1619
SEE CENSOR DEI WWW MEMORY HOLE STROY 1 AM EXCEPTIONALISM
see reconstruction
merri ok
---
RWW
03/02/2026
by
- Will Neal @ The Daily Beast: ‘Peace President’ Breaks Record for Attacking the Most Countries
Trump has reportedly authorized more assaults in just the first year of his second presidency than Biden did throughout four years at the White House.
- Edith Olmstead @ The New Republic: Trump Warns “The Big One” Is Still Coming for Iran
Donald Trump is ready to make it a whole lot worse for Iran.
- Mark Wingfield @ Baptist Press: The Iran bombing is a religion story for all but one person
When the United States and Israel bombed Iran Feb. 28, the motivations and repercussions were religious as well as political.
- Lee Moran @ HuffPost: Lindsey Graham Names 'Next' Country On Trump's Hit List: 'Their Days Are Numbered'
First Venezuela, then Iran — and now Cuba. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News’ Trey Gowdy on Sunday that the U.S. under President Donald Trump will next target the communist-led Caribbean island for regime change.
- Liam Adams and Karissa Waddick @ USA Today: Trump's Freedom 250 hits the road with museum focused on faith, civics
Six mobile history museums, part of President Trump's Freedom 250 program, aim to counter 'woke agenda.' Historians say it leaves out key facts.
- Karin Brulliard and Brady Dennis @ The Washington Post: Confidential database reveals which items NPS thinks may ‘disparage’ America
An internal government database reviewed by The Washington Post demonstrates the vast scope of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to revise or remove information on African American history, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.
- Chauncey DeVega @ Salon: Historians resist Trump’s effort to police the past
Attempts to reshape the Smithsonian reflect a broader campaign to control public memory and what Americans learn.
- Alice Gibbs @ Newsweek: What New Department of Education Banner Labels Charlie Kirk Raises Eyebrows
A large banner featuring conservative commentator Charlie Kirk has been hung on the exterior of the Lyndon Baines Johnson U.S. Department of Education building in Washington, D.C., prompting debate online over who should be publicly honored on government property.
- Michael Kruse @ Politico Magazine: ‘I Don’t Know That I’ll Ever Be OK With Myself’
Nancy Mace opens up about her trauma, why she does what she does and Donald Trump as a “father figure.”
---
---
8 25
The top Trump official tasked with reshaping the Smithsonian’s collections into a more conservative presentation argues that, based on her experience and expectations, the institution should place less emphasis on the painful chapters of American history and more on its achievements.
Insurance attorney Lindsey Halligan is now Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, as well as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary.
On Wednesday, Fox News host John Roberts told Halligan that “like just about every other country in the world, the United States has got a checkered past.”
He reminded her that “some of the worst episodes in our history were formative experiences that led us to where we are today, and those typically are reflected in museums.”
Halligan replied that from her point of view, “the fact that we had our country, was involved in slavery is awful. No one thinks otherwise.”
READ MORE: Stephen Miller Casts Trump’s D.C. Takeover as Race Issue in Fiery Tirade
“But what I saw when I was going through the museums personally was an overemphasis on slavery. And I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
She insisted that Americans “should be able to take our kids, our students, through the Smithsonian, and feel proud when we leave,” and that “we need to keep moving forward.”
“We can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide us, and we really need to unite the country and focus on all the positive as we approach America’s 250th birthday.”
A section of a Trump executive order titled “Saving Our Smithsonian” directs Halligan, by name, to seek “to remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution and its properties, “and shall recommend to the President any additional actions necessary to fully effectuate such policies.”
In April, Halligan told The Washington Post that she believes “improper ideology” means “weaponizing history.”
Halligan has a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law, and does not appear to have any education in museum sciences.
When she first moved to Washington, D.C. she “didn’t like everything she saw,” at the Smithsonian, the Post reported.. “Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.”
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan said, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”
READ MORE: Trump’s Border Wall to Get $500M+ ‘Hot’ Makeover Experts Say Won’t Work
She told Fox News that “it’s common knowledge that our education system in general has been just indoctrinated with political ideology and various ideological narratives. And the Smithsonian is really a version of education.”
“It could be the foundation of our American education,” she claimed, explaining the as a young child she went to the Smithsonian Museum on a class trip, “and the Smithsonian is really supposed to be a trust instrument.”
“And what’s happened is it’s become more of a platform upon which the curators and leadership at the Smithsonian can push ideological narratives and we really want to help the Smithsonian be the gem,” she said. “Represent our nation, properly and truthfully.”
Critics denounced Halligan’s remarks.
U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) remarked, “400 years of brutal bondage, torture, and murder should be emphasized. The generations of Black Americans who built this nation with their own hands and their own pain should be emphasized. The true history of this country SHOULD BE EMPHASIZED.”
“White American woman who went through the museum said there was an ‘overemphasis on slavery.’ What a thing. To say those words out loud,” wrote former Republican Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh.
Watch the video below or at this link.
---
---
the primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.
On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.
We have opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.
Public and political resistance to historians is nothing new; book bans, fights over textbooks and curricula, and battles over what a proper national narrative should be have long besieged our craft. Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!
:{:{In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:}:
One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery;
five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy;
six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes;
seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.
All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.}:
In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.
These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. }:}:
All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. The White House/Heritage Foundation axis has seized the word “patriotic,” as its cloak of legitimacy, and all who care about a pluralistic, meaningful American history must seize it right back. Their initial threats to the Smithsonian, indeed, according to Mike Gonzalez, one of their attack artists, is only the beginning of a long war some within the Heritage Foundation intend to wage until they can depose Lonnie Bunch as the institution’s secretary.}:
The Heritage Foundation has been an incubator of much of Trumpism in style and content. Indeed, if Trumpism is a grandiose media show, Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump’s history department, ready and eager to tell you what to think about the nation’s past.
On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Roberts leads an organization with hundreds of employees, $100 million on hand in 2023, and support from several extraordinarily wealthy conservative foundations. For more than 50 years, Heritage’s leadership has dreamed of this moment: a presidential administration willing to destroy and then remake the nation’s “heritage” in the service of right-wing triumphalism and now, via Roberts, Christian nationalism. Roberts has a Ph.D. in American history but has come to loathe the universities that bred him. His dissertation, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831,” is a study of kinfolk and family patterns in the lives of Black people in his home state (he grew up in Lafayette, raised by a single mother after divorce). For this work, he drew upon the revolution in late-twentieth-century scholarship on the social and cultural history of the lives of the enslaved.
:{:{Not so his more recent political fare. On the eve of the 2024 election, Roberts published the book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,with a foreword by then-Senator JD Vance. Roberts’s original title advocated “burning down” Washington and remaking it in the image of Christian nationalism. His stock-in-trade consists of vacuous platitudes that emerge from well-rehearsed sound bites. He wants “national renewal” forged “just as it was under Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln’s presidency encompassed four years of all-out Civil War, during which he managed an extraordinary expansion of federal government power in order to defeat the Confederacy. }:
He also signed legislation for an income tax and a new finance system to pay for the war; the Homestead Act to provide land for poor farmers; the Morrill Act to found land grant colleges across the nation; and the Pacific Railway Act, which authorized the first transcontinental railroad. Above all, Lincoln used unprecedented executive power to free the slaves and confiscate around $3.5 billion of legal property (worth around $119 billion today). National renewal indeed. With the presumed exception of emancipation, Roberts would denounce all of them, or their equivalents, today.}:
In a June 2025 essay, “America’s Golden Age: A Return to Permanent Things,” Roberts argues that liberalism has created a nation in which “liberty could survive without virtue.” Roberts seems to know nothing about the liberals who love teaching in great books programs rooted in classical works of all kinds. Moreover, Roberts loves lists of big ideas lined up like stations of the cross that can only be observed uncritically. Lincoln’s era was “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-God, pro-nation.” Somewhere in historical heaven, Lincoln ruefully chuckles at how today’s Republicans misuse his legacy of expanding government. The “permanent things” Roberts demands are “Faith. Family. Work. Worship. Sovereignty. Sacrifice.” I do not know any liberals who oppose those values and practices. Roberts has long since abandoned any responsibility to define his terms. He imagines a return historically to a political order defined by the Whigs, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay, without ever saying why.
Liberal academics have become “tyrants who shroud themselves in ‘academic freedom,’” Roberts blithely asserts. Well, liberals in universities in some quarters do have much to answer for in our hubris and our obfuscations that have made us easy targets for these assaults. In Roberts’s vision, though, liberals are little more than godless, cultural elitists who do not believe in anything permanent or any kind of truth. Such an absurd claim might apply to a few postmodernists steeped in the academic fashions of the ’80s or ’90s, but no one has condemned the products of that arcane theoretical persuasion quite as much as serious “liberal” research historians. Projection fuels Roberts’s passion, and slogans drive his prose. “Our rights come not from courts or constitutions, but from God,” he proclaims. One wonders how the United States would have survived this long if every lawyer in a courtroom arguing a Fourteenth Amendment case would make that argument before a federal judge.
:{:{Roberts constantly announces that America lacks the search for “meaning.” But what on Earth does he mean when he says: “liberty without order is chaos, and … without truth, even freedom becomes a mask for slavery”? Roberts’s “Golden Age” is one derived from “natural law and biblical wisdom.” Great! No one in the nineteenth century embodied those intellectual and spiritual traditions as much as the famed abolitionist and liberal political thinker, Frederick Douglass. }:
So, since Roberts does not seek any “moderation” with liberals and prefers to “bury” them, I respectfully invite him to join a small group of historians in a series of discussions/debates. He can choose his companions, and we will choose our participants. I challenge him to a series of civil debates in major television or podcast outlets, or especially a public venue before the 2026 anniversary of American independence. What are and ought to be the big questions and answers about American history at this important marker in time? Roberts says he wishes to “catechize our children better than the culture indoctrinates them.” He says he wants to “outbuild” liberalism, “in education, in media, in law, and in the public square.” Then please come join us in the public square, and, as you continue to declare war on us, let’s try to have a civil discussion among historians before it is too late. We eagerly await your response.}:
Many great voices, living and dead, have called on us to engage this debate. In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the writer Toni Morrison, in a moment less harrowing than now, warned about the threats made by people in power to how we think, write, and teach. Beware, she asserted, of “statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” Prophetically, she pressed on. “However moribund, it [statist control of thought] is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.}:
Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story.” Such language, Morrison argued, exists “to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege.” She summoned us to wake up to these assaults on how we know the past. “Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability.” This was 1993, in the hopeful wake of the end of the Cold War! “When language” about truth and history “dies,” said Morrison, “all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” Do not commit “tongue-suicide,” she demanded, in fear of “infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of the human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.”}:
With Morrison’s call to duty more than 30 years ago, we cannot drop the baton of today. We are all “accountable,” Mr. Roberts. All of us. Your fellow historians invite you to the public square.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
---
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/yale-history-professor-torches-trump-s-political-war-on-american-history-244558405971
mSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian, and Yale University professor David Blight who is calling out Donald Trump's attacks on the facts of U.S. history and the flawed scholarship of Kevin Roberts of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, who is behind Project 2025 that is seemingly guiding many of the Trump administration's actions.
---
aha: story 1 vs 2?
notably most recent act of bundy idaho // is armed invasion of gay pride picnic? so 1776 BS about guns used by gutsy rebels to overthrow foreign tyrant is BS, they are agents of oppression. Note below panthers about inclusion and justice thus 1619
CNN
no lnx
editor’s Note: Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently “Stokely: A Life.” The views expressed here are his.
President Trump’s decision to pardon cattle ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond for committing arson on federal lands in Oregon sends a troubling signal about double standards of justice based on race in America. The Hammonds’ legal troubles dovetailed into the rise of Ammon Bundy, who led an armed struggle to take over federally preserved land that he and his group claimed belonged to the American people.
The Hammonds and Bundy tapped into a longstanding reservoir of anger and skepticism over the federal government’s seemingly capricious use of power. From this perspective, Uncle Sam does not represent a benign symbol of patriotism, but rather the specter of Big Brother ordering citizens to return their guns, land, and liberty in the name of the law.
Historically, the politics of armed insurrection against the US government has elicited tense standoffs between authorities and local movements who each strive to define their actions as patriotic.
The Hammond pardon showcases the double standard of justice the nation still clings to, one that is dependent upon the skin color of armed insurrectionists. White survivalists, many of whom are proud supporters of the President, the NRA, and the symbols (if not substance) of America found in declarations of faith, family, and football are treated as misguided patriots, overzealous citizens whose love of country and hatred of taxes got the best of them and caused them to misbehave.
BUNKERVILLE, NV - APRIL 24: Rancher Cliven Bundy speaks during a news conference near his ranch on April 24, 2014 in Bunkerville, Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management and Bundy have been locked in a dispute for a couple of decades over grazing rights on public lands. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)
VIDEO
The history of Cliven and Ammon Bundy
Black insurrectionists who are critical of the government are frequently labeled anti-American terrorists whose willingness to use self-defensive violence should be punished to the full extent of the law. The very presence of the Black Panthers, for example, spurred local, state, and federal authorities to enact new laws (including gun control in California) expressly designed to limit their impact and make it easier to arrest and prosecute them.
The Black Panthers notably protested during the 1960s against the growing and sometimes violent use of authority in black communities, going as far as organizing their own patrols to follow police officers and at times engage in armed conflict with law enforcement officials.
In stark contrast with the Hammonds’ original sentence of five years each, some of the Panthers faced steep legal consequences for their behavior, at times for crimes they were innocent of. Perhaps the most egregious example is the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a former Green Beret turned Black Panther who served 27 years in prison for a crime the FBI allegedly knew he didn’t commit.
50 years later, who are the heirs of the Black Panthers?]
A Philadelphia-based group of black activists called MOVE also famously refused to cooperate with municipal authorities during the 1970s and early 1980s, setting off a period of tense relations that ended in tragedy. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement, under the command of the city’s first black mayor, Wilson Goode, dropped a bomb on 10 square city blocks and let the fire rage in an act of violence that arguably might never have been conceived of had the organization’s members been white.
More remarkable is what both of these groups were actually fighting for. The Black Panthers, for all their shortcomings, were vocal proponents of racial and economic justice. They fervently believed in the best and most resilient aspect of the nation’s founding dreams of liberty and democracy for all and were willing to use bold, at times reckless, tactics in pursuit of justice.
The Hammonds, on the other hand, represent a strain of anti-American insurrectionary politics whose goal is truly another country – one where the federal government exerts virtually no control over the lives of Americans, is unable to right political and moral wrongs in local communities, and political entitlement remains the birthright of white men. Both of these perspectives deserve equal treatment under the law, yet one is considered by many to be more American and less dangerous than the other, based on race and fear.
Mr. Trump’s pardon of the Hammonds continues his intimate rapprochement with his overwhelmingly white base of supporters. The rest of us await the President’s pardon of former Black Panthers and MOVE members who continue to languish in federal and state jails as political prisoners. They deserve nothing less than the empathy, compassion, and forgiveness that Mr. Trump has shown the Hammonds.
---
VOX
NO LNX
Podcasts /
Today, Explained podcast
How Trump is rewriting American history
Yale professor David W. Blight explains why Trump is far from the first to try to rewrite the record.
by Amanda Lewellyn
:{Apr 23, 2025,
Protestors Rally At Stonewall Nat’l Monument After NPS Removes Trans References
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Amanda Lewellyn is a tech-focused Today, Explained producer.
History has been disappearing from government websites.
First, it was Stonewall. The word “transgender” was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just “LGB.”
Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight “Black/white cooperation.” A page about Jackie Robinson’s Army service was taken down from the Pentagon’s website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had “opened doors” for those seeking “equality and education.” Now, the pages say the students were just seeking “education.”
The edits come amid the Trump administration’s push to end DEI and “restore truth and sanity” to American history, an effort causing alarm among historians like Yale professor David W. Blight.
In an interview with Noel King on Today, Explained, Blight says the changes amount to a brazen attempt to rewrite our past — but that America is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and re-saved and re-pushed its narrative of events so many times that it might as well look like the filename of a high schooler’s final project.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Reporters will often say, “Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented.” But I imagine you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points.
Many times, yes.
Give me some examples of the times we’ve tried to do this.
During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. That’s what governments do during wartime. That organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic.
Moving ahead from that to McCarthyism: Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America — and not without some reason in the ’30s and ’40s. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything.
Let’s take the Civil War. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the South called the Southern Historical Society. That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.
On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp.
:{
What was the story they were trying to sell?
They told a story that we’ve come to know as the “Confederate Lost Cause.” Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield, they only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to “the leviathan of northern industrialization.” There’s some truth in that, but that’s not the full explanation.
They also argued that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states’ rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their morays and folkways…
Can I jump in and tell you something?
Sure.
I’m from central New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned.
Wow.
Why did I learn something that wasn’t true in public school?
Because over time, in culture, schooling, politics, and rituals from the 1870s and ’80s well on into the 20th century — and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear — was this idea that the United States divided had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again.
How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You’re going to have to find mutuality. You’re going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century — and there’s reality to this — is that you unify around the valor of soldiers. But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it’s of course limited.
“Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.”
Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in. And if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor, you fought for the right [reasons]. Everybody was equal in valor. The causes had to be muted, put aside. Well, you know, that’s a part of human relations as well: How do you keep a family together? Well, there’s some things you don’t talk about.
But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take on, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation — the identity of your past and now your future — is going to leave somebody out. In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in America, that meant Black Americans. It meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South.
Now, the point of all of this is that the Confederate Lost Cause, which said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity. … It eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes, by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative.
This was an age of a lot of sentimental literature. Americans came to love stories of the Old South. Of course, it’s there in Gone With the Wind, still, maybe the most famous movie ever made. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement and it was a literary movement. But it was at its core a racial ideology, and it lasted a very long time.
Related What comes after the DEI backlash?
Let’s compare to what we’re seeing today. What you’re talking about with these popular books and Gone With the Wind, that seems to me more subtle than the president saying, “You delete that information about Jackie Robinson’s military service from the website.” Will what Trump is doing succeed because it is so unsubtle?
That’s a very good question and my instinctive answer — and it’s partly my wishful answer — is that no he won’t. It is not subtle, you’re right: They’re wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying, “Professional history, whether it’s in our greatest museums or our greatest university, has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They’ve been dividing us.” This is the word they love to use: The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive.
Well, no, it’s not. It’s simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is telling us that they know better — policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo-historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, gender, all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from “American greatness.” They use that term a lot: “We’re no longer teaching our youth about American greatness.”
Yes we are! We’re teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.
What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you wanna know is about greatness? What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness?
It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education, and a whole lot of people who don’t have a lot of formal education. I’m not very optimistic right now about what’s going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren’t going to buy this.
See More:
Donald Trump
Podcasts
Politics
Today, Explained podcast
===
an 2 25 pro pub
This was the great, necessary undertaking of the four-year effort by the Department of Justice: to draw distinctions for the sake of allocating individual accountability. By poring over countless such videos and other evidence, investigators zeroed in on the hundreds of people who could be identified as engaging in and instigating the most violence. There was Daniel Rodriguez, who could be seen on camera driving a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone; he was sentenced to more than 12 years. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and member of the Marine Corps who swung a metal flagpole at an officer; he got 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder who attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray; he got 14 years.
Inevitably, some of the outcomes were ripe for second-guessing. Kerstin Kohlenberg, the former U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, reported recently on the case of Stephen Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man who received an eight-year sentence for his role in pushing over one of the metal security barriers on the Capitol grounds, injuring a police officer in the process; others in the same group received much milder sentences. Trump and his allies could have chosen to comb through cases and pardon only the defendants who they could argue had been painted with too broad a brush.
But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the broadest brush possible and wiped it all clear. In doing so, he let the defendants off the hook. But in another sense, with the mass pardon and deletion of the database, he deprived all of the Jan. 6 participants of individual agency, of individuality, period. In a sense, he rendered them just what the most ardent castigation on the other side had cast them as from the outset: a mindless mob.
As chance has it, at the end of Trump’s first week in office, I was in Tulsa. I went to the Greenwood Rising museum, which tells the story of the rise of the neighborhood and its sudden destruction. It is a powerful presentation despite the dearth of documentation of the violence: snatches of oral history from survivors play over a video simulation of gunfire and arson; before and after photos capture the near-total obliteration of the neighborhood’s prospering commercial core by first the attack and later urban renewal.
One of the museum’s central preoccupations is the attempt by Tulsa authorities and leading white denizens to downplay the massacre, by framing it as a “Negro uprising”; only a couple decades afterward, the museum notes, many in Tulsa were barely aware it happened at all. This cover-up came with lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors, who were denied insurance claims for their destroyed homes, not to mention any form of civic restitution.
Even now, many Black residents of Tulsa are left wondering why the reckoning represented by the Department of Justice investigation is not joined by substantive reparations of any sort. The last two living survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, said in a statement responding to the report, “The DOJ confirms the government’s role in the slaughter of our Greenwood neighbors but refuses to hold the institutions accountable under federal law.” Still, they said, “We are relieved to see one of the biggest coverups in American history come crashing down.”
And now, back in Washington, the federal government has embarked on an entirely new cover-up of another day of enormous violence. The erasure will not be nearly as successful this time around. There are, after all, all those videos, which live on ProPublica’s website, among other places, while much of the deleted database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (And ProPublica is one of 10 media organizations that have jointly sued the federal government, seeking to obtain 14,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage.)
But for the time being, at least, those seeking to preserve the record of one of the darkest days in recent U.S. history will be doing so, like the survivors of Greenwood and other outbursts of violence around the world, in direct opposition to their own government.
Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research....
---
judd 2 25
A Texas county has mandated public libraries move a well-regarded children's book documenting the mistreatment of Native Americans in New England — Colonization and the Wampanoag Story — from the "non-fiction" section to "fiction." The decision was made after the government of Montgomery County, under pressure from right-wing activists, removed librarians from the process of reviewing children's books and replaced them with a "Citizens Review Committee." Colonization and the Wampanoag Storywas "challenged" by an unknown person on September 10, 2024. The Committee responded by ordering that the book be moved to the fiction section of public libraries in Montgomery County by October 17, 2024, according to public records obtained by the Texas Freedom To Read Project shared with Popular Information.
The author of Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is Linda Coombs, a "historian from the Wampanoag Tribe." Coombs spent three decades working at the Wampanoag Indigenous Program, an initiative to preserve the history of the Wampanoag people. The book is published by Penguin Random House, which describes the book as "[t]he true story of the Indigenous Nations of the American Northeast, including the Wampanoag nation and others, and their history up to present day."
Colonization and the Wampanoag Storytells the real story of the brutalization of the Wampanoag people by European settlers. An excerpt:
[C]ertain ship captain began kidnapping Wampanoag men and those of other tribal nations along the coast. Sailors invited them aboard their ships under the pretense of trading, then lifted anchor and sailed away. The men were prisoners, stolen from their families and homes.
They were taken to England and Spain to be sold into slavery and paraded through the streets as "novelties," something for the people of Europe to gawk at as curiosities — not as human beings. Imagine how these men must of felt when they realized their situation: they would never see their children, parents, wives, relatives or communities and homelands again. What a terrible shock for all their families when they realized their men were gone — just disappeared forever.
This is fact, not fiction.
In addition to telling the history of the Wampanoag people, the book also includes several parables. But these sections are identified in italics. It does not change that it is a history book, which is why it is classified as non-fiction by the Library of Congress. The book's Library of Congress classification begins with "E99," the non-fiction classification for books about Native American peoples. It is also classified as non-fiction by Penguin Random House, the Houston Public Library, the Austin Public Library, and the Fort Worth Public Library.
The move to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Storycomes after a controversial decision last March to remove librarians from the decision-making process when a children's book carried by Montgomery County is challenged. Previously, there was an advisory committee comprised of five librarians and five community members. As a result of the change, the librarians were removed from the Committee, and the determinations of the new Committee, which consisted of five non-librarians, became binding.
The change to the book review process was driven by a local right-wing group, Two Moms and Some Books. The group is led by Michele Nuckolls, a local mother. Nuckolls believes "children’s books with alternate gender ideology to be moved to the adult section." The group also is demanding more "conservative and Christian’s [sic] books in the public library." The group is especially enthusiastic about titles from Brave Books, which publishes children's books from far-right authors like Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Donald Trump's former press secretary Sean Spicer, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In case there is any confusion about the objectives of the group, its slogan is "Make Libraries Great Again!"
Before the change to the review process, Nuckolls expressed frustration that the local library system was not altering its holding to conform to her ideology. Nuckolls then successfully lobbied the Montgomery County Commission to change the policy and put non-librarians in charge:
“It’s been a long road,” said Michele Nuckolls, a Montgomery County mom who advocates for keeping the children’s section of local libraries safe and appropriate for kids.
“I first sounded the alarm about concerning children’s books at commissioners court a year ago,” Nuckolls told Texas Scorecard…
“I challenged two of the most alarming children’s books late last year and the committee head, a librarian, sent me a letter saying that they would stay right where they were,” said Nuckolls. “The old policy was not working.”
Under the new policy, once a children's book is challenged, it must immediately be moved to the adult section, with only adults allowed to access it. The book is then considered by the Citizens Review Committee at a meeting that is "closed to the public except for the Resident who made a formal request for review." The decisions of the Citizen's Review Committee are final, and there is no appeals process.
From the outset, critics of the new policy warned that it could be abused.
Teresa Kenney, a Montgomery County resident who owns an independent bookstore, submitted a public records request revealing the decision to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Story. No explanation for the decision was provided.
The Committee's decision to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Storymay have exceeded the Committee's authority. The new policy allows the Committee "to reassign the material to a more restrictive portion of the library" or "recommend removal of a material." There is no provision for changing the classification of a children's book from non-fiction to fiction. But with no appeals process, it's unclear whether the decision can be challenged.
At the October 8, 2024, meeting of the Montgomery County Commission, Kenney spoke about her ongoing concerns regarding the Citizens Review Committee. She asked the Montgomery County Commission to "return librarian oversight to the review process and open the meetings to the public for complete transparency." Her request was tabled.
Members of the Montgomery County Commission and the Citizens Review Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
---
==
AN 7 24
Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950? If you don’t, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.
The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.” These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history: That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope. And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century. The Executive Order bans teaching any historical facts if,
“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”
As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired. In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.” Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.
(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias. Well, D’oh!].
On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,
“While you teach students about our nation's past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation's true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024! Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”
It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind. Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.
And he’s baaaaack! Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform. Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race.
This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of teachers for teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”
Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself. Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.
Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort. I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade. Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.
Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022,
Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;
And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”
He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
I can’t make this up.
Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws. What do these states have in common? According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement. Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.
Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow. Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”
Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves. Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.
The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding. Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killers culled from classrooms across the state.
A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.” Can you blame them?
Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head. But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation. Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory. Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.
I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon. And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.
But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban. Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career. PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia? Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip. Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.
I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President. It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”
The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”
I was curious. Who were these “donors” needing protection from history? I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men: Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers. And the Chairman of the Historical Society? Gov. Brian Kemp.
Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.
Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says, “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.”
Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”
Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced.
*Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen to be released in September. GregPalast.com
---
hmmn mystery solved iowa caucus: anyone who criticizes am am values etc including acknowleding slavery HATES america and roots for contributes to its decline
---
the ink gmail 2 24
Can Americans unlearn the stories that enable inequality — and write new ones?
Is it possible to escape from America’s tradition of violence?
Are American efforts to defend democracy abroad hobbled by our failure to live up to the idea at home?
Do we have the moral strength to break our dependence on merit and work for the common?
Is there a way for us to address how the legacy of slavery has shaped our landscape?
Can we remake our system of government to represent the most diverse generation?
What can we learn from drama about how American political leadership?
Is it possible for Americans to learn how to see our caste system — and to overcome it?
Can we reclaim the “public” in “public safety”?
Why do we leave it to the worst leaders to address our anxieties about progress?
---
https://www.c-span.org/video/?523455-1/reconstruction-americas-story
OCTOBER 6, 2022
Lectures in History
Reconstruction & America's Story
University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches Constitutional law, asserted that modern America traces its political sentiments to Lincoln and the Reconstruction era, rather than the Founding Fathers and the Revolution. Kermit Roosevelt is the great great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt
dec indep 1789 const lexington? vs gettyburg address, Recon Const 13-15, civil war sacrifice driven by social movement abolition [so states dissolved to 5 mil district, then new integrated state gov voted got 14th
---
---
an 7 22 raw
fuck your feelings: [cspan book TV had several on slavery eg UVA?] free exge of idea (free mkt in the gift shop? buy it or not, or buy and burn it.
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out on Sunday because she said she was made to feel "ashamed" and "guilty" after visiting the home of former President Thomas Jefferson and learning about how he owned slaves.
During a discussion on Fox & Friends,host Pete Hegseth complained about how the "whole tone" at Jefferson's Monticello home has changed to focus on his slave ownership.
"It's overwhelmingly negative!" Hegseth exclaimed. "You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was."
Hegseth said that one visitor noted that "half of the comments on Jefferson were critical."
Campos-Duffy recounted her visit to Monticello.
"I visited many of these homes," she recalled. "And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country."
"There are slaves across human history," the Fox News host continued. "I get that. It's a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way."
Campos-Duffy complained that "anti-racism" books could be found in the gift shop at Jefferson's home.
"These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that," co-host Joey Jones chimed in. "And we talk about that. That's different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you're only going to use it for grievance?"
Jones argued that liberal leaders are not "perfect" either.
"Socialists," Campos-Duffy quipped. "You come away thinking how terrible this country is."
"Where's all this coming from?" she asked. "The homes of these presidents are being populated -- this is avery diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they've done is they've taken their donors on the left and they've populated the boards of these estates with leftists."
"Don't look over here at all the amazing things that Thomas Jefferson unleashed," Hegseth agreed. "It's always about inclusivity. It's the buzzword they use. And we fall into the trap! Because good, earnest historians who take care of Monticello sit there and they go, 'Oh, you're right. You know what? We haven't included enough about the fact that he was a slave owner. So let's include more of that.' And then the ideologues come in with their money and say, let's make it all about that!"
"And then you get kids coming through thinking Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy," he remarked. "We get accused of wanting to 'whitewash' or not talk about that. We will talk about that. We know that. That's a real deal. But making it about America being an evil place is when we get into the realm of a cultural revolution."
Watch the video below from Fox News.
---
---
an 11 21
After the Rittenhouse: Will 'white freedom' spell the ruin of America?
Chauncey DeVega and Salon November 22, 2021
"White freedom" could bring the ultimate ruination of America. By that term, I do not simply mean "white privilege" or "racist" behavior that violates social norms and is considered unacceptable or aberrant.White freedom is much more powerful than that: it is a core organizing principle of American society.
In his recent book "White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea," Tyler Stovall explains this concept as "the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free."
Contrary to what many Americans would like to believe, the country's founding was not a project dedicated to universal human rights. Instead, America's "democratic" experiment was based on a racialized understanding of democracy and of who counts as fully human — and who does not.
In the 18th century, full citizenship rights and "democracy" were exclusive to white men who owned property. As Charles Mills, Edmund Morgan and other scholars have documented, Black and other nonwhite people were the boundary against which "democracy" and white freedom were to be demarcated and built upon.In his 1999 book "The Racial Contract," Charles Mills summarizes this as: "Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."
White freedom is everywhere in America. Black and brown people (and some white people as well) condemn it as a manifestation of the lies which undercut any claims that America is an "exceptional" nation and the world's greatest democracy.
Many or most white people, however, take white freedom for granted and are likely to deny its very existence, even as they remain extremely protective of its power. This is but one example of the lies that are central to race itself, and the transhistorical project of making and remaking whiteness.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and his acquittal on all charges, offers one of the most recent high-profile examples of how white freedom functions in America.
Last August, Rittenhouse, who was then 17 years old, traveled across state lines, armed himself with an AR-15 assault style rifle, joined forces with a local militia group and put himself in the middle of the civil disturbances caused by the police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two of them, allegedly in self-defense. When he attempted to surrender to police they ignored him, and then he was cleared of all legal responsibility in a criminal trial whose judge was blatantly biased in his favor, and based on gun laws and definitions of self-defense that advantage white defendants. He is already a right-wing media star, and will likely soon become a wealthy celebrity.
Consider the fact that Rittenhouse was not shot dead by the police as he walked down the street with an assault rifle, immediately after shooting three people in the street. That is an iconic illustration of white freedom's power over life and death in America. White vigilantism is perhaps the ultimate expression of white freedom.
I asked Tyler Stovall to share his thoughts about the role of white freedom in the Rittenhouse saga. He responded by email:
The recent acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse by an essentially white jury for murdering two unarmed men simply underscores the widespread belief in the fragility of white privilege and the overwhelming need to preserve it. Rittenhouse's argument that he acted in self-defense proved compelling, even though it was not backed up by any substantial proof, and the jury simply ignored the facts that he chose to enter an area armed with a high-powered rifle and became the only person to kill another human being that night. Rittenhouse's trial became a textbook case of the need to preserve white freedom, to prevent a tearful young white man from going to jail even though he permanently deprived others not only of their liberty but of their lives. ...
One only need imagine what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were a young Black man who claimed to have shot others in self-defense. Consider the case of Tamir Rice, shot by Cleveland police in 2014 at the age of 12 for holding a toy rifle. The claim of the police, upheld by the judicial system, was that his murder was justified because he presented a possible threat. If Rittenhouse were Black his victims would doubtlessly be seen as justified in attacking him, in self-defense, because he held a rifle (a real one), and Rittenhouse would most likely have been convicted of murder. But Rittenhouse is white, and self-defense works in his case because it is ultimately a defense of white power, white privilege and white freedom.
Rittenhouse's actions were easily avoidable: If he had simply stayed home, no one would have died in Kenosha that night. That human tragedy also offers an example of the ways white freedom is central to a larger dynamic of escalating right-wing political violence and other threats to American democracy.
The ongoing Republican coup and Jim Crow 2.0 assault on multiracial democracy is an act of white freedom, in which Black and brown people's civil rights are being usurped as part of a larger plan to create a new American apartheid system. Moreover, white freedom is so powerful that these fascistic attacks on multiracial democracy are largely legal — or at least occur on the debatable margins of legality — and cannot simply be corrected by enforcing existing laws.
The coup attempt and attack on the Capitol last January by Donald Trump's followers was also an example of white freedom. The insurrectionists felt emboldened in their violence, overt racism and anti-democracy fervor because they believed, with good reason, that white freedom granted them the "right" to act with impunity.
Trump and the other plotters who planned and executed the events of Jan. 6 -- and many other aspects of the ongoing coup against American democracy -- have not been punished for their evident or likely crimes. For the most part, the foot soldiers arrested in the wake of Jan. 6 have received relatively light sentences for their crimes against democracy and the rule of law.
All of these events are part of a much larger campaign against democracy, which law enforcement and national security experts warn may lead to a violent insurgency against the Biden administration, the Democrats and other groups targeted by the far-right "patriot" movement. This too is another example of white freedom.
Black and brown people (or "leftists" of any race, for that matter) would never be allowed to operate with such impunity, or with reasonable assurance that they would face no serious punishment. They certainly would not be described in empathetic detail by voices in the mainstream news media as people who were "angry," "upset," "confused" and likely "misunderstood."
White freedom is also exemplified by America's criminogenic politics — which go back well before the Age of Trump — in which the wealthiest individuals (nearly all white) and largest corporations (nearly all controlled by white men) can act with impunity, concealing their wealth and income to avoid taxes, destroying the environment and evading virtually any responsibility for their individual and collective crimes against society.
White freedom also manifests through collective narcissism. The Republican death cult repeatedly emphasizes the language of "freedom" to encourage its followers not to wear masks and to refuse vaccination against COVID-19, not merely risking their own lives but endangering public health on a grand scale.
Across a range of public policies, today's Republican Party and the larger "conservative movement" have advocated and enacted laws that have increased human misery and loss of life among the American people, as well as around the world. White freedom permits, encourages, enables, protects and normalizes such antisocial and sadistic behavior.
Neofascism may represent the final form of white freedom in American democracy. Right-wing political violence and other forms of terrorism are becoming normalized. The Republican-fascist movement led by Trump is a political cult prefaced upon using white freedom to attack its "enemies" with impunity. Those who are deemed inferior, according to the ideology of white freedom, are to be denied any fundamental human rights or liberties.
Loyalty to white freedom, and the retrograde reactionary values and politics it represents, empowers a wide range of antisocial and anti-human behavior against marginalized individuals and groups, not always based on race, color or ethnicity. White freedom by definition is exclusionary, and this form of "freedom" is defined by white people's ability to define and limit the freedom of others
Leonce Gaiter, who has written extensively on questions of race, masculinity and violence, offered this additional context for understanding white freedom and American history, in an email to Salon:
When white supremacy is challenged, white reaction follows. Reconstruction brought reclamation. The '60s and '70s rights revolutions brought Reagan. Obama's election brought the tea party and Trump.
In this nation's 245 years, African Americans have enjoyed statutory equal rights for only 56 — since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Think about it. White supremacy and forms of apartheid have been the status quo in this nation for 77% of its history. The very ideas of black equal rights and full black citizenship are shockingly new. This is something we dare not forget. After Obama's election, the post-racial nonsense flew in all directions, flung by white pundits desperate to forget American history. Instead, we got Trumpism and a Republican Party cheering racist violence to maintain white supremacy.
To a large percentage of the white population, their "white identity" can be reduced to "white supremacy." There is no "white" American identity because there is no aspect of American "white" identity that Black and brown Americans have not overtly impacted (speech, art, letters, music, dance, morality, notions of freedom) — save white supremacy. "White" is a null identity — it was created in opposition to those it wished to exploit. It does not celebrate what you are. It insists on what you are not. Thus the identity is so fragile that any perceived threat requires the appearance of long guns.
Gaiter concluded:
The Rittenhouse trial and verdict — a judge coddling the white man on trial for murdering white men seen as black allies — an overwhelmingly white jury, white "self-defense" as an excuse for murdering men after overtly seeking violent confrontation… it's all America's normal. We are not better than this. It is a large part of who we have always been. Supposed "moderates" and liberals have never had the stomach to sever the diseased limb of white race hatred from the body politic. Until they do, there will always be a Kyle Rittenhouse. His story is the bulk of America's.
Historians have observed that America's founding rests upon two crimes against humanity: The genocide against First Nations peoples and white-on-Black chattel slavery. White freedom was a partner in those crimes against humanity, and was largely defined by them.
America in the 21st century faces an existential struggle for the future of its democracy and society. Matters are becoming so dire that if seems conceivable the country could face a second Civil War. In this struggle for America's future, the neofascists are carrying the banner of white freedom.
On the other side are those Americans who believe in a true "We the People" multiracial democracy. These two forces cannot logically be reconciled. Unfortunately, the Democrats and other Americans who hope to redeem and renew democracy are consistently on the defensive. To defeat white freedom, we can no longer downplay it or deny its existence. We must name it, recognize it and confront it directly, before it devours us all.
---
---
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EnHWtqPT4UBy0Ur8-dj6hRMJlE_KQcY55FTrfz7tFeM/edit
Two stories MTA 11/20
as a result of 5 crises, there's a big fundamental fight going on about the Story of America: stories are powerful because they are our way of seeing and making sense of the world.
1619 vs 1776: left tries to make a more perfect union, live up to democratic values, right pretends we already have.
Story 1
General story of America: that All Men Created Equal ideal (White landowners over ___age), expanding who literally counts, or at least who is counted, who gets to have vote and a voice; but less well understood is HOW that happens:
{{ Once Upon a Time a poor but honest smart entrepreneur went to king Isabella and F for VC, dumb aristos so turned down but changed mind; he discovered the New World while being a good disruptor to find another way to rich asian spices; at the same time, spreading god (glory, exploration, gold).
Pilgrims were being persecuted for being too godly (Luther vs the Bad Old Church sold indulgences) landed at Plymouth and had a potluck; Mean Old King Geo tax w/o rep so our forefathers picked up their god-ordained 2nd aMENDMENT remedies and shot at the Recoats dumb in rows; Rhett and Scarlett states rights, Lincoln freed the slaves; Yankee ingenuity --> robber barons, industrialization we invented everything: cars, telephone, cotton gin; prosperity; we avoided foreign entangling alliances, in fact Wilson ran on promise no war, but Gary Cooper-like he saw we needed to go clean up mess in Europe (since those effete Limey and surrender monkeys could not defeat the manly/brutish Hun; we love peace so we set up the League of nations, war to end all wars; fun flappers in roaring 20's ended by 1929 stock crash (act of god? bad luck?) Hoovervilles, Great Depression, FDR fear itself, WWII made us prosperous and we beat the nazis and japs w/ atomic bombs (technology/ innovation/science).
Post-war properity, Cold War, JFK eyeball to eyeball with Kruschev, AA sad because drinking fountains, so MLK gave two speeches and marched somewhere, problem solved (dodged that angry back extremist MX] , no more racism, we fixed slavery; LBJ had some bleeding heart liberal Great Society that failed, including affirmative action, but scrapped b/c US meritocracy and if you're poor it's b/c you're lazy (and possibly dumb/sinful]. LBJ got us into Viet Nam, which we fought commies with one hand behind our back b/c bureaucrats, but Rambo went in and got our POW's back. Rooskies defeated by tough manly Cooper-esque Reagan. Also Grenada.
GoGo 80's Gordon Gekko Morning in Am we're the last super-power standing, so we continue to bring Freedom / free mkt to the world. End of History (in HS?) Fukuyama. 9/11 war on terror; losers hate america; WMD? Obama proves no racism.(but secret kenyan muslim, you didn't build that, road to serfdom via medicare. Wimpy/dumb Dems sold us out with bad trade deals, but w/ tough Art of Deal our coal-fired factories will come back and we will rule/win forever.
}}:
STORY 2
me vs we (zinn says we must not invent victories for we the ppl)
Am exceptionalism is a kind of denial agnotology that holds that some unique factor(s), the grace of god? says that we do not need to abide by rules/ lessons of history; it is the opposite of systemic thinking or historic/structural analysis, maybe more akin to Great man Theory: Geo Washington, Dale Carnegie, Trump. magical thinking
it was/and it was not Vs Once Upon a Time
Ottoman Turks/Islam controlled spice routes, so Europe needed alt for luxury goods spices for rich[China hoovers silver]; Columbus needed VC, promised gold but found little/none so pay with logs and slaves;
Conquistador Cortez? proto-capitalist, charged his men for all including medical supplies, but gave them territory and ten? years to plunder/extract wealth to repay; Sugar and later (tea, coffee) rubber mission [God gives permission to take land and enslave, punish the body/disobedient to save to soul]/plantations killed off indigenous, so African slaves imported; did the math and cheaper to work to death and replace?!
Industrial (and agric) revolution, Enclosures pushed peasants off land into crowded dirty cities and factories; girls more obedient (less dangerous) sent money home and saved for their burial?! Steal bread or handkerchief death penalty or transportation to US/oz ghost acres.
Plantations beginning of capitalism, but EIC QE sanctioned for big aristo ROI and colonialism on the cheap; rival Dutch corp beat, so broke but big stash or tea so corp dictated law, like today; Boston Tea Party, revo war; [AA killed Boston Massacre]. French eternal imperial rival of the UK, so sent us essential money, ships, troops and military experts.
Cronon: yankees pulled N Am into the world trade system; no longer light footprint b/c only local use and rotated food extraction by season. Hunt fur animals to extinction b/c never enough $.
Triangle trade $ on all 3 legs, South richest part of country, thus 3/5th, 2 senators (appt by legis) capitol in DC malarial swamp, Fugitive Slave act; only propertied whites can vote, not mob, electoral college ensures power; genocide against Indians (satan lives in dark forest, God made this garden for his Pure-itain elect/chosen ppl [booted fron UK and even Hollard b/c they tried to impose their religion on others?! Taliban?] and inspired FF to build xian nation, that eventually god wants to go from Sea to Shining Sea; post Revo treaty Brits make us promise to contain settlers from Indian land, but cheap/plentiful land [FF surveyors/speculators] plus free slave labor boost economy; sometimes inequality led to uprisings [Bacon?] Whiskey, and sometimes runaway slaves, renegade Indians and White set up autonomous and more democratic/egalitarian/free towns in remote places, but most eventually destroyed;[late Black Wall St Oklahoma].
Slater the Traitor
Lincoln did not care about slavery, or at least took back seat to preservation of union [feared corps/big banks?] Emanc proc freed no one, but slaves --> contraband, property that could support Confed. RR key in war win and sought power after war; Congress massive land and $ giveaway for infrastructure, boost Indus revo; big 4 leland stanford and senator (latter tried to renege on $ loan?) SPRR vs SCC corp personhood;
Robber baron cut-throat competition --> monopolies, Gilded Age massive inequality; various financial Panics wreck economy (proto-Gt Depression?) JP Morgan bailed us out?
1848 revolutions break out all over Europe; mostly brutally put down; but in 1883 Otto Von Bismarck had a socialist problem, despite banning them, so undermined them with health insurance (that expanded to handicap, accident, unemployment). Another difference from US is that unions got incorporated (like seat on board) vs very violent history in US (Haymarket, Battle of Blair Mountain etc).
Robber Barons challenged by prairie Populists ( RR) and city progressives; TR Teddy trustbuster (muckraker Ida tarbell ~ Standard Oil Rockefeller, Ludlow Massacre) but PO'd at Uppie on FDA; also San Juan Hill colonialist; Panama Canal? Progressives got elected senators, ecall and prop; ended by?
WWI the War to End All wars, but endless religious and imperial wars in the Old World, warned to avoid entangling alliances, we lost 77K in Civil War, wide oceans to keep us safe, so little appetite to go fight; Socialist/anarchists pretty strong, so why go die for rich corp warmongers/industrialists Krupps?
Creel Commission first/ massive US propaganda effort; Bernays and Poison Ivy (press release) both Bibles for Goebbels, differed on reaction; later techniques used for corporate propaganda (advertising to convince ppl to stop being a producer and --> a consumer), and then politics (Campaigns Inc). JE Hoover and proto-FBI Palmer Raids/ Red Scare deportations Emmag Goldman [Berkman shot Frick/Carnegie; Gen Otis LAT bomb].
Ally w/ USSR Stalin Uncle Joe to best Nazi facists. Fastest industrialization in history despite civil wars and sabotage by US/Eur? A-bomb 1948? Stalin paranoia --> totalitarian police state;
1920's post-war prosperity; mail catalogues, buy radio in credit --> stocks on the margin. Inequality // 2007. Absentee RR land speculators --> Dust Bowl extraction. Worster maxims; dual system failures; Great Depression foster unions solidarity? FDR ok'd 1935? Labor Relations Act (not blk/brown agric and domestic workers). New Deal CCC/WPA WWII mass deficit spending (Keynes).
Great Migration (2 waves? Jim Crow post-Reconstruction) out of South to Northern WWII factory jobs (military segregated, Port Chicago explosion, Inouye 442nd // camps, Code talkers)
Post- WWII prosperity, woman put back in home --> suburbs; unions strong so shared prosperity IKe 90% tax bracket; Cold War red Scare Mccarthy witch hunt silenced any collectivist ideas; CRM, 60's --> Powell memo, COINTELPRO
Watergate
80's Reagan ctr-revolution, Kochs libtard hyper-individualism, gov't inept --> oppressor Tea party (Kochs can't win election, ideas eg pvtize SS unpopular, so co-opt GOP) ~ BO Birther trump (who takes over the GOP from Kochs, possible because decades of anti-gubmint pro-Free mkt BS)
Great recession Gramms dereg, Clinton triangulated Glass-Stegall;
Tea party wave 2010 climate zombies; Occupy
Citizens United 2010 unlimited secret corp cash/dark money Money = Speech, corps = ppl.
COVID lays bare bankrupt libtard BS (won't fund hosp beds, ventilators or even vaccine). But somehow 70 million in Trump death cult, got more votes than 2016, educated white woman;
WHERE IS THE WE? contrast to ME in story 1?
---