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RACISM2

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// XENOPHOBIAs

see CRT

see BLM black lives matter

see big lie trump coup fake electors always POC cities/ ga election workers

see alt rt

see voter suppression including illegal alien Big Lie BS

see violence

see domestic terror

see kyle verdict

manifesto, mass shooter

see "real am"

2nd civil war

see great replaCEMENT ~ IMMIGRATION border BS

see invasion

see race hustle

see border BS violent crime

SEE kkk see kirk 4

see grievance reverse discrim // affirm action DEI

bak 5 23 capt 1024

see CRT 1619vs 1776 story 1 vs 2

see state of exemption margin. where force applied 1st and hardest (test?)

see AI (algorithms) radicalization --> mass shooter

aha get rid of racism by cutting it from history textbooks, and stop collecting data:

MSG fail 10 24 no pix twt

Popular, famous, and highly-influential Latino stars, and superstars including Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, are lashing out at Donald Trump after his six-hour Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday served up racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic rhetoric. A New York Times headline described it as "Trump's racist rally."

The most-noted racist remarks came from a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, in an attack calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” and saying, "these Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country,” before talking about Black people carving watermelons.

The Trump campaign waited several hours before issuing a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” It was unclear why other racist remarks made throughout the event, including by Hinchcliffe, were not addressed by the campaign.

"Battleground Pennsylvania," NBC News reports, "where polling margins show a razor-thin race between Trump and Harris, is home to thethird-largest Puerto Rican diaspora in the country. Last month, the former president invitedPuerto Rican artist Anuel AA onstage at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to publicly throw his support behind the Republican ticket."

READ MORE: ‘What’s He Confessing to?’: Trump’s Mike Johnson ‘Secret’ Draws Electoral College Concerns

Variety reports, "Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin were among the notable industry figures who boosted Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Sunday after a speaker at Donald Trump‘s political rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico 'a floating island of garbage.'"

"Bad Bunny, one of the world’s biggest music superstar[s] with more than 45 million Instagram followers, boosted Harris’ campaign video targeting voters in Puerto Rico and noting what a contentious relationship that Trump had with the island during his tenure in the White House. Lopez posted Harris campaign material targeted at Puerto Rico as well as the same video pitch that Bad Bunny boosted."

"Singer-actor Ricky Martin, with 18.6 million Instagram followers, did the same thing on his Instagram Stories feed, adding the comment 'I remember' on the Harris video. He also included a clip of Hinchcliffe’s 'garbage' comment."

Variety continued, reporting, "Luis Fonsi, the Puerto Rican singer who had a worldwide smash in 2017 with 'Despacito,' also reposted the Harris video and added a comment."

“We are not OK with this constant hate. It’s been abundantly clear that these people have no respect for us and yet they want our vote,” Fonsi wrote. “I purposely wrote this in English cause yes we’re American too.”

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Political strategist, CNN commentator, and co-host of ABC's "The View," Ana Navarro, has two million followers on the social media platform X and is a highly-influential Republican.

"Today, @KamalaHarris released policy proposals to help Puerto Rico. On the other hand at the Trump rally, this is going on," she wrote, pointing to a clip of Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

"But nah. They’re not piece of s--- racists who treat Puerto Ricans as second-class US citizens. It’s just our imagination. Puerto Ricans, pay attention!"

READ MORE: ‘:{Ten-Cent Dictator’: Trump Threatens Mass Arrests of Opponents in ‘Cease and Desist’ Post}:

She also noted posted a screenshot of Bad Bunny's post, in which he shared Vice President Harris's proposal for Puerto Rico with his 45 million followers.

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And, pointing to Hinchcliffe's racist remarks about Latinos making babies, Navarro wrote:

"Latinos, defend our community’s dignity.

Show some self-respect.

A vote against racism is a vote for @KamalaHarris."

Monday morning on "The View," co-host Sunny Hostin, who is Puerto Rican, served up a monologue strongly criticizing Donald Trump.

"This Puerto Rican has something to say about the island that I love, where my family is from," Hostin began. "Puerto Rico is 'trash'? We are Americans, Donald Trump. Americans. We voluntarily serve disproportionately high in the military, while you have bone spurs."

"And we vote."

"Pennsylvania is home to almost half a million Puerto Ricans. North Carolina, 115,000. Georgia, 100,000. Arizona, 64,000. Wisconsin, 61,000. Michigan, 43,000. Nevada, 27,000. We vote Donald Trump."

"Trash?"

"And by the way, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, and Mark Anthony have over 345 million followers on Instagram. I think you only have 26 million, since you care so much about size. And we don't like what was said about Puerto Rico. And we know how to take the trash out Donald Trump. Trash that has been collecting since 2016. And that's you, Donald Trump. And finally, my fellow Puerto Ricans, trash collection day is November 5th, 2024. Don't forget it."

IFrame Content

Former Fox News political commentator Geraldo Rivera let loose Sunday night:

"'A floating island of garbage…?' Referring to Puerto Rico??? 'Poisoning the blood of our nation…?' We have 'murder in our genes….?' Fuck these racists. Latino men of good will, have pride in yourselves and your ancestors. A vote for Trump is a vote against self-respect."

Monday morning he added: "Latino men, for the love of your parents and children, for your pride and your honor tell this little gringo s--- to go f--- himself."

See the video and social media posts above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Malignant Narcissism’: Trump Is an ‘Existential Threat to Democracy’ Health Experts Warn

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used to be neo nazi stuff?

October 14, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): This election is literally about are we allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes. Let me say that again — this entire election is about are we allowed to fight back against an invading armed fighting force and hordes and swarms of people that want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation. These are landing parties on the United States of America. Donald Trump's campaign is a rejection and a refutation of the Third World conquering America.

mma

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dining w nazi dem talk pt

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us will be venez Trump Stands Silently for ‘God Bless the USA’ Then Trashes Detroit to Detroit Economic Club an 10 24

September 27, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

BLAKE NEFF (CO-HOST): Maybe a bit of that. Maybe a bit of that.

KIRK: I think there's an element there. You can't convince me. I have no evidence of that, but it's just gut instinct. I'm not gonna get into what states can do to resist this yet because I wanna win the election and do this properly through the federal government. If we lose in November, it's gonna get very, very messy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, it's gonna get messy of states being —

NEFF: Especially if they start packing the courts, then you're you really have to start thinking, like, OK. What are we gonna do about, like, this truly out of control wants it all —

KIRK: Do we have a country at this point?

NEFF: Yeah.

KIRK: And I don't wanna get there yet, Emily. But, Emily, just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list — meaning they're currently roaming free around our country. So right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists. And they're just — they're having a field day, and they're coming for your daughter next.

...

KIRK: I want you to understand this. That means that they're coming across the border, they run a background check, or someone knows, and then they say, just have fun. That's what that means. That means that they — we know who they are, and then we just release them into the interior and say —

NEFF: It just shocks me, like, the level of control you can have over media narrative that. Like, you know, The New York Times or whoever can blow this off. 13,000 homicide convictions just roaming the US as an elective policy choice.

KIRK: And the election is close. I mean, the election is close. It's very close. And, it — again, there was a poll that just showed up here. Arizona women voters, favor Kamala Harris 52%, 43%. And that does not include the 2 million gotaways. And since those are the border jumpers who avoid border encounters, it's safe to conclude the proportion of convicted criminals is even higher than that 2 million plus of them. Thank you for being a member, and stay safe in Alabama, and pray Trump wins, or else things are gonna get really bad. They're gonna get even worse. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters.

aha get rid of racism by cutting it from history textbooks, and stop collecting data:

an 4 24 tom disp

First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex.

Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second “necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all, “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their “elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to the problem of racism does not categorize individuals at all, but instead describes structures — like corporate hiring practices based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage groups of people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue (mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project 2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country. It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or termination of employees.

:{Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in 2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially, about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of “driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the attendant risk of police violence or even death. Voters soundly defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access to the data to prove it.}:

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their “conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore anti-discrimination laws when it suits them....

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September 19, 2024, edition of Loomer Unleashed streamed on Rumble

LAURA LOOMER (HOST): Go online and type in Haitian cannibals; you'll see for yourself. A cannibal gang and its barbecue leader pushed Haiti into chaos. So, no, Jimmy Kimmel is lying. He's attacking me as a racist saying that I'm beyond the pale and that I'm a racist and that I'm a terrible person, but they do. The Haitians are eating people. They're cannibals. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. They're eating people, and they're eating people's pets, and they're eating the cats, and they're eating the dogs. So how is this racist?

We don't do that here in America. We don't eat people. We don't practice cannibalism. It's disgusting. It's third-world. It's beyond third-world. I mean, it's like, it's like for, it's like for people and I don't know, living in the jungle, you know, it's like, I don't even know if people like living in the jungle do this. Right? It's animalistic behavior. It's like Stone Age behavior. Exactly. There's people that live in the most depraved third-world conditions, and they're still not eating people. It is so third-world.

h/t AngryWhiteMen.org

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Right-wing media are celebrating JD Vance for his racist lie that Haitian immigrants are widely spreading disease in Springfield, Ohio

Data from Ohio’s Department of Health and Clark County Combined Health District shows only a handful of new tuberculosis and HIV cases, which Vance falsely claims “have skyrocketed”

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 09/14/24 2:36 PM EDT

Right-wing websites are celebrating Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance for spreading a longstanding xenophobic trope in a CNN interview that “communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed” in Springfield, Ohio, because of Haitian immigrants in the city. This falsehood follows his debunked smear that Haitian residents of the city were eating people’s pets, a lie reportedly linked to recent bomb threats.

Vance had already spread this smear in a September 10 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. But it was Vance repeating the falsehood in a CNN interview shortly after the ABC News presidential debate which right-wing websites are celebrating.

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SEN. JD VANCE: And again, whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. Health care costs are up, housing costs are up, communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town. This is what Kamala Harris' border policies have done.

Vance repeated this smear in a September 13 post on X as well.

Right-wing blogs have responded to Vance's misinformation with widespread praise.

A Townhall post which quoted his smear that Haitian immigrants are widely spreading disease in Springfield declared his CNN appearance “masterful,” adding, “Bravo, sir.” The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters embedded a clip of Vance’s CNN interview, declaring: “JD Vance SCHOOLS CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Immigration and Cat Memes.” And RedState included a transcript of Vance’s disease smear in its post congratulating him for making “a very real and damning point about the media,” adding: “When you come at JD Vance, you better get ready for a fight. CNN's Kaitlan Collins certainly wasn't.”

For all of their congratulations to Vance over continuing to push this smear, these right-wing blogs missed the reality that Vance is simply lying. Making it up.

Data from the Ohio Department of Health and Clark County Combined Health District — which Vance presumably could easily obtain, given that he’s one of the state’s senators — shows that there are barely any new cases of either TB or HIV in Clark County, of which Springfield is the county seat.

The most recent data available, for 2018-22, shows that in 2018, Clark County reported 10 new HIV infections. Six new HIV infections were reported there in 2019, six again in 2020, 12 in 2021, and 13 in 2022. These five years of data reveal that between 2018-22, the county had a cumulative total of 322 HIV diagnoses — while the state’s cumulative total during this time period was 39,729 HIV diagnoses. To put it simply, Clark County, which includes Springfield, represented less than 1% of all HIV diagnoses in Ohio during this time period.

A December 2022 report of TB cases in Clark County prepared for the Clark County Combined Health District goes back a full decade, showing several incidences of 1, 2, 3, and sometimes zero cases of active TB in the entire county each year.

Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook told NBC News that Vance’s claim of a surge in diseases there is false: “Overall, we have not seen a substantial increase in all reportable communicable diseases. In fact, if you look at all reportable communicable diseases together (minus COVID) for the year ending 2023 you will see that we are at our lowest rate in Clark County since 2016.” And according to Bruce Vanderhoff, the director of Ohio’s Health Department, the state isn’t seeing a “measurable or discernible increase” in vaccine-preventable illnesses, further debunking Vance’s smear.

As Advocate explained, Vance is reinforcing “historical stigmas, stoking xenophobia and racial fear.” Right-wing media may be celebrating Vance pushing these cruel lies, but legitimate media organizations should be prepared to call him out.

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  1. ### Right-wing media are gleefully promoting a false, racist rumor that Haitian migrants are eating pets

09/10/24 mma

Right-wing media are gleefully promoting a false, racist rumor that Haitian migrants are eating pets

Right-wing figures have called Haitian people “locusts,” zombies,” and “weird Third World aliens”

Written by Chloe Simon & Reed McMaster

Research contributions from Gideon Taaffe

Published 09/10/24

On September 9, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance claimed that Haitian migrants had “abducted and eaten” pets in Springfield, Ohio, seemingly referencing debunked social media rumors.

Though local officials explained that there was no truth to the claim, right-wing media immediately jumped on the bandwagon, amplifying Vance’s allegations and pushing racist narratives about Haitian immigrants.

Some right-wing figures accused Haitian migrants of consuming “cats and ducks” and comparing them to “zombies” and “locusts.”

Select a Section


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  1. ### Fox anchor pushes debunked racist claim about Haitian migrants “eating” pets

09/10/24 1:48 PM EDT

  1. ### Clay Travis: “These cat women are in a tough spot now that Kamala's illegal immigrants are are eating up cats”

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Charlie Kirk amplifies since-debunked social media rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio

09/09/24 mma

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nyt no lnx pix

american nationalist: Part 2

How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump’s Heir

By Nicholas Confessore

Published April 30, 2022

Updated May 16, 2022

Tucker Carlson had a problem.

After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.

But as Mr. Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Fox’s highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.

Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.

The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.

Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’

:

A Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.

Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.

The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”

Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. At Fox, his popularity with viewers has allowed him to fend off external critics and shut down those within, from news anchors to junior employees who objected to his rhetoric. His importance to the Murdochs has grown along with his ratings, giving him unusual power at the network. During the waning months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Carlson would harness the tidal wave of white resentment animated by Mr. Trump to draw the largest audience of any show on television.

Today, Mr. Carlson’s influence reaches far beyond the channel he works for, or the audience that tunes in to his show. Mr. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Mr. Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers. Each night, Mr. Carlson channels the passions and grievances that have replaced the Reagan-era conservatism he grew up on, from the tyranny of mask mandates to the grave danger posed by critical race theory in schools. He has aggressively defended the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president’s “deep state” canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious Republican lawmakers now echo his embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing immigrants to disempower the native-born.

In some respects, Mr. Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Mr. Trump. While the former president has urged his followers to get vaccinated and sought to claim more credit for his administration’s efforts to fight Covid-19, Mr. Carlson has continued to promote doubt about the vaccines’ efficacy, even likening mandates to Nazi medical experiments. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, set out to walk back his comments accurately calling the Trump-inspired riot a “violent terrorist attack.” He didn’t apologize to Mr. Trump. He apologized to Mr. Carlson, in a cringing appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Trumpism Without Trump

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” was at first only a slight update on the classic cable shoutfest. The show arrived on Fox a few months after Roger Ailes, the network’s powerful co-founder, was forced out amid a widening sexual harassment scandal. Mr. Ailes had been lukewarm on Mr. Carlson, then paying his dues on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends.” (According to a Fox colleague at the time, Mr. Ailes had once described Mr. Carlson’s hiring at Fox as “his last chance” in cable news.) But the Murdochs liked him, and Rupert Murdoch, who temporarily took the reins after ousting Mr. Ailes, installed Mr. Carlson in Fox’s 7 p.m. slot.

In segments dubbed “Tucker Takes On,” Mr. Carlson would invite on a liberal foil for combat, an approach Fox executives sometimes referred to as “Twitter for television.” There were lighter segments, like “The Friend Zone,” in which the host would bring on a Fox colleague or friend for a bit of self-promotion, or “King for a Day,” in which viewers would be invited to propose one thing they would do to fix the country.

Less than two months in, Mr. Murdoch promoted Mr. Carlson again, to the higher-profile 9 p.m. slot abruptly vacated by Megyn Kelly. To help write scripts, Mr. Carlson hired one of his old Daily Caller reporters: Blake Neff, a young South Dakotan who would later be let go after CNN outed him for posting racist and sexist jokes online. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began to dial up coverage of college liberals, both a Fox staple and Mr. Neff’s specialty at The Caller. Sometimes titled “Campus Craziness,” the segments featured conservative professors shunned for criticizing Islam and left-wing professors expressing hatred for white people. One episode mocked students in Mississippi who mistook a stray banana peel for a hate crime. Mr. Carlson’s ratings shot up, and just a few months later, in April 2017, Mr. Murdoch promoted him to succeed Mr. O’Reilly, long Fox’s most prominent and popular host. Mr. Carlson’s agents immediately began shopping a book, with a price tag said to be as high as $15 million.

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Mr. Carlson and other hosts repeatedly called a migrant caravan approaching the southern border in 2018 an “invasion.” They continued even after a man who applauded such language on social media fatally shot 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.Credit...Associated Press

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“Another migrant caravan of people from another country who have not been invited to this country are coming nevertheless and telling us that we’re not allowed to do anything about it. Will that caravan make it to the U.S. border? And what exactly happens if and when it does? That is next.”

To help redesign “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the 8 p.m. hour, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O’Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox’s executive ranks, where he would supervise “story development” across prime time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added bump to its Nielsen ratings. To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.

His new direction — Trumpism without Trump — took shape that summer. The lighter segments faded from view. Notably, Mr. Trump was mentioned less often than on “Hannity,” and Mr. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, particularly when he deviated from campaign promises like building the border wall and avoiding what he had once called “stupid” wars. In private, Mr. Carlson mocked the president’s habit of calling to head off his on-air attacks. (When Mr. Trump called to pre-empt criticism of one foreign-policy move, Mr. Carlson declined the call, according to a former Fox employee who witnessed it.)

Most strikingly, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began devoting more and more airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic change. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said another former Fox employee, who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.

He covered protesters’ attempts to pull down Confederate monuments with hyperbolic intensity; one such episode, he told his viewers, marked the beginning of “the destruction of America’s delicate social fabric.” His producers scavenged local news for under-covered items about refugees and migrants, which Mr. Carlson blew up into national news. He also began to venture farther afield than other hosts. He mocked Austria as the soon-to-be “caliphate of West Arabia.” The immigration backlash and migrant crimes in countries like Sweden and Germany became forewarnings of America’s future. “The country’s in decline,” he told viewers in the fall of 2017. He added: “Everyone knows that. It’s not racist to note that.”

A Ratings Game

But as America declined on screen, Mr. Carlson ascended behind it.

Fox News was undergoing the most significant changes in its history, a shift that would position Mr. Carlson to seize outsize power within the network. The Murdochs were negotiating to sell most of their television and studio assets to the Walt Disney Company, a transaction that would also resolve the family’s succession battle, leaving Lachlan Murdoch as sole heir to the throne. He was widely viewed as having more conservative politics than his father. In Australia, he had been instrumental in installing a number of hard-right executives and editors at the family’s media properties, while overseeing efforts to transform the little-watched cable channel Sky News into a mini-Fox, with a fiery evening lineup. At Fox, he became friendly with Mr. Carlson, who cultivated a perception within the network that the two men were close.

Mr. Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. (Last year, he moved back to Australia.) In mid-2018, he announced the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Fox News chief executive. Though credited with helping revamp the network’s post-O’Reilly lineup, Ms. Scott, who would preside over Fox expansions into weather, books and other new divisions, seemed disinclined to exert Mr. Ailes’s tight rein over Fox’s talent, according to former employees. And where Mr. Ailes had been regarded within Fox — if not always outside it — as protective of the news divisions’ credibility, Ms. Scott, mindful of the cable industry’s long-term headwinds, was focused on preserving the network’s audience. “Suzanne began talking about, ‘We have to do more of what we do best,’” said one former senior employee.

Under Ms. Scott, Fox’s news shows began to more closely mimic its highly rated prime-time opinion shows in both tone and topic. Guests brought on to analyze the day’s stories would instead find themselves asked to respond to clips of provocative comments made by Mr. Carlson and other hosts or guests the night before — a backdoor way for Fox to inject prime-time material into the lower-rated dayside shows. In 2018, after a former Hannity producer took over the network’s widely read website, FoxNews.com, he assembled a team of reporters called Fox News Flash, who were deployed to write news stories built solely around video clips from prime time. Mr. Carlson’s drove the most traffic, according to a former FoxNews.com employee.

One major force behind the news-side changes was a former Megyn Kelly producer named Tom Lowell, a Fox vice president who assumed growing authority over the network’s correspondents and news coverage. He was considered a favorite of the elder Mr. Murdoch, who appreciated his tabloidy approach to news curation. He was less popular among his subordinates, who nicknamed him “the burglar,” on account of his reputation for stealing credit for ideas, and because of a long-ago incident that became Fox lore as he rose: In his 20s, Mr. Lowell and two friends were arrested after breaking into a liquor store in Florida. (Mr. Lowell received three years’ probation, according to public records.) One week, while an executive who typically ran the high-level daily news meeting was on vacation, Mr. Lowell took over the role and never gave it back.

He encouraged shows to focus on the kind of grabby, inflammatory stories that dominated prime time and drove ratings. As the midterm elections approached and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity threatened to sink down-ballot Republicans, Fox began nonstop coverage of a migrant caravan wending its way through Central America to the U.S. border. Mr. Carlson and other prime-time hosts and guests called the caravan — mostly women and children — an “invasion” dozens of times in the weeks before the election, according to tallies by Media Matters and CNN. They continued to do so even after a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in late October and murdered 11 people, leaving behind a trail of social media posts railing against immigrants and Jews and applauding how people were now calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”

Shortly after the attack, the longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved figure in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. “There is no invasion,” he told viewers of his afternoon news show. “No one’s coming to get you.” Whether or not the caravan threatened America, however, it was a boon to Fox: That October, ratings were even higher than they had been right before the 2016 presidential election. Network executives soon began retooling the dayside shows, applying the approach that had worked for Mr. Carlson and his prime-time colleagues. Mr. Mitchell, now promoted to a high-level position running “analytics” across Fox, began sitting in on story meetings to vet topics and guests, a role that discomfited some reporters and producers. He handed out color-coded bar charts detailing the minute-by-minute performance of each show. “They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes,” said a former Fox employee. “Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized.”

Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell pitched the initiative as “Moneyball” for television: a data-driven, audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it. But journalists on the daytime lineup discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like. Segments featuring Fox’s own reporters consistently drew lower ratings, especially if they were covering stories the audience deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump. So did guests who leaned left, or simply staked out independent viewpoints. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell, for example, urged shows not to book Chris Stirewalt, a respected, down-the-middle political editor and analyst. But immigration was a hit. Coverage of migrant caravans became a Fox mainstay, with one correspondent even embedded with refugee groups.

Fox executives wanted to focus on “the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up,” said one current Fox employee. “They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you.”

Dangers Abroad

In the spring of 2018, Mr. Carlson aired a segment that jolted even his more jaded Fox colleagues. South Africa’s white farmers were “being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he told viewers. The Black-led government “just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

Until Mr. Carlson waded in, few Americans were paying attention to “farm murders” in South Africa. In a country of 60 million people, where violent crime is common but the vast majority of its victims are Black, the police record dozens of murders of whites on farms and other small holdings each year. But the notion that white farmers were being singled out for attack was largely confined to the far-right web, where writers and commenters warned of a burgeoning “white genocide” — itself a neo-Nazi trope dating back to the end of apartheid.

Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-owned Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled civil rights group for South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the group had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a disproportionate risk of murder and brutalization. After touring white-owned farms in South Africa, the Telegraph team returned with a package of columns and news articles asserting that being a South African farmer was “now the world’s most dangerous job” and demanding that they be granted emergency refugee visas. From there, the story would be picked up by the Fox-inspired nighttime hosts on Sky News. Within days, Australia’s home affairs minister floated the idea of fast-track visas for South African farmers.

The idea went nowhere, but the story soon jumped around the world. In a 2018 meeting of Fox News executives, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, Mr. Lowell proposed covering farm murders for American audiences, echoing the fevered framing of his Australian colleagues: a country descending into chaos, an impoverished Black majority scheming to kill white farmers and steal their land. Mr. Carlson, it turned out, was also pursuing the story. He had briefly mentioned farm murders in a segment that March, and two months later, when AfriForum officials made a lobbying trip to Washington, an ally put them in touch with him.

“My understanding was, he was interested in the topic already, and someone we had gotten to know over time recommended he speak with us,” said Ernest Roets, AfriForum’s deputy chief executive, who declined to identify the intermediary.

AfriForum formally rejects the far-right idea of a “white genocide.” But when he interviewed Mr. Roets on his show that May, Mr. Carlson bulldozed through the group’s careful caveats, describing “in some sense an intentional campaign,” supported by the government, “to crush a racial minority within your country.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Roets acknowledged that Mr. Carlson had exaggerated.

“It’s not my job, as a spokesperson, to tell a journalist how he or she should frame a question,” he said. “I would be a bad spokesperson to use what little time I have to say, ‘Well, let’s frame that question a little differently.’”

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In 2018, Mr. Carlson began airing segments on “farm murders” in South Africa, linking the killing of white farmers there to government proposals to seize land without compensation — something that had never come to pass. The coverage echoed far-right narratives about a looming “white genocide.”Credit...The New York Times

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“South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he said, adding that “the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

:{:{Mr. Carlson’s coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox’s senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business Network and the highest-ranking Black man in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Mr. Carlson was saying on the air was wrong.}:

Legislators in South Africa, where whites still own the majority of private farmland, had begun debating a constitutional amendment to allow uncompensated land seizures, but no such measure had been passed. Though intended to reverse apartheid-era land dispossession, the proposed amendment did not target farmers on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Nor had the government backed a campaign of ethnic violence and murder. Mr. Jones told his fellow executives that Mr. Carlson’s coverage had been ripped from far-right sites, including the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. (Mr. Jones, who left the network in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.)}:

Mr. Lowell defended the segments, and Mr. Jones was ultimately overruled. A Fox spokeswoman disputed that account, saying that Mr. Lowell had only pushed for the story to be investigated to see if it was accurate. But word of the high-level editorial dispute soon filtered down through the network. Even among the generally right-of-center rank-and-file, discontent was growing over Fox’s nativist tilt and racial scaremongering. Now staff members who had watched the farm-murder story swirl around far-right websites wondered how it had arrived at their network, and why Mr. Lowell and Mr. Carlson had pushed it, especially when Fox was so busy covering Trump-related breaking news and more conventional controversies.

But Mr. Carlson dug in. He covered South African farm murders and land disputes throughout the spring and summer, again claiming that officials there were seizing land that they hadn’t under a constitutional amendment that didn’t exist. That August, after an episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” President Trump tweeted that his administration would “closely study” the seizure of white-owned land and the “large-scale killing of farmers.” Alt-right and neo-Nazi figures in the United States cheered the propaganda coup. Patrick Casey, leader of the group Identity Evropa, exulted that Mr. Trump’s proclamation could help bring white nationalist ideas to a mainstream audience.

“Conservatives becoming aware of the plight of White South Africans has the potential to take them beyond the current limitations of ‘acceptable’ conservative immigration debate toward identitarianism,” Mr. Casey tweeted.

Strange Bedfellows

Fox journalists soon had another reason for concern. Around the same time Mr. Carlson was promoting the notion of a South African ethnic cleansing, Fox was lurching through a post-Ailes rebuilding of its human resources organization. Lines of authority and power had always been mysterious at Fox, and so when a formal organizational chart appeared on the company’s employee portal, some curious employees logged on to see who reported directly to Rupert Murdoch.

Most of Murdoch’s subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the chart. But one came as a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare.

The British-born Mr. Brimelow had known Mr. Murdoch for decades and once worked as a columnist for MarketWatch, the Murdoch-owned financial news site. But over the years, he had adopted more pronounced nativist views; VDare, started in 1999, had evolved into a hub of the new, more online-oriented white nationalist movement. Mr. Brimelow once described the Obama administration as a “Minority Occupation Government” and California as “totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants.” Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected, he spoke at a conference held by the National Policy Institute, a latter-day white nationalist group. (Mr. Brimelow sued The Times in 2020 for articles in which either he or VDare was described as white nationalist; a judge dismissed the case later that year. A separate lawsuit brought by VDare is still pending.)

Mr. Brimelow’s apparent role at Fox set off a new wave of consternation and gossip. Employees who asked about the relationship were given a variety of explanations. Mr. Brimelow was said to be helping with Mr. Murdoch’s memoirs — a project that, as far as most people understood, their boss had abandoned in the 1990s — or writing speeches, or attached to some other Murdoch initiative. In short order, several former Fox employees recalled, the organizational chart was taken down entirely.

A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Brimelow did not currently have any relationship with the company. Mr. Brimelow declined to comment, writing in an email that The Times could not be trusted, so “you cannot expect any sane person to talk to you.”

In August 2018, Mr. Brimelow was spotted at a birthday party for the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, drawing an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Mr. Kudlow to distance themselves from Mr. Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Mr. Carlson on South Africa. If Mr. Murdoch had someone like Mr. Brimelow working for him, reasoned the former employee, he would have little objection to Mr. Carlson peddling far-right themes. (By coincidence, the same week Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers had begun their emergency-visa campaign in Australia, VDare published a story imploring Mr. Trump to welcome South African farmers to the United States.)

South Africa was not an aberration. In an echo of how Mr. Murdoch’s media empire had spent decades nurturing right-wing populism throughout the English-speaking world, Mr. Carlson had begun to fashion his show as a broader platform for nationalist ideas. From early on, he had promoted right-wing figures from abroad, people who could provide testimony on his themes of immigration and social decay. Now he was forging links with an increasingly globalized movement of populist activists and politicians — some of them eager for influence in Trump-era Washington.

Among those politicians was Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, a rising darling of the international far right. In late 2018, the Hungarian embassy hired a lobbyist, William Nixon, with business ties to Mr. Carlson’s father; within weeks, the lobbyist was in touch with Mr. Carlson about arranging an interview with the Hungarian foreign minister, who was planning a trip to Washington. During these talks, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, Mr. Carlson mentioned that his head writer, Mr. Neff, was headed to Hungary the following year to report on how Mr. Orban was “improving the country.” (At the time, allies of Mr. Orban, a promoter of what he called “illiberal democracy,” had completed a sweeping takeover of the country’s news media, and the government would soon begin efforts to shut down a Budapest university founded by the liberal philanthropist George Soros.) In an email to The Times, Mr. Neff characterized his trip as a vacation.

Mr. Nixon connected Mr. Neff to the embassy to arrange interviews during the trip, according to the person with knowledge of the conversations. He also brought the Hungarian ambassador to Mr. Carlson’s Washington office, where the three men bonded over fly fishing, a popular pastime in Hungary. Mr. Carlson said he had long been interested in Mr. Orban and would welcome the chance to interview him.

That February, Mr. Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Mr. Orban’s hard line against immigration and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And last summer, Mr. Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban government. In a series of segments and a gentle interview with the prime minister himself, Mr. Carlson employed a sanitized version of Mr. Orban’s Hungary to frame his own arguments about an American civilization under attack by alien forces.

Where South Africa was a warning of the hell that America could become, Hungary was a vision of the paradise that could be had by taking America back. “You don’t have to watch your country collapse,” Mr. Carlson told viewers. “You don’t have to have leaders who hate the population or divide their own people against each other.”

Going Farther Afield

The day after the 2018 midterms, as darkness fell over Washington’s leafy Kent neighborhood, members of a local antifa group appeared outside Mr. Carlson’s home to protest his coverage of the migrant caravan. Standing in his driveway, yelling through bullhorns, they chanted, “We know where you sleep at night.” Mr. Carlson was not at home, but his wife, Susie Andrews, was. According to the Carlsons, someone banged on the door. Panicked, she locked herself in the pantry and dialed 911.

Mr. Carlson had lived in Washington for most of his adult life, and loved it. Two longtime friends said he was deeply shaken by the protests outside his home. “All of a sudden, it just became impossible to live there,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview last fall with Dave Rubin, a conservative YouTube personality and occasional guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” He added, “I felt like we were really part of the city and then, next thing you know, people are showing up at the house.” He worried that “you’re going to wind up shooting somebody.” Within a year, he would flee Washington entirely, seeking asylum far beyond the Acela corridor.

In March 2019, Mr. Carlson set out to buy a dilapidated town garage in Bryant Pond, Maine, where his family had owned a vacation getaway for decades. In a letter to town officials, he pledged that Fox would install a state-of-the-art studio there. Mr. Carlson had never been guarded about his home in Bryant Pond, and often told interviewers about his love of Maine living. But when a local newspaper, The Sun Journal, published news of the proposed purchase, he lashed out like a man under siege. “All it does is hurt me,” he told the paper’s reporter, Steve Collins, explaining that Fox would never agree to leave $1 million worth of equipment in an isolated rural location if everyone knew about it. (Mr. Carlson would raise the stakes when The Times later assigned a freelancer to write about his life in Bryant Pond, accusing the paper of seeking to endanger his wife and children. A Maine-based freelance photographer, whom Mr. Carlson named on air, found his own door banged on by strangers after dark.)

In the end, Mr. Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following spring, The Sun Journal reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington house up for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from Bryant Pond. (When not in Maine, Mr. Carlson usually broadcasts from Florida, where he has a second home in the resort town of Boca Grande.)

A different kind of threat was emerging inside Fox itself. In March 2019, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters surfaced old recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” comments that had yet more advertisers fleeing and Fox colleagues fuming, especially some younger employees. That same month, the Fox opinion host Jeanine Pirro questioned on air whether Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-born former refugee, might be more loyal to her Muslim faith than to the Constitution. The slur prompted a young Muslim employee named Hufsa Kamal, who worked on Fox’s flagship news show, “Special Report With Bret Baier,” to chastise Ms. Pirro on Twitter — an extraordinary breach of the network’s hermetic culture. Not long after, as Ms. Kamal endured a stream of online abuse and threats from Fox fans, a producer in Fox’s Los Angeles bureau named Dan Gallo wrote to the company’s top human resources executives.

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Mr. Carlson ran a segment in 2017 on a small group of Romani asylum seekers in Pennsylvania town. Local reports of a Romani child going to the bathroom outside became, on Mr. Carlson’s show, a plague of streets covered “with human feces.”

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“I’m merely saying this has been a distinct group for a thousand years. It actually hasn’t assimilated, for the most part, into the cultures in which it has been hosted. And so I wonder why we think they’re going to assimilate in Pennsylvania.”

“When Fox personalities make these sorts of statements, it damages my credibility as a Fox journalist & my ability to effectively cover stories,” wrote Mr. Gallo, who provided copies of his emails to The Times. He argued that Mr. Carlson and Ms. Pirro were creating an unsafe workplace for employees like Ms. Kamal, and asked that Fox take action. “If an employee said those things in the workplace, especially with Muslim colleagues present, I think they would be disciplined,” Mr. Gallo wrote. (While Fox had issued a statement condemning Ms. Pirro’s remarks, she had not apologized.) Before sending his complaint, Mr. Gallo showed a copy to Ms. Kamal to make sure she was comfortable with it.

In a subsequent phone call, the executives, Kevin Lord and Nicolle Campa, seemed receptive, Mr. Gallo said in a statement to The Times. They thanked him for his letter and promised to relay it to Ms. Scott and Jay Wallace, Fox News’s president, so that they could understand the impact the hosts were having on the network’s journalists. Mr. Gallo assumed the complaint would otherwise remain confidential, as with other human resources matters.

A month later, Mr. Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes after arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Mr. Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to two colleagues. “Are you Dan Gallo?” he interrupted. When Mr. Gallo tried to introduce himself, an indignant Mr. Carlson simply handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The next time Mr. Gallo had a problem with his show, Mr. Carlson said, he should “do the honorable thing” and call. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, he said, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.

That night, Mr. Gallo wrote again to the human resources executives, asking who had told Mr. Carlson about his complaint. They promised to talk to Mr. Carlson. But pressed on the leak in a subsequent phone call, Mr. Lord refused to look into the matter. He blamed workplace gossip, and insinuated that Mr. Gallo himself was responsible for the leak. “That was insulting,” Mr. Gallo said. “I stuck to the proper channels and had moved on.” He left Fox that summer, and now works for MSNBC. (The writer of this article is an MSNBC contributor.)

Far from being chastened, Mr. Carlson seemed to be testing his boundaries. In August 2019, days after a 21-year-old white man killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart to protest what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared on the air that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” Even more advertisers fled; Mr. Carlson embarked on what Fox described as a preplanned vacation. While he was gone, a Fox producer named Cristina Corbin tweeted an indirect rejoinder to the prime-time star. “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact,” Ms. Corbin wrote. “Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.”

She had not mentioned Fox’s star by name, but Mr. Carlson appeared to catch wind of her tweet almost immediately. A few hours later, while still on vacation, he called Ms. Corbin at work from a blocked number, then berated her for airing her disagreement publicly. “Shut your mouth,” he yelled, according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. Ms. Corbin did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article; Fox declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements pertaining to human resources matters.

When Ms. Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making such a call, according to the former executive. He was soon back to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to “just shut up.”

The Backlash Pays

It was a frequent refrain on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”— and a calculated one. According to former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook. Mr. Carlson would grab third rails on race or immigration, then harvest the inevitable backlash, returning the next evening to roast his critics for trying to suppress an obvious truth. The feedback loop didn’t just drive up ratings. It boosted the audience’s loyalty to Fox, while encouraging audiences to identify with Mr. Carlson himself, now playing victim to the same forces he was warning them about. (Liberal-leaning outlets and Twitter influencers also capitalized on Mr. Carlson’s provocations, using clips from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to attract and provoke his haters rather than his fans.)

In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you.” The next evening, as Fox’s public relations team insisted Mr. Carlson’s comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. “The mob came for us — irony of ironies,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to force the show off the air for good. They won’t succeed in that, thankfully. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they’re not intimidated.”

Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn’t get into college. “It’s not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children’s future,” Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.

But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson’s popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” comments, the proportion climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) “Fox is basically an enormous loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. “He’s the hook.”

Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to cushion Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company’s ads spiked. (All told, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would have cost $91 million at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)

Blue-chip advertisers would never return to the show in force. But thanks in part to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has brought more annual ad revenue to Fox than any other show, according to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018 but brought in almost twice as much money.

As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, it also began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson’s own message. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to debate him, though some now refused to appear on the show, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox was learning that its audience didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side.

“From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my takeaway is that they’ve made the judgment that they just don’t do debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson’s show until the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show featuring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some recent months.)}:

And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his fury as a shadowy “they.” Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.

:{:{His critics at Fox found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson over the legality of Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Mr. Carlson’s ratings grew, buoyed by the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential campaign.}:

One night in June 2020, after yet another commercial-to-commercial attack on Black Lives Matter protesters, Mr. Carlson addressed the matter directly. Ratings were more than just ammunition in the cable-news wars, Mr. Carlson explained. They were proof that his viewers were not alone, proof that they were right. “Last night, we did something we don’t do very often: We spent the entire first block of the show on a single topic,” he said. More people had watched the previous night’s show, he observed, than any other hour of prime-time television that evening — more than the old evening news broadcasts, more than any sitcoms or sports events. “Millions and millions of Americans agree with you,” he said. “You are not crazy. Your views are not evil.”}:

That month, another Fox employee complained to human resources that Mr. Carlson’s on-air statements contradicted Mr. Murdoch’s public pledge to “support our Black colleagues” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In response, an executive cited the company’s need to allow “diverse voices and perspectives,” according to a person familiar with the exchange. At the end of the month, when the Nielsen figures trickled in, Fox sent out a triumphant news release: Mr. Carlson had posted the highest quarterly ratings of any cable news show in history — breaking Mr. Hannity’s old record and helping make Fox the most-watched channel on all of basic cable.

An Upside-Down Nation

In the end, it was Fox’s own political unit, a bastion of traditional news-gathering, that brought the network’s increasingly wobbly balancing act to an end. Just before midnight on Election Day, hours ahead of other networks and news consortiums, Fox announced that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the swing state of Arizona. Mr. Trump instantly declared the result a “fraud,” but the following Saturday, as late votes trickled in, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, ending the presidential race.

:{:{Mr. Trump’s defeat was the ultimate glitch in Fox’s Trump narrative, one that couldn’t be so easily spun or papered over by its prime-time hosts. Despondent Trump supporters began to look elsewhere for news, encouraged by anti-Fox tweets from Mr. Trump himself.}:

In early December, the upstart conservative network Newsmax, which had positioned itself as even more devotedly pro-Trump, scored its first ratings win over Fox. It was a minor crack in Fox’s cable dominance — fewer than 30,000 viewers in one audience segment on a single December night in the 7 p.m. hour — but it sent shudders through the Fox executive suites. The network might shrug off the complaints of a few advertisers; losing audience to a right-leaning rival was another thing. That month, according to one former Fox executive, Rupert Murdoch delivered a message to the network’s chief executive, Ms. Scott: Clean house. (A Fox spokeswoman disputed this description.)}:

:{:{The purge would not come until early January, as CNN and MSNBC overtook Fox, the cable-news ratings leader for two decades, and as Washington reeled from the violent, Trump-inspired effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory}:. In the intervening weeks, Mr. Carlson and other Fox prime-time hosts would pump out a steady stream of attacks on the election results, often drawing on claims of voter fraud from Mr. Trump and his new legal team, led by Rudolph W. Giuliani.

:{:{Fox’s prime-time guns also aimed inward: When a Fox White House correspondent and occasional Carlson guest, Kristin Fisher, told viewers that much of one rambling Giuliani presentation “was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court,” Mr. Carlson went on the air to attack “credentialed reporters, some of whom we know and like,” who were refusing “even to acknowledge” the already discredited claims.}:

He had not mentioned Ms. Fisher by name, but she was warned by superiors to keep her head down, according to two former employees. She did not reappear on air for several days, and her appearances declined significantly in subsequent weeks. (Ms. Fisher later left for CNN.) Around the network, supervisors repeated an Orwellian mantra: “Respect the audience.”}:}:

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Mr. Carlson has fanned doubts about the 2020 election and often cast those who stormed the Capitol as victims: innocent citizens entrapped by scheming Democrats.Credit...The New York Times

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"When a group of sad, disenfranchised people who have been left out of the modern economy show up at your office, you don't have to listen to their complaints. Not for a second. Why would you?"

:{:{Much as Mr. Carlson’s vast cable audience had grown to encompass the white nationalist fringe, it now drew in some of the hundreds who would go on to attack the Capitol.}:

At least eight people now facing criminal charges stemming from the insurrection commented on Mr. Carlson’s official Facebook page in the preceding months, according to an analysis of since-deleted Facebook accounts conducted for The Times by CounterAction, a security firm. They included Graydon Young and Connie Meggs, members of the Oath Keepers militia organization who would be indicted on federal conspiracy charges. Another Carlson fan was Tammy Bronsburg, who on Election Day posted “WE ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK.”

Two months later, she donned a Trump flag as a cape and joined the crowd breaking into the Capitol. (Mr. Young pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government against the Oath Keepers; Ms. Meggs and Ms. Bronsburg are fighting the charges against them. Their lawyers did not comment on the Facebook posts.) Later that day, as the Capitol lay stained with blood and broken glass, the Proud Boys posted a defiant message of justification on the Parler social media platform, borrowing a meme from Mr. Carlson’s segments on Black Lives Matter. The lesson of the civil rights protests, Mr. Carlson had claimed, was that “violence works.”}:

:{:{Soon after the Capitol riot, Fox replaced its 7 p.m. host — Martha MacCallum, a news anchor and part of the political reporting team — with another hour of right-wing opinion programming.}:

Mr. Stirewalt, the political editor, who had vanished from the air after defending the Arizona call, was fired; his boss, Fox’s Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, retired. More than a dozen reporters for Fox’s digital arm were also laid off, a culling that followed pre-election layoffs in the Brain Room, the in-house research and fact-checking division. Publicly, Fox portrayed these changes as a restructuring, but as with the Moneyball initiative, their impact was felt chiefly in the news ranks, now an expensive and increasingly distracting legacy of the Ailes era.}:

:{:{Trumpism without Trump had begun as a programming strategy. Now, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House and cut off from Twitter and Facebook, it has become a reality. Mr. Carlson, more successfully than any other figure on the right, has filled the vacuum, picking up the banner of Mr. Trump’s movement and the followers who insist he was cheated of victory.}:

Last year, according to The Times’s analysis, nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — included segments playing down the Capitol riot, lurching into ever more fantastical terrain. Much as he once recast the country’s racial hierarchy to make white Americans an oppressed class, Mr. Carlson has inverted the story of Jan. 6 into a modern-day Lost Cause. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the rioters were not aggressors; they were victims. Last June, he floated a conspiracy theory that the riot was an inside job, claiming that an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a government court filing was “almost certainly working for the F.B.I.” In fact, it was Sharon Caldwell, the wife of an insurrectionist with ties to the Oath Keepers; a few months later, Mr. Carlson brought Ms. Caldwell onto the show, now casting her and her husband as the victims of overzealous prosecutors.}:

:{:{This past fall, Mr. Carlson and his team distilled the show’s Jan. 6 fantasia into “Patriot Purge,” a three-part “documentary” for the Fox Nation streaming channel. After a trailer aired in late October, two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest. Mainstream media outlets and fact-checking sites inevitably eviscerated Mr. Carlson’s work for its factual errors and dubious assertions, but that was beside the point.}:

:{:{ After starting the year with the lowest ratings in cable news, Fox ended 2021 back on top. And Mr. Carlson’s inverted, invented narrative of the Jan. 6 insurrection has become a new Republican orthodoxy: This February, members of the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling investigations into the attack a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” censuring two Republicans who sit on a congressional panel scrutinizing the riot.}:

“Propaganda tends to bewilder people, to confuse them when they first hear it,” Mr. Carlson observed last fall, in a monologue accusing liberals and mainstream outlets of themselves misleading the public about Covid-19, Jan. 6 and the 2020 elections. “It is so completely and obviously untrue,” he continued. “‘What is this?’ you think. And yet for that very reason, because it’s so ridiculous, so absurd, propaganda tends to be effective.”}:}:

Reporting was contributed by Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, Ben Decker, Alan Feuer, Barbara Harvey, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Karen Yourish. Jack Begg and Julie Tate contributed research.

Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com. More about Nicholas Confessore

A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: American Nationalist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Republican Party, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics

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tucker fired

intercept

it’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systemslawsuit. Carlson was fired becausehe used the C-word. Carlson was fired becausehe prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Foxdespised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenowethwrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused toback policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his sonLachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson evendined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned justa few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelterexplained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on hissecond book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPRreported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

IFrame Content

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

Share

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rww July 31, 2024

Ali Alexander offers some advice to the Trump campaign: “YOU HAVE TO GET NATIVIST, RACIST, NATIONALIST, AND CATHOLIC! TO WIN!”

AHA EFFORTS TO RE-CLAIM ---NATIONALIST BUT 1ST FOR RACISM? // THEY ARE GONNA CALL US BAD NAMES/RACIST NO MATTER WHat we do so we might as well own it/ do what we like/ push back on pc woke attacks?

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Fox has run nearly 1,000 weekday segments on “migrant crime” in 2024. The GOP turned that bogus narrative into a convention night theme.

07/16/24

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see big lie trump coup fake electors always POC cities/ ga election workers

AM PROSPECT

6 24

On Tuesday, Wisconsin became the fifth state to file criminal charges stemming from the plot by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election by submitting forged electoral certificates falsely claiming that Donald Trump had won the vote.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced a felony indictment on June 4 against two attorneys, Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, and campaign aide Mike Roman, all of whom helped orchestrate the scheme to submit false paperwork claiming to represent that state’s electoral votes. The group was charged with conspiracy to commit forgery.

The indictments are another small step toward establishing the official record of the stunning and destabilizing events of the 2020 election, even in the face of a continuing barrage of disinformation from the Republican Party, and despite the plodding pace and laxity of law enforcement in one of the most important criminal cases in the country’s history.

A former adviser and assistant to then-President Trump, Peter Navarro, recently reported to prison to serve a sentence for contempt of Congress, after defying a subpoena to testify about the plot. Rudy Giuliani, another former adviser and Trump lawyer, was served with an indictment for his participation in the scheme in Arizona, after disclosing his location at a birthday party in a social media post that mocked law enforcement officials for being unable to locate him. And Trump himself was convicted last week for falsifying records in an effort to cheat in theprevious presidential election, in 2016. And that’s just since March.

*More from Hassan Ali Kanu

Meanwhile, Republicans remain uniformly unbothered by the unprecedented, multipronged assaults on our democracy, and by Trump’s personal role. And they’ve continued to push false narratives about the former president being politically targeted, along with a need to protect against allegedly widespread voter fraud.

Still, the verdicts thus far, the plea deals, pending prosecutions, and indictments, as well as the public evidence, tell a different story. Taken together, they make it clear that there was an illegal scheme, involving the core of the Republican leadership, to overturn a legitimate election by fraud and by force—and that those efforts to disenfranchise voters were targeted against Black and Latino people specifically.

The broader scheme that resulted in the recent charges in Wisconsin, for example, didn’t question ballots across the state. It sought to disqualify votes only in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, where a supermajority of nonwhite Wisconsinites live. (Milwaukee County includes the city of Milwaukee, and Dane includes college town and liberal bastion Madison.)

That observation wasn’t lost on a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, who told Troupis in 2020 that Trump’s lawsuit asking the courts to scrap hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots solely in those counties “smacks of racism.”

The same goes for just about every other county and city whose voters were portrayed by Trump and his allies as potential criminals and somehow “illegitimate,” like Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix; Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas; and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

If you’ll recall, the dog whistles being used at that time were often pitched at the tone of an emergency siren; the underlying racism was fairly obvious to many other observers.

Bob Bauer, then a senior legal adviser to President Joe Biden’s campaign, told NPR in November 2020 that there was nothing subtle about Trump’s “targeting of the African American community.”

“It’s quite remarkable how brazen it is,” Bauer said. “This is straight out, discriminatory behavior.”

The illegal plot to overturn the election is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.

And here’s how Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, put it when I interviewed him that same month: “I can say, as succinctly as possible: These are Jim Crow-era efforts to disenfranchise voters.”

The “fake elector” scheme was a central component of Trump and his allies’ scattershot strategy to subvert the election result, according to the separate indictments and ongoing prosecutions brought by the Justice Department against the many co-conspirators.

The latest indictments in Wisconsin are the first in the state, which was where the plot actually originated before being attempted elsewhere.

The charging documents lay out the three defendants’ role in promoting the theory behind the unlawful scheme, and how they coordinated to transmit forged electoral certificates to alaw student who unwittingly served as their bagman, ultimately delivering the fraudulent paperwork to Chesebro in Washington, D.C. The young woman received a selfie from Chesebro so that she could identify him, and later text-messaged the co-conspirators saying, “5 mins until I make the drop,” adding, “I feel like a drug dealer.”

The forged documents were delivered to a staffer for an unnamed Pennsylvania congressman; and the plan was supposed to culminate with then-Vice President Pence simply rejecting his legal duty to open the envelopes containing the electoral vote certificates, or reading out the results from the fake certificates instead, according to the indictments.

At this point, the Wisconsin case seems pretty airtight. Ten people who actually stood in as “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors have accepted a settlement in a different, civil lawsuit brought by two (real) Wisconsin electors and a voter. The Wisconsin fake electors even formally repudiated their false claims as part of the settlement, including admitting that they “were not the duly elected presidential electors,” and that their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential elections.” One of the false electors, who is also a former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, has said they were “tricked by the Trump campaign” into signing a document claiming Trump won the state.

Chesebro and Roman have also been charged along with Trump in a racketeering indictment in Georgia; Chesebro has pleaded guilty in that case and agreed to provide evidence. (The case was temporarily put on hold Wednesday while the court reviews a conflict-of-interest allegation against the prosecutor, which likely pushes out that trial beyond the presidential election.)

The indictments in other states also shore up the allegations about the conspiracy, and they show the involvement of Republican Party leadership around the country.

State authorities in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona have also brought charges stemming from the plot. The former chairs of the Michigan Republican Party and the Georgia Republican Party have been charged for helping submit electoral certificates. And the indictments against Chesebro and others implicate the Republican National Committee as well.

The latest charging documents point out that “Trump, Michael Pence, and the Trump campaign filed lawsuits in Dane County Circuit Court and Milwaukee County Circuit Court, ‘seeking to invalidate a sufficient number of Wisconsin ballots to change Wisconsin’s certified election results.’”

The two cities are Wisconsin’s most diverse. The city of Milwaukee, for example, is majority-minority, with Black and Latino people accounting for about 59 percent of its population.

Those patterns hold in virtually all of the places targeted by the Trump campaign and Republican Party’s efforts. Both Maricopa County and Clark County, for example, are about 32 percent Latino, and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit are all plurality- or majority-Black.

Of course, the specter of massive voter fraud in those counties and cities was and is a myth, based on nothing more than racist tropes, and barely hidden by racially coded language.

Trump and his allies routinely invoke race, almost always to marginalize and degrade nonwhite people, but often without actually using explicitly racist or racial language. The illegal plot to overturn the election, in other words, is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.

As part of the scheme, Trump and other defendants spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, including lies about two specific, Black Atlanta election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss—facts that are a part of the federal and Georgia indictments.

Trump, for example, falsely claimed that Freeman, a temp worker in her sixties, was actually a “professional vote scammer” and “hustler.” He mentioned Freeman by name 18 different times in his now-infamous call in which he pressured and at times threatened Georgia officials to alter the election results.

While trying to overturn the election in 2020, Trump baldly asserted that Detroit and Philadelphia are “two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily.” He has previously singled out Oakland and Baltimore, saying living in those cities is “like living in hell.” And the former president has also described Atlanta as “crime-infested” and a “Murder and Violent Crime War Zone.”

Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani, falsely claimed that there was video footage of Freeman and Moss acting suspiciously during the voting process, and compared them to drug dealers “passing out dope.”

Freeman and Moss have since faced horrific, racist death threats, as they explained during emotional congressional testimony in June 2022. Because of this, they sued Giuliani and were awarded $148 million in damages for defamation.

Giuliani also held a press conference in the midst of the unfolding scheme, where he claimed that people are still using the names of dead Black Philadelphians—mentioning Joe Frazier and Will Smith’s late father, specifically—to vote long after they are deceased.

Legal scholars Catherine Powell and Camille Gear Rich explained in a 2020 paper how Trump’s language in the Georgia phone call effectively remobilized the old racist trope of a political trickster known as the “welfare queen,” transforming her from a welfare-and-benefits fraudster into a voter fraudster, “still Brown, female, and poor, but now out to steal American democracy.”

Despite all the evidence—including public admissions of the conspiracy, if not all the details—we are still quite far from official legal accountability and consequences for what was a serious, internal attack on our democratic institutions. Still, the public record is clear enough, even today, as a matter of history, and the enforcement actions by officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere will continue to flesh out the details of the crimes.

POLITICS REPUBLICANS DONALD TRUMP ELECTION 2020 RACE & ETHNICITY ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTING RIGHTS DEMOCRACY WISCONSIN GEORGIA

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an 6 24

when a predominantly white mob of far-right Donald Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, some of them were carrying Confederate flags.

Many Trump critics, from liberals and progressives to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, have pointed to those flags as evidence that the assault on the Capitol was more than a riot — it was an outright insurrection.

According to a newly published study conducted by David C. Wilson of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and Darren Davis — a political science professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana — there was another component in the January 6 attack: "racial resentment."

READ MORE: **Republicans have invented these 5 reasons to 'reject any verdict against Trump': conservative**

The Guardian's Alice Herman reports, "Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters — some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone — stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election."

The study is titled "Stop the Steal: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection."

According to Herman, researchers "relied on a national survey of adults in the U.S. conducted in 2021."

Herman notes that the researchers draw a distinction between "racial hatred" and "racial resentment."

READ MORE:**GOP hardliners pressure Johnson on vote that would seal 'their allegiance to' Trump: report**

According to Herman, "Wilson and Davis also point to the fact that while a slew of polls show the general public split somewhat evenly over the legitimacy of the (January 6) House Select Committee, Black Americans overwhelmingly supported the Committee's work, while white poll respondents generally opposed it…. Distinct from racial hatred or prejudice, racial resentment, Wilson argues, is a particularly powerful motive to action because it stems from a sense of injustice. The psycho-social phenomenon can have consequences for democracy, Wilson said."

In the report, Wilson and Davis explain, "Many of President Trump's supporters believed they were being victimized by election fraud in the 2020 election, but they also believed that whites were being victimized more generally — the American way of life for them was changing and they were being disadvantaged by African-Americans and other minorities."

READ MORE:['Fantastical' claims: Trump’s lawyers who argued he won in 2020 are getting punished

*Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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AN 5 24

judge has ruled that Darrell Leon McClanahan III can remain on the 2024 Republican primary ballot in Missouri's gubernatorial race, despite the party's efforts to remove him.

The Daily Beast reported that McClanahan, who was outed as a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) earlier this year, prevailed against the Missouri GOP's legal challenge on Friday after a ruling by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Cotton Walker. In his decision, Walker ruled that while Missouri Republicans were free to criticize McClanahan as much as they liked, he wouldn't grant their petition to strike him from the ballot based on their argument of not properly vetting him first.

"I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” Dave Roland, who is representing McClanahan, told the Associated Press. "I think the case got filed because the Republican Party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose."

READ MORE:GOP candidate for governor outed as KKK member after cross-burning photo emerges

McClanahan's ties to the KKK came out after the Missouri-based publication Riverfront Times published photos of him from 2019 using a white power gesture next to a hooded man with a burning cross in the background. A separate photo shows McClanahan standing next to a klansman while holding a copy of the KKK's newsletter. The gubernatorial hopeful has since distanced himself from the group, but maintains that he is "pro-white." The photos were initially obtained by the Anti-Defamation League.

"The Missouri GOP knew exactly who I am," McClanahan wrote in a tweet in response to a separate tweet from the Missouri GOP condemning him.

McClanahan suggested that state Republican leadership made racist remarks to him in confidence, namely that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft — one of the eight other Republicans vying for the gubernatorial nomination — told him in 2020 that "the Blacks are a problem."

"I have forwarded my email communications with the GOP to media and will to any other media that request it," he added, alluding to "recorded conversations" he had with Missouri Republican leaders he decried as "a bunch of Anti-White hypocrites."

READ MORE:'I don't know who he is': Missouri GOP senator's 'deceptive' campaign targets fixed-income residents

The far-right activist confirmed the photos of him at the cross-burning, but maintains that he was granted honorary membership in the KKK for one year but is no longer a member. He downplayed the photo of the event as a "private religious Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning."

Term-limited Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) will not be seeking reelection this year, meaning the primary to replace him in the predominantly Republican state is particularly crowded. Other high-profile Republicans seeking the GOP nomination include Ashcroft, Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe and Missouri state senator Bill Eigel.

Missouri's gubernatorial primary election will be held on August 6.

Click here to read the Beast's full report (subscription required).

READ MORE:Even Trump is 'well aware' that Josh Hawley is beatable in 2024: Ex-Missouri sec of state

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crm

alternet-no lnx

When it comes to 'rage' of white rural voters, liberals may not be asking the right questions

Former President Donald J. Trump arrives to deliver remarks Thursday, August 6, 2020, at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Reverend Daniel Schultz May 16, 2024

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book out titled White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. It has proved controversial. There are two major objections, as I understand them. First, Schaller and Waldman may have misrepresented or misunderstood scholarship on the rural context. Second, their thesis — white rural voters pose a unique threat to American democracy — may be overstated and under-supported.

I've known of Schaller and Waldman's work for a long time, and know Tom himself at least a little. So I was a bit surprised to see the vehemence and breadth of the pushback on the new book. I was equally surprised to see other folks I know strongly defend their thesis. The authors got their own word in at The New Republic.

Is it rural or is it race?

It may surprise you to hear this, but I am neither a rural sociologist or political scientist. I decided I was in no place to give an authoritative assessment of these arguments. Then, while I was groping around for what I did want to say, Noah Berlatsky ... just went ahead and nailed it?

Democrats struggle not with rural voters in general, but with white rural voters in particular. And white rural voters do not vote for the GOP because they are rural. They vote for the GOP because they are white.

That's pretty much it. As one scholar argues, if you control for other factors, the difference between rural and urban voting patterns essentially disappears. Race is a much stronger predictor than things like income, religion or place of residence.

Let's put that more anecdotally. I've known some straight-up, stone-cold racists in rural areas. But then I've also known some in urban areas.

It's not quite as simple as saying that rural whites are a bunch of racists. But for at least some people, it's a straightforward enough syllogism:

Cities are the source of all our problems.

Black people live in cities.

Democrats run cities.

Ergo, Democrats and everything they stand for are bad and wrong.

There are variations on this theme. Illegal immigrants are overrunning our society! Democrats let them all in! Therefore, etc. Or: covid is a city problem, Democrats run cities and liberals run health departments. Therefore, we're not interested in getting vaccinated or practicing social distancing.

As with any white people, rural or urban, the supremacist elements of these formulas are more or less explicit, depending on the individual and their community. It could be that rural whites are more prone to bias due to lower levels of education. But other than that, racists are racists, no matter where you find them.

Social incentives

There is one factor particular to rural areas that deserves consideration before we look at potential answers to the "rural problem." Rural folks traditionally don't move around as much as city folks.

Deep roots feed social capital through rich networks of relations, neighbors and friends. Rural communities are able to offer impressive support to those in need or to accomplish shared goals. Think food pantries, volunteer fire companies, churches that persist with a handful of members.

But those same roots provide lots of incentives not to rock the social boat. This boils down to "Don't tick off the neighbors because you're stuck with those assholes for a long time and you never know when you might need their help." That makes it difficult to confront your loudmouth bigoted uncle. It makes it even harder to disagree with those weird dudes down the road with all the AR-15s. It also can create a "culture of bullying" that reflexively smashes down anyone who doesn't conform to gender, political or racial norms.

Asking better questions

I don't say these things to valorize or demonize rural areas. It's just that knowing them helps us to ask the right questions.

For example, Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, tells Tyler Austin Harper:

The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems — our government, our economy, our modes of communication — that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?

On the surface, this seems like a decent enough question. But it falls apart when you consider its easiest answer. Some people feel unseen, unheard and disrespected because they're bigots who have been spoon-fed a diet of resentment and entitlement courtesy of rightwing media. That leads to the practical but not very satisfying conclusion that they're best ignored in any kind of political project to the left of Attila the Hun.

You might also ask, as Thomas Frank did, What's The Matter With Kansas? Or as Frank's thesis is often formulated: Why do white rural residents vote against their economic interests?

The usual hot take is that they've been hoodwinked by Republicans into voting on culture rather than cold hard cash. But that doesn't give them much credit. They're not fools. What if they know what they're doing? What if there's something they value more than economics?

To put it more exactly: What is it that white rural voters are willing to sacrifice so much for? It could be maintaining various forms of privilege, especially racial hierarchies. Or it could be saving a rural way of life that they perceive to be under threat of vanishing. (These options are not mutually exclusive.)

Getting better answers

Whatever the case, I suspect the most productive response to the situation will involve two things. They might seem like pie-in-the-sky projects at first. But I at least think there's some cause for a bit of optimism for each of them.

Democrats and progressives will need to do a lot less writing off rural districts as hopeless and a lot more intentional work on developing solidarity with them. A revived union movement such as we're currently seeing could go a long way toward meeting this goal. So could a new "green economy." It would help if there were a leftwing media ecosystem to push the good news coming out of those developments. Rural voters may not be fools, but there is evidence that messages of economic success aren't getting through to voters. There is also a desperate need for more positive racial narratives than the ones provided by Fox News and AM radio. But that might be too much to ask, given the kind of investment it would take.

And in the end the answer to overcoming divisions between rural and urban areas will have to come from within the communities themselves. They'll never accept a solution imposed from outside, and it is their community, after all.

It may very well be that cultural differences and the tensions between extractive and information economies are too big to bridge. On the other hand, maga extremism might prove finally too much even for country mice. Trump's unpopularity might create an opening for home-grown — and less extreme — leadership to emerge. And as Schaller and Waldman point out in their New Republic piece, there is a sizable rural minority population to build upon.

On the third hand, I despair.

Why bother?

But on the fourth hand, I'm pleased to see homegrown rural Democratic candidates emerging to challenge Republican hegemony. I'm also encouraged to hear of communities adopting more inclusive policies out of self-interest, if nothing else. With time and investment, I'm fairly confident liberal messages can get through to rural voters and a progressive vision can take root.

Rural white voters aren't more extreme than anyone else in my experience. Nor are they more racist. Your mileage may vary. They are, however, primed to support Republicans in a lot of ways. It would take a lot of time and investment to overcome those factors. There are legitimate arguments to be had about how worthwhile the effort would be. I've made some of the same arguments about religious outreach.

But it can be done, and I think it should at least be attempted. It won't win Democrats the next election, probably not the next few either. But if the nation is ever to emerge from the shadow of racialized politics, it will have to confront white beliefs and practices. White racism may not be all that different in the cities than it is in the country. Still, it's as good a place to start as any. Which, come to think of it, is the tacit motto of a lot of rural places.

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AN 5 24

The GOP over the last decade, Reuters noted in March, has transformed into a "Republican electorate that is more isolationist, more skeptical of globalization, more suspicious of the electoral process and more likely to view Democrats as a threat than it was when former President [Donald] Trump launched his first run for the White House in 2015."

University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman said the stark changes "reflect an electorate that has become more populist, both feeding off of Trump's populism and influencing the broader party." Now, he added, "It's hard to see the (party) going back to nominating Mitt Romney-type candidates."

In a Tuesday, May 7 op-ed published by MSNBC, columnist Charlie Sykes discusses the right-wing's shift through the eyes of conservative ghost writer Nancy French.

READ MORE:**Johnson demands all Trump prosecutions cease, vows to use Congress 'in every possible way'**

French's new book, Ghosted: An American Story, according to Sykes, is "a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party."

The book reveals "the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump," the Bulwark founder notes.

Sykes writes:

*In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”

*There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.

French writes in her book, "The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives."

READ MORE: 'Terror into votes': Expert examines Trump and MAGAworld’s 'deep investment in promoting fear'

"This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” French emphasizes. "It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans."

Sykes notes:

In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poemtitled 'Cuck Elegy,' which accused 'parasites' of surrendering to the 'mocha-skinned' and 'low-life reprobates.'* In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.

The same year, "the Aspen Institute featured a panel that included both French and Christopher Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, titled'Can the Republican Party Survive the Alt Right?' (In the spirit of transparency, I helped moderate that panel.)," Sykes emphasizes. "French writes that Aspen’s decision to invite the publisher of American Greatness to talk about the alt-right 'was akin to asking an arsonist to give advice on putting out fires,' adding, 'but they did not ask me for my advice.'"

*Sykes' full op-ed is available at this link.

===

OMG

no lnx judd 4 24 see kirk 4

Senate nominee bankrolled by far-right activist trashing MLK and the Civil Rights Act

JUDD LEGUM, TESNIM ZEKERIA, AND REBECCA CROSBY

APR 18

Founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, speaks on July 15, 2023, in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Last month, Bernie Moreno won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio. Moreno benefited from an early endorsement from Turning Point Action, the far-right activist group founded by Charlie Kirk. On May 10, 2023, Kirk posted on X that he was "proud to support Bernie," and Moreno had Turning Point Action's "full endorsement."

In response, Moreno wrote that he was "honored to be endorsed by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point Action." Moreno said that "[f]ew have done more to fight back against the radical left than they have," and he looks "forward to working with them to defend for our America First conservative values in the US Senate."

In 2023, Kirk repeatedly featured Moreno as a guest on his popular podcast and consistently promoted Moreno's candidacy to his 2.9 million followers on X. At the end of 2023, Kirk donated the maximum legal amount of $5,000 to Moreno's campaign through the Turning Point PAC.

At the same time, Kirk, known for his embrace of fringe views and conspiracy theories, launched a sustained attack on Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and legacy. At a December 2023 convention hosted by Turning Point USA, Kirk said that King "was awful" and "not a good person." Kirk's critique extended not just to King himself but to the civil rights movement itself. "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s," Kirk declared, trashing the legislation that outlawed segregation in public places and many businesses.

In his convention speech, Kirk blasted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an effort to “re-found the county” and “get rid of the First Amendment.” He criticized courts for enforcing the law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. "Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it's the actual American Constitution," Kirk complained.

A spokesperson for Turning Point USA, Andrew Kolvet, defended Kirk's attacks, saying respect for King's legacy was based on "fake history."

Kirk announced he was "gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr" on MLK Day in January 2024. According to Kirk, a podcast episode attacking King and the civil rights movement was being put together by his producer, Blake Neff. In 2020, Neff was forced to resign from Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News after it was revealed Neff was posting racist comments online under a pseudonym.

The episode, titled “The Myth of MLK,” kicks off with Vince Everett Ellison – a right-wing activist who claims that voting for a Democrat will send you to Hell. Ellison describes King as “despicable,” “immoral,” and “perverted.” Kirk repeatedly suggests that King’s legacy has harmed “Black America.” He asks Ellison if the lives of Black Americans have improved “the more that we have worshipped MLK.” Kirk also invites Ellison to talk about how “MLK's narrative and political activism led to the modern welfare state.” Ellison responds by accusing the civil rights community of keeping Black people poor, adding that the devil “rest[s] his head at the DNC” and that the DNC “use[d] MLK and all of those perverts with him.”

“I could say declaratively this guy is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of god-like status. In fact, I think it's really harmful,” Kirk says after the conversation with Ellison ends. Then Kirk, alongside Neff, spends roughly 30 minutes attempting to demonize the Civil Rights Act. According to Neff, the Civil Rights Act is “directly against this colorblind world that conservatives think MLK brought.” Kirk tells listeners that “in reality the language and the application of the Civil Rights Act…is a color preference act, not a color blindness.” Kirk adds that the Civil Rights Act “is making it harder for us to pursue Excellence as a society” because, as Neff puts it, “you have to discriminate against men, against white people.”

On X, Kirk wrote that the "deification of MLK and his proto-DEI ideology marks the exact moment that the progress of black America goes sideways." Kirk suggested that MLK was responsible for the "disintegration" of "their cities," the "collapse" of "their families." Because of MLK, Kirk claims, "they" are "enormously dependent on government support."

Kirk's crusade against King and the civil rights movement did not appear to impact his relationship with Moreno. On March 14, 2024, Turning Point Action donated $100,000 to the Buckeye Values PAC, Moreno's Super PAC.

Buckeye Values PAC is tightly aligned with Moreno's campaign and was responsible for organizing and financing a key rally featuring Trump and Moreno on March 18, the day before the Ohio primary.

The day after his primary victory, on March 20, Moreno appeared again on Kirk's podcast. At the beginning of the interview, Moreno expressed his gratitude for Kirk's support. "Thank you, Charlie," Moreno said. "And thank you for your early endorsement. You were with me from the very beginning."

The Moreno campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Moreno suggested white people should get reparations

Moreno himself has also had controversies involving racial issues. When he launched his campaign for Senate, Moreno floated the idea of reparations for white descendants of Union soldiers that were killed during the Civil War. “They talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people, for the North, who died to save the lives of Black people?” Moreno said. “I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but you know what, we’ve got to stop being politically correct.”

"We stand on shoulders of people like John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington… That same group of people later, white people, died to free Black people,” Moreno said. A campaign spokesperson for Moreno told the Cincinnati Enquirer, "Bernie was right when he said political correctness is killing our country, and the crocodile tears from the left expose the Democrat hypocrisy he was referring to in the clip.”

Moreno's companies have “faced multiple lawsuits alleging discrimination against employees in the run-up to the sale of his high-end Cleveland car dealership,” the AP reported. One 2017 lawsuit involved “a Black former service manager” at a dealership owned by Moreno, who “alleged that he was targeted for discipline and then demoted after taking concerns to human resources about white peers and a subordinate being paid the same or more than him.” He “claimed racial discrimination led to his demotion and eventual wrongful termination.” The lawsuit was "settled out of court," and the terms of the settlement "were kept private.”

A campaign spokesperson said that “Moreno is ‘a proud minority businessman’ who based his company 'on the colorblind principles of merit and hard work.'” The statement said that “Bernie has always been committed to giving opportunities to all of his workers, regardless of race, color, gender or creed.”

8/18

note sorta neglected this is a thing to link to more than indep/2x storage of info

see sci racism  eg entine

bak 5 23

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aha maga do not want to legislate just clickbait, provocateurs must weigh in on every event,m feed the maw, stay relevant, own the libs/dems, racists b/c every problem/disaster is the fault of POC

// rep collins bigot not 1st

MACE blames biden infra bill

'Disgusting': Maria Bartiromo ripped for linking Baltimore bridge collapse to Biden border policy - Alternet.org

:

https://www.mediamatters.org/clay-travis/outkick-founder-clay-travis-we-have-more-issues-fake-racism-america-today-we-do

aha // schmitt sen hold up col promote, story 1 demands denial of racism

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PREVIOUSLY REFERRED TO DARK DIRTY MIGRANTS? NAZIS AT CPAC 2 24

At CPAC, Steve Bannon says Trump will "drive the vermin out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue | Media Matters for America

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=]=

alternet- no lnx

Home | Trumpsters who want a civil war hope they can create enough chaos to fulfill their fantasies

How to reverse 'democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking': author

Thom Hartmann

February 21, 2024

America is under assault, and, in the 9th year since Trump burst on the political scene, it’s happening so often now that it’s becoming normalized. This is a very real danger to the survival of our republic.

And they’re getting more brazen: this past weekend a group of mask-clad Nazis marched through downtown Nashville complete with swastikas and racist chants. The media treated it like “just another day.”

Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War.

And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP. Televangelist Andrew Wommack, a big Republican supporter who called COVID a hoax “hyped by liberals as an opportunity to come against Trump,” on his Truth & Liberty podcast recently promoted the idea, along with replacing the US Constitution with the Christian Bible:

“I’ve actually had people say that if Trump was to be elected if we got a conservative Congress, that they fear that we would have another civil war,” Wommack told a caller. “And you know what? I don’t want a civil war, I don’t know anybody that does, but would it be worth it? To turn this nation back? I believe it would.”

Having been caught in the middle of a civil war years ago in Uganda (and having had one of my colleagues killed in it by stray gunfire into our refugee camp), I can say with a pretty high level of certainty that anybody who’s pushing civil war here in America has never experienced one.

Nikki Haley has been swatted twice, been physically attacked on stage, and is now being stalked at campaign events by Putin-loving Trump followers who are outraged that she’s calling for more military aid for Ukraine.

Jacob Ware, author of Guns, God, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in Americaand a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC):

“I think intent to commit violence is high across the political spectrum, but especially on the far right. And in the United States, we always have the capability to conduct violence because of our gun laws. There’s a very poisonous mix being brewed with the great potential for violence in 2024 and beyond.”

Just days after Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled that Trump had committed sedition and therefore couldn’t be on that state’s ballot, she was swatted at home. Judges Tanya Chutkin and Arthur Engoron have also been targeted by fascist Trump followers.

A Trump devotee armed with a hammer broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, to death; on the campaign trail, Trump regularly refers to the incident as if it was some sort of victory for him and his people, joking about it in a way that some interpret as encouragement for future similar attacks on Democrats.

Another apparent Trump follower, just last month, murdered and decapitated his own father because he was a federal employee and, therefore, part of the “deep state” that Trump has repeatedly called on to be destroyed.

An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that fully 23 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” The Institute’s CEO, Melissa Deckman, told the CBC:

“You have political leaders like Donald Trump who are not willing to ratchet down that rhetoric — in fact, they're doing the very opposite. In that context, I’m not surprised to see that Nikki Haley is asking for more security.”

When The Washington Post looked into the problem, they found that people running for Congress increased their spending on security by over 500 percent between the time Trump lost in 2020 and last November’s midterms.

The Brennan Center for Justice questioned over 1,700 state and local elected officials in all 50 states and found that fully 40 percent reported being threatened or physically attacked in the three years since Trump lost. Ninety percent said they’d been “harassed, intimidated, or stalked,” and one in ten state legislators reported that a person with a weapon had tried to intimidate them on one or more occasion.

Fascist Republicans are apparently getting what they want out of these intimidation tactics: one-in-five state officials, and almost half of local elected officials report that because of the threats they’re less willing to involve themselves in any way with “controversial” issues like abortion, immigration, or gun control.

Last year, Republican anti-abortion extremist Philip Buyno loaded his car with a hatchet, flares, matches, and bottles and cans filled with gasoline, then drove to the offices of an Illinois reproductive care clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions.

He repeatedly rammed his car into the front entrance of the building, destroying the main entrance and damaging the building’s foundation, and told police that when he got out of jail he was going to “finish the job.”

Buyno told police he was a member of a “rescue group” along with Matt Trewhella and Dan Holman; Trewhella signed the “Justifiable Homicide Statement” supporting people who murder abortion doctors, while Holman has defended using murder as a way to stop abortion.

Last week an openly Nazi group marched in front of the home of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. In Idaho, a group of 31 hateful white supremacists had the case against them dismissed because FBI agents and local prosecutors had “accidentally” bungled evidence and interrogations.

Last week, a Tennessee man was arrested for trying to participate in a plot with two Texas men to visit the southern border and murder Border Patrol agents along with any immigrants they could find. One of them was in possession of six semiautomatic firearms, over 20 magazines, and around 1,800 rounds of ammunition.

The border has been inundated with immigrants ever since Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson held a press conference to inform people in South and Central America that “the US border is wide open.” NPR reported on it, noting in their headline, “The border crisis is helping to mainstream a dangerous conspiracy theory.”

Johnson has openly promoted that hateful and antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory” that says wealthy Jews are funding the entrance of millions of Hispanics into our country so they can illegally vote for Democrats.

“If you’re scratching your head,” Johnson told his followers, “you’ve seen the video, you see droves of people, 2.4 million people coming over the border illegally, the president allowing it, the Democrats in charge of Congress are allowing it. The deal is they're going to turn them into voters.”

The Great Replacement Theory, a warmed-over reboot of Hitler’s theories about Jews and Gypsies, now has a huge following in the Republican Party and among Trump supporters.

Recently a “convoy” of armed white supremacists calling themselves “God’s Army” made its way to the southern border, echoing Trump’s (and Hitler’s) rhetoric that dark-skinned immigrants “poison the blood” of a country and intend to “replace” white men in the workplace and bedroom.

The FBI had to evacuate the Border Patrol processing center in Eagle Pass because of threats; a few days later Paul Faye Sr., identified as a “militia sniper,” was arrested for planning to murder Border Patrol agents. His hope was it would cause what he called a “domino effect” in which white men all over the country would take out their weapons and begin a mass slaughter of federal employees, much like the scenario from the novel Turner Diaries that inspired Tim McVeigh.

Faye credited the Great Replacement Theory as his main inspiration, as did the Trump followers and racists who murdered Jews in Pittsburgh, Black shoppers in Buffalo, and Hispanics in El Paso. The Theory was also the basis for Republicans’ impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a detail rarely mentioned in our media.

As the pro-democracy, pro-immigration group America’s Voice noted last month:

“Speaker Johnson, who was an instrumental supporter of Trump’s attempted coup, is far from alone as a Member of Congress promoting the conspiracy meant to undermine the faith in the democratic process.

“America’s Voice has identified 120 Members of Congress who amplified the replacement and invasion conspiracy in their official capacity just this last year.

“We identified over 1,040 times top GOP candidates, officials, or outfits that pushed the bigoted fiction in just the last year. We also identified this disturbing practice more than 700 times in 2022.

“In 2023 the Republican House majority also brought 13 witnesses to Congressional hearings who had promoted replacement and invasion conspiracies and even one witness who participated in Jan. 6 was asked by the Republicans to serve as a witness on one of their anti-immigrant hearings.”

Even candidates for the Senate are getting into the act, as American Journal News noted with their headline about the man who wants to take on Bob Casey for the US Senate this November:

“Republican David McCormick invests millions in website that platforms Holocaust denial.”

The Michigan House of Representatives just stripped Republican Representative Josh Schriver of his committee assignments for publicly promoting the Replacement Theory. Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, a regular guest on my radio program, said:

“Rep. Schriver’s peddling of the racist ‘replacement theory’ is a deplorable demonstration of his fear of a dynamic and diverse Michigan future where all of our people in every community can succeed.”

Rolling Stone has discovered that fascist street gangs (“militias”) are embracing a new tactic, showing up on the scene of mass shootings and other mass casualty events to do their recruiting. Trace reporter Sonny Sone lays it out:

“According to geolocated footage reviewed by the magazine, members of a right-wing militia called Patriots for America — whose volunteers patrol the southern border with long guns and regularly espouse conspiracy theories targeting migrants — were on the scene, and spent almost 10 minutes beyond the police line, while law enforcement responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.

“Last fall, armed neo-Nazis responded to the mass-casualty gun rampage in Lewiston, Maine, and gained access to the shooter’s registered address.”

The highly publicized mass shooting at Joel Ornsteen’s megachurch last week was allegedly committed by a woman steeped in antisemitic writings. That same week, the FBI arrested a Minnesota man who was a member of the Aryan Freedom Network, an openly Nazi group of Trump supporters, for conspiring to modify semiautomatic weapons into full automatic mode for the “coming race war.”

Two weeks ago, police in Massachusetts arrested a second man in connection with four fires set at Jewish community centers and Jewish-owned businesses. Rabbi Avi Bukiet, one of the victims of the attacks, said the fires were, “a domestic terror attack fueled by antisemitic motivations.”

In Maine, a man and his son were arrested last week for painting swastikas on public street corners. In Dallas, a Jewish city councilwoman’s home was defaced with antisemitic and anti-abortion graffiti. Two days later the Hillel Center for Jewish students at Brown University in Rhode Island was on the receiving end of threats of violence. White supremacy stickers popped up on street signs in Stillwater, MN.

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, residents woke up to find White Lives Matter flyers in their mailboxes. The hateful screeds quoted America First leader Charles Lindbergh and mentioned an “anti-white trend” that “will continue to increase unless White people come together to Defend and support their common interests.”

The screed demands, the Rocket Miner newspaper reports:

“[T]hat white people ‘band together to preserve their European blood’ and ‘guard against dilution by foreign races’ because ‘harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. America’s founding population has gradually been overtaken by a wave of immigration from all around the world which share no connection with American heritage, culture and history.”

In Ashville, NC a white supremacist shut off the power to a local restaurant and left racist material for people stumbling out to find on the front porch, provoking County Commissioner Al Whitesides to say:

“What concerns me is not just what’s alleged here but what you see in America going on all over the country. If you’re African-American, if you’re Jewish, we’re living in an environment in 2024 that I didn’t think in the ‘60s that I would see today.”

In Austin, Texas last week a white supremacist named Bert James Baker stabbed a victim because of the color of his skin or his national origin. Mustafaa Carroll, the interim executive director for CAIR, told reporters:

“Baker repeatedly screamed the N-word and other obscenities, opened a passenger door, pulled one of the victims out of the car and physically attacked him.”

The father of the victim told reporters: “We came into the U.S. after the American dream. And my dream, and our dream, was not a big house or a big car. We want to live in peace and tranquility. We want to be able to cast our opinion without being jeopardized of being killed or shot or even harassed.”

Meanwhile, here in Portland, Oregon a man tried to set several people of color on fire, screaming racial epithets at them.

Almost everything in this article is from the past two weeks or thereabouts: the racist Trump followers who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” and hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their adolescent fantasies about fighting in a “noble” civil war.

Will they get the conflict they so desperately want (and thought they were getting on January 6th)? I’m skeptical: to paraphrase President Eisenhower, their numbers are small and they are stupid.

Nonetheless, we must be vigilant if America is to survive as a pluralistic, multiracial society…

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Fox News’ highest rated evening programs spread white nationalist rhetoric in nearly half of their immigration segments | Media Matters for America

Fox News’ highest rated evening programs spread white nationalist rhetoric in nearly half of their immigration segments

Immigration segments in January on Jesse Watters Primetime and Hannity each contained white nationalist talking points in over half of the segments, at 55% and 53%, respectively. The Five spread white nationalist rhetoric in 45% of such segments.

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI & ISABELLA CORRAO

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ROB SAVILLO

PUBLISHED 02/13/24

Exacerbated by the upcoming presidential election, a constitutional fight over security measures in Texas, and right-wing opposition to a bipartisan border security deal, issues related to immigration received significant media coverage in January. Media Matters found that Fox News’ three highest-rated evening shows — Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and The Five — spread white nationalist rhetoric in nearly half of their immigration segments that month.

Immigration segments on Jesse Watters Primetime and Hannity each contained white nationalist talking points in over half of the segments, at 55% and 53%, respectively. The Five, the most-watched cable news show in January, spread white nationalist rhetoric in 45% of such segments.

The Five ran 5 episodes containing white nationalist rhetoric, including one on January 10 in which co-host Jesse Watters claimed that Democrats “were literally replacing American kids” after migrants were sheltered at a New York City public school. Later in the segment, co-host Jeanine Pirro warned that Democrats would give migrants “a license sooner or later” and work visas to entice them to vote. Pirro continued, “They are now talking about them voting. You want to know why? Because they're going to vote. That's why they're here.” Her co-host, Jessica Tarlov, even clarified that Pirro was endorsing the “replacement theory,” noting that the immigrants will “vote blue.”

CitationFrom the January 10, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Five

Jesse Watters Primetime, which the network elevated last July to the prime-time slot vacated by the network’s previous top white supremacist, Tucker Carlson, aired at least 11 immigration segments that contained white nationalist discourse, the most of any prime-time host.

Watters peddled “invasion” fear tactics when he declared that “foreign nationals are breaching our shores by boat and then sprinting through the beaches and just disappearing onto the streets.” He concluded, “What you're seeing on the screen is what every country in the world calls an invasion.” This iteration of the great replacement conspiracy theory inspired the 2019 shooting in El Paso, Texas, where a shooter targeted Latino Walmart shooters because of fears of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Hannity

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INVASION HIST

mma 1 24

The bogus premise that migrants entering the United States in search of a better life are conducting an “invasion” of the country has moved from the fringes of the right-wing media to its core over the past decade. The idea of an imminent threat to personal safety and national identity posed by columns of faceless brown masses marching on the border is now a fixture of right-wing commentary, from the depths of the online fever swamps to the talk-radio world of Rush Limbaugh to the heights of Fox News. And this incendiary talking point is now the pretext for a looming constitutional crisis.

Texas and the U.S. government are in a standoff over whether the state’s government can defy orders from federal officials by constructing and maintaining razor-wire barriers along the border with Mexico to prevent migrants from crossing into the country. On January 22, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated an appeals court order which had barred the U.S. Border Patrol from taking down the barriers at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, near the Rio Grande — but Texas officials are still preventing federal agents from entering the area.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a January 24 statement that due to President Joe Biden’s “lawless border policies,” Abbott had “declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” and that state officials would continue “acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”

Legal experts have skewered Abbott’s contention that his state is suffering an “invasion” and that that overrules the federal government’s constitutional supremacy over immigration policy and the maintenance of national borders. They note that mentions of “invasion” in the Constitution refer not to metaphorical examples like migration but to literal armed incursions by hostile foreign powers.

“The claim that a large increase in the number of would-be migrants gaining entry at the southern border constitutes an ‘invasion’ under Article IV is constitutional nonsense,” University of Missouri law professor Frank O. Bowman III wrote for Just Security. “It cannot be sustained by any reasonable reading of the text of the Constitution, the original understanding of the Constitution, or subsequent interpretations of the Constitution by courts or constitutional scholars.”

Indeed, three different federal appeals courts summarily rejected the idea in the 1990s, as Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted.

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But constitutional arguments be damned, the right wants to increase the salience of a chaotic border (while preventing both bipartisan legislation that would provide more money for border security and increases in legal immigration) because they think that will help Donald Trump win the presidency. Every Republican governor but one and numerous Republican members of Congress are supporting Abbott’s effort, as are the full constellation of right-wing commentators (some of whom are hyping a potential civil war).

It’s impossible to disaggregate the Republican Party’s full-throated adoption of the bogus “invasion” analogy as a constitutional argument from the right-wing media’s use of that rhetoric.

Language once limited to far-right figures like Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, Steve King, and the Minuteman militia has become commonplace among the movement’s demagogues. Right-wing stars like Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson, who strive to terrify their audiences with the prospect of dangerous immigrants, popularized the “invasion” framing in order to gin up support for the GOP and its ethnonationalist wing and to make space for extraordinary measures at the border. Republican Party leaders, up to and including Trump, have followed in their wake. And along the way, armed white nationalists spouting the same talking point conducted a series of massacres, with targets ranging from an El Paso Walmart to a Pittsburgh synagogue.

IFrame Content

Here’s the history, ripped from the Media Matters archives.

2005 — 2012: Pat Buchanan and the “Reconquista”

There is a long American tradition of right-wing bigots warning that immigrants would contaminate and ultimately destroy the country. But President George W. Bush’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation during his second term brought the issue to the fore this century and exacerbated a schism between the right’s pro-business, pro-immigration reform wing and its nationalist, immigration-restrictionist wing.

Right-wing restrictionists used the increasing migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border during that period, an overwhelming majority of which involved Mexican citizens, to claim that the United States was suffering an “invasion” by that country.

“This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history,” Buchanan wrote in his 2006 book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “We are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted.”

Buchanan and his allies, like Michelle Malkin, argued that the migrant influx was part of the “Reconquista,” a purported plot by Mexico’s government and Hispanic politicians in the U.S. to reclaim the American Southwest. “Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war,” Buchanan explained. He argued that the “invasion” would cause a “balkanization of America” in which the Southwest “de facto is going to secede from this country.”

The “Reconquista” theory fell out of fashion in subsequent years, as migrants with Mexican citizenship fell from 85% of all border apprehensions to 20%. But even without the involvement of a purportedly hostile foreign nation, “invasion” rhetoric recurred on the right’s fringes whenever the immigration issue returned to the fore — and ultimately spread into its mainstream.

2013 — 2016: Laura Ingraham’s “invasion” talk helps take down Cantor, Breitbart’s lifts up Trump

Immigration reform once more seemed within reach during President Barack Obama’s second term. The U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill in 2013 that would have increased border enforcement, expanded legal immigration, and provided a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants. With Obama promising to sign the bill, the remaining holdup was the Republican-controlled House — and right-wing immigration restrictionists like Laura Ingraham, then a prominent radio host and Fox contributor, demanding that the GOP legislators oppose reform.

But the first months of 2014 saw a near-doubling of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border over the previous year, which experts attributed to a rise in gang violence in Central America. Obama’s June declaration that the surge constituted an “urgent humanitarian situation” requiring the provision of food, housing, and medical treatment for the children triggered a firestorm on the right — complete with claims that the kids constituted an “invasion.”

“The Obama administration has basically put out the welcome mat at the border: ‘Come on in, we'll feed you, we'll house you, we’ll clothe you, we'll get you medical care,’” Ingraham said in a Fox & Friends appearance. “This is an ongoing invasion into our country, and it is horrifying for our sovereignty and our rule of law.”

Ingraham also blamed Republican Eric Cantor, then the House majority leader and a congressman from Virginia who supported citizenship for young people brought to the U.S. as children, if not necessarily broader immigration reform, for aiding what she described as “an invasion facilitated by our own government.” And she did more than complain about him — she endorsed and campaigned for Cantor’s primary opponent, Dave Brat.

Brat won that June 10 election in a victory widely credited to the anti-immigrant rabble-rousing of demagogues like Ingraham. Cantor’s defeat sent a seismic shock through the GOP, and by the end of the month, House Speaker John Boehner informed Obama that immigration reform would not receive a vote that year. The increasingly powerful right-wing media had exercised its veto over the Republican agenda.

Soon after, immigrant “invasion” rhetoric began gaining traction on right-wing Facebook pages, Media Matters found. Breitbart.com, the far-right website controlled at the time by Trumpist Steve Bannon, sought to capture that fringe-right grassroots energy — and snag market share from Fox — with virulent anti-immigration content. By 2015, the site “became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem,” Harvard researchers reported in a post-mortem on election coverage that cycle.

The right-wing media’s incessant fearmongering over the border eliminated any space within the party for reformers. The ultimate beneficiary was Trump, who launched his presidential campaign claiming that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the U.S. and promised to build a wall and make that country pay for it as his supporters touted his ability to turn back the purported “invasion.”

2017 — 2020: The migrant caravan and the mainstreaming of “the great replacement”

Trump’s ascension to the presidency put his party in control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives and left him ultimately responsible for the border. But as the 2018 midterm elections approached, Trump adopted Fox’s preferred campaign strategy by focusing attention on a caravan of migrants 1,000 miles from the U.S. border with Mexico, an “invasion” he falsely blamed on Democrats.

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The Fox-fueled president’s fevered statements attracted crisis-level coverage from national broadcast shows, cable news networks, and newspapers, though the attention ultimately failed to prevent Democrats from gaining control of Congress.

Trump’s caravan push coincided with a major increase in Fox references to migrants as an “invasion” or “invaders,” a trend that continued even after the GOP’s November defeat, Media Matters found. “Prime-time Fox News hosts and guests used the words to refer to migrants 33 times in the 30 days ahead of the election, up from 25 times in all of 2015, 2016 and 2017,” we reported. “Fox has kept up the attacks in the weeks after the Republicans lost the U.S. House: Prime-time hosts and guests used the terms 48 times between Election Day and the end of November.” A follow-up review found more than 70 Fox references to a migrant “invasion” in the first seven months of 2019.

IFrame Content

As Democrats took power in Congress, Fox commentators began pushing something even darker alongside their constant invocations of a migrant “invasion.” Influential figures like Ingraham and fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson adopted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, a white supremacist talking point which posits that Democrats are deliberately importing brown migrants to “replace” white Americans in order to corrupt the country and increase their own power.

The “great replacement” rhetoric moved from internet fever swamps to the prime-time hours of the nation’s most-watched cable news network — and to the manifestos of white nationalist spree killers bent on stopping the “invaders.”

2021 — 2024: Forever war

The right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been more incendiary than ever since Biden took office in 2021. Border apprehensions and expulsions have increased to record levels as migrants flee political and economic instability in Central and South America for the booming post-COVID U.S., and hundreds of thousands have made asylum claims to authorities at the border.

But for the right, “Biden’s border crisis” is a deliberate effort by a president who does not want to stop the invasion.

IFrame Content

Every possible news event, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the end of Title 42 deportation authority to the upcoming presidential election, brings a new wave of fearmongering over the “invaders” who will “replace” the population. They’re using this rhetoric to argue for extreme measures on the border and to denounce Biden for not pursuing them. As Carlson claimed, “Our military could seal the border with Mexico in days. That would save American lives, it would restore order, and it would end the invasion.”

Texas, with its long border with Mexico and numerous Republican politicians eager for the right-wing media’s spotlight and support, is a natural subject for this coverage. Indeed, over a three-day period in July 2022, Media Matters found that Fox aired at least 20 claims that the state was being invaded by migrants. That period overlapped with a push by county officials to get Abbott to declare an “invasion” under the Constitution in order to seize control of border policy from the federal government.

At the time, legal experts pointed out that the effort was ridiculous and based on “a total mischaracterization of what an invasion is.” But the GOP’s propaganda wing currently wields more influence over the party’s legal policy than its legal experts, and 20 months later, Texas is in a standoff with the federal government based on its “invasion” talking point.

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{{MMA 1 24 ERUPTION?

SCOTUS let feds nat guard cut texas barbed razor wire?

BlazeTV host Steve Deace: "The Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are be invaded or secede" | Media Matters for America

Warning of civil war, Matt Walsh: "Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border" | Media Matters for America

Charlie Kirk: There is a "border invasion" and "native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal" | Media Matters for America

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After previously dining with Trump, Nick Fuentes gives Nazi salute and discusses his willingness to commit violence for Trump | Media Matters for America }}:

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Laura Ingraham suggests Nikki Haley is fabricating memories of experiencing racism during childhood | Media Matters for America

// Matt Walsh: "Nikki Haley is not really brown" | Media Matters for America

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Matt Walsh: "Nonwhite countries are by far more racist than white ones" | Media Matters for America

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Heather Mac Donald to Charlie Kirk: “White civilization has decided to engage in the great replacement theory, and to go down without a fight” | Media Matters for America

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Here's what's upsetting to me, Heather, is if I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I don't -- I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action? It almost creates thought patterns that are not necessarily wholesome. It creates resentment, doesn't it, Heather? This is not a way to design society.

HEATHER MAC DONALD (GUEST): Yeah. We have to stop being scared by the race hustle. We have to stop --

KIRK: Yes --

MAC DONALD: Being called a racist and just say, sorry, the facts are these. You cannot have racial proportionality and excellence at the same time, not because necessarily there's any inherent difference that -- we don't -- we can put that question aside for now, but just because if you look at the fact that 66% of all Black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic math skills defined as doing geometry -- doing arithmetic or reading a graph, 66% of Black 12th graders don't possess even partial mastery of that. It is absurd to think that if you look at a air traffic control room, which depends on being able to do very fast calculations, being able to handle a lot of data on an instantaneous basis. If that isn't, you know, 13% Black, it's because somewhere there's discrimination going on, that is completely fallacious. It is against what is the obvious fact of the world that we live in, and yet I'm just stunned. Like, when is this gonna end?

:{:{So, at some point, it's gonna end -- especially when young white males say we are not gonna be canceled any longer. We know the facts. We know the fact that this is a society now that has done a 180 degree about face from a period where it was, in fact, white supremacy. When it was, in fact, an apartheid state, when it treated Blacks with gratuitous cruelty, heartlessness, heartbreaking nastiness and sadism, that was the reality, but we are not gonna cop to that reality today.}:

We have to stand up against this, Charlie, because white -- there's no other civilization like Western civilization that is engaged in this deliberate self-immolation. No other culture has turned on itself with such fury. You don't see this happening in China. You don't see it happening in Africa. You don't see it happening in India where those cultures are saying, oh, because we have historically been Chinese or African or Indian, we must be a colonialist, oppressive, apartheid state. No. It's only happening in the West out of some perverse instinct that if we get to the heart of it, we would understand much about Western civilization. But right now, it is a totally suicidal instinct.}:

KIRK: It is. And so, about a minute and a half remaining here, Heather. I was having difficulty persuading somebody who is more in the middle over this because they said, yeah, I don't like the woke stuff, but I don't understand why they're doing it. There must be a good reason. Can you just elaborate in about a minute here, Heather? This is suicide. This is I don't want this to exist any longer.

MAC DONALD: There is something about European civilization that is highly susceptible to blackmail. We are now being blackmailed. The reality is Black privilege, not white privilege. It used to be white privilege. I am not denying that. But for some reason, white civilization has decided to engage in the great replacement theory, and to go down without a fight. And I'm gonna fight, you're gonna fight, Charlie.

KIRK: Yes.

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Charlie Kirk: "Why are whites taking this? Why are we just sitting idly by and allowing corporate America to give all the jobs to nonwhite people" | Media Matters for America

Charlie Kirk: "We've allowed our beautiful cities to just be captured by the cult of anti-racism" | Media Matters for America

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Fox News’ Dana Perino says migrants are ushering major cities “into a death spiral” | Media Matters for America

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CA working on reparations 6 23

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Right-wing media outlets resurface long-debunked myth that all migrants get $5,000 debit cards from the government | Media Matters for America

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an 12 23

as part of their Project 2025 agenda, Donald Trump's MAGA allies have — according to reports in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Axios — been thinking long and hard about the type of MAGA Republicans they would like to include in a second Trump Administration if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and goes on to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election. The idea of Project 2025 is to give the United States' federal government a thorough MAGA makeover and make sure that only devout, unquestioning loyalists are hired.

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan has been slamming Project 2025 as a dangerous recipe for far-right authoritarianism. During a recent broadcast, the progressive host cited "unhinged" GOP attorney Mike Davis as a troubling example. Donald Trump Jr. and "War Room" host Steve Bannon are among the MAGA Republicans who have been touting Davis as a possible candidate for U.S. attorney general during a second Trump Administration.

To show how extreme Davis is, Hasan showed clips of him on "The Benny Show" promising that as attorney general, he would "put kids in cages" and send political opponents to "the gulag." On October 1, 2023, Davis tweeted, "The violent Black underclass is a danger to America…. We must resume the mass incarceration of these thugs. In the meantime, Americans must arm up. These monsters will kill."

Hasan told viewers, "Mike Davis is on their radar not in spite of, but because of, his unhinged rhetoric…. Mike Davis is something that the Trump Administration lacked the last time around: a skilled, even competent, veteran of Beltway legal politics and right-wing causes — one who seems keen to transform Trump's darkest fascist impulses into an actual policy agenda…. Mike Davis is super-authoritarian and as we've discussed, super competent. That makes him super dangerous."

Hasan added, however, that Davis is only one of the many "authoritarians" Trump and his loyalists would like to hire. The MSNBC host noted that according to Axios, they are hoping to install, in the federal government, a "pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

READ MORE:Revealed: Trump's Project 2025 agenda aims for 'total control' of the federal government

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

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MMA 12 23

...

“You talk about the great replacement theory and people are — oh, you know, people get very upset when you talk about it, but just look at the math,” Bannon answered.

“It’s not a theory,” Carlson interjected.

“This has happened across Europe,” Bannon continued. “It's happened in Germany.”

“In 100 years, there'll be a minority of Irish people in Ireland,” Carlson said. “That's a big change, and it's on purpose.”

Later in their conversation, Bannon endorsed mass deportations, saying: “I think illegal alien invaders are coming because they've gamed the asylum system. My belief is those people have to go home. They have to be returned, they have to leave our country or we're not going to have a country.”

Later that day, Bannon appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered to celebrate Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and Irish mixed martial arts fighter Connor McGregor, who had come under police investigation following anti-migrant social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the November 27, 2023, edition of Triggered, streamed on Rumble

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Charlie Kirk fumes that pastors who support Black Lives Matter are “introducing an unclean spirit from Satan into the church.”

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8 23 AN invol admit hosp 2017? desantis booed

'Diary of a madman': Florida shooter with 'several manifestos' originally targeted HBCU

Maya Boddie August 27, 2023

The white gunman who murdered three Black people at a Jacksonville, Florida Dollar General store Saturday night has been identified by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department.

The Sheriff's Department shared the suspect's name on Sunday via X — formerly known as Twitter — along with a photo, writing, "Sheriff TK Waters holds follow-up briefing to identify the three victims who senselessly lost their lives yesterday during this tragic event. The suspect has been identified as 21yo Ryan Palmeter."

Although department officials noted that the 21-year-old "bought his guns legally and had no criminal history," according to Reuters, "Authorities have described the shooting as racially motivated, saying the man had authored 'several manifestos; for media, his parents and law enforcement detailing his hatred for Black people."

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

During the Sunday press conference, Waters described one manifesto as a "diary of a madman."

Reuters reports:

On Saturday, he was spotted trying to enter a local historically Black college, Edward Waters University, before heading to the Dollar General store.

The university said in a statement that a man had refused to identify himself and had been turned away by a campus security officer. 'It was later determined that the individual would be involved in a shooting near EWU campus,' the institution said.

The New York Times reports Palmeter used an "an AR-15-style rifle that bore swastika markings, as well as a handgun" to kill the three victims before turning the gun on himself.

READ MORE: Targeted 'because they were Black': Jacksonville’s state senator reacts to Saturday mass shooting

Reuters' full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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see plantation

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-says-democratic-party-coalition-includes-resentful-government-addicted

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https://www.alternet.org/theyre-losing-white-supremacist-groups/

an 7 23

journalist and author Wesley Lowery explained on Saturday's edition of The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart how the American white supremacist movement has evolved away from "big organizational, hierarchical groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan into a peppering of acts of vigilante violence throughout the United States.

"So one thing that's very interesting right, is that there's a historian, David Chalmers. He writes 'the definitive history of the Klan' in a book called Hood Americanism. And he writes that for most of its history, the Klan and other white supremacist groups were dispositionally conservative, meaning that they were winning. We lived in a white supremacist society. Their goal was to keep things the way they were," Lowery recalled.

"But following the entrance of our country into multiracial democracy in the late Sixties, their tactic changes," Lowery continued. "They become radical and revolutionary.They're no longer winning, they're losing. And so now they're fighting to restructure the country back to the way it was. Now that justifies more aggressive violence or aggressive acts of terror.We start to see the rise of these extremely complex groups who are literally trying to spark a race war."

READ MORE: 'The history of social change is also a history of disruption': experts

Lowery noted that "beyond that, they shift — white supremacist leader Louis Beam writes in the Eighties — they shift to a quote-unquote 'leaderless resistance model.' We think about this as quote-unquote 'lone wolves' very often, that their aim is to build these bureaucratic systems and goals and membership organizations. But their aim is to put their toxic propaganda out into the world via the internet, via pamphlets, via television shows, via the mainstream politics, so that an individual can become radicalized."

Lowery also cited recent examples of these occurrences.

"We see this with Timothy McVey. We see this with Dylann Roof. We see this with the shooter in El Paso and in Buffalo. They're not members of these big organizational, hierarchical groups," Lowery said. "They — these are white Americans who have racialized prejudice, who locate the writings and the message boards of these, of these violent white supremacists. And what their marching orders are, become very clear, and then they carry them out."

Watch MSNBC's clip below or at this link

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/bless-your-heart-klansplaining-crt blackburn

https://www.alternet.org/oklahoma-judge-rulsa-race-massacre/ judge toss case 100 yo 3x

https://boingboing.net/2023/07/07/oklahoma-schools-superintendent-says-tulsa-race-massacre-wasnt-um-about-race.html

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note ilya shapiro legal shop

an 6 23 no lnx

'Invidious scheme': Supreme Court refuses to hear case challenging Mississippi 'Jim Crow' law

Maya Boddie June 30, 2023

The United States Supreme Court, on Friday, decided not to hear a case against a longtimeMississippi rule denying the right to vote to persons "convicted of certain felonies," CNN reports.

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Per the report, and according to critics, the state rule disproportionately impact Black voters.

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According to NBC, "The court's decision not to hear the case prompted a sharp dissenting opinion from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor," who "contrasted the decision on Friday with the court's ruling a day earlier that" ended affirmative action.

READ MORE: Unequal Justice: The Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling is not as good as it seems

Furthermore, CNN notesboth justices "argued that the court had made 'clear and momentous errors.'"

Jackson wrote, "If the court viewed affirmative action as race discrimination, then the Mississippi measure must be seen similarly," adding, "So at the same time that the court undertakes to slay other giants, Mississippians can only hope they will not have to wait another century for another judicial knight-errant. Constitutional wrongs do not right themselves."

CNN reports:

The challengers in the case, Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, are Black men in the state who have been convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively, and have served their time. They are currently barred from voting under state law – Section 241– because of their convictions. They argued that the law is tainted with racial animus.

NBC notes, "In asking the Supreme Court to weigh in, Harness and Kariem's lawyers point to the fact that the court in 1985 struck down a similar measure that was enacted in Alabama in 1901."

READ MORE: 10 years after Supreme Court gutted voting rights, advocates urge Congress to reverse damage

Backing the plaintiffs, the Legal Defense Fundfiled a brief that referred to the rule as a "Jim Crow law," according to CNN, that was put in place as a "deliberate and invidious scheme to disenfranchise Black People."

LDF's assistant counsel Patricia Okonta told the news outlet, "While the state is home to the highest percentage of Black Americans of any state in the country, it has not elected a Black person to statewide office since 1890."

The Guardian reports:

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}:

Sixteen per cent of the Black voting age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.

Harness and Karriem's attorney, former United States Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., wrote, "Today, in 2022, many thousands of Mississippi's African American citizens are disfranchised by a provision that was enacted in 1890 to ensure 'a home government under the control of the white people of the State.'"

READ MORE: 'Jim Crow': Symone Sanders accuses Republicans of waging 'an all-out assault' on Black people

CNN's full report is available at this link. NBC's report is here. The Guardian's report is here.

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Jim Crow 2.0: Black voters face new restrictions upheld by Supreme ... ›

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emigr post slavery

https://www.alternet.org/trump-wants-every-african-american/

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spike fed holiday

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-calls-juneteenth-neo-segregationist-federal-holiday-and-pagan-garbage

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https://www.alternet.org/neo-nazi-juneteenth-white-genocide/

an 6 23  no lnx

'Dumbest weird' neo-Nazis fear anti-Juneteenth ploy promoting 'white genocide' film will fail

Maya BoddieJune 17, 2023

Neo-nazis are deeply worried their plan to ruin upcoming Juneteenth celebrations will fail, Rolling Stone reports.

Per Rolling Stone, neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League (GDL) is encouraging supporters to watch a 30-minute film explaining alleged "white genocide."

However, because the white supremacists fear their ploy will be unsuccessful, the group is also urging comrades "to pose as concerned citizens," to heckle "local media outlets" and "'report this awful expression of hate!'"

READ MORE: Tennessee pride celebrations showcase queer joy amid neo-Nazi threats and legal attacks

Per the publication, "a June 15 Telegram post reviewed by Rolling Stone," urges "white supremacist leafleters to embrace a strategy of 'overstating' — i.e. lying. 'You know for a fact we did 10k [leaflets]?' it reads, 'Tell them it was 100k.'"

Rolling Stone reports:

A pinned post on Telegram explains the dual aim of the Juneteeth leaflet drop. 'This is a White unity project,' it says. But the post makes plain that racial intimidation is also a key component: 'We want to wake our people and scare our enemies.' It concludes with a reference to the neo-Nazi trope of 14 words (concerning the need to 'secure' a future for white people). '14 or nothing,' it declares.

Per a Newsweek report, "Juneteenth is celebrated annually on June 19, commemorating an important moment in African-American history when Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to control the state and inform the remaining slaves that they were free. There were 250,000 enslaved people in Texas at the time, according to a report by the nonprofit organization The Pew Charitable Trusts."

The news outlet's 2022 report noted "White Lives Matter" activists protested Juneteenth celebrations in Tennessee last year, wearing shirts that said, "Stop White Replacement" and "It's ok to be white."

READ MORE: Why Paul Gosar has become a 'sort of hero' to neo-Nazis and other extremists: report

Rolling Stone also notes:

GDL is a virulently anti-semitic outfit that's notorious for plastering American neighborhoods with hate literature. That group's leaflet promoting the Juneteenth action whinges, in part:

DIVERSITY means fewer white people.

INCLUSION means exclusion of white people.

EQUITY means stealing from white people.

Mike Chitwood, Sheriff of Florida's Volusia County tweeted earlier this week, "Heads up: Some of the dumbest weird losers in America are planning to dump more hate flyers this weekend. Just remember it's all because they feel inadequate and small with no friends & no future. We will be out to enforce the law and stand up for all our residents & visitors."

READ MORE: GOP congressman’s aide tied to Neo-Nazi

Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required). Newsweek's report is here.

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another stopped tanehai coates betw world and me; youth poet laureate

teacher taught racism

https://www.alternet.org/i-did-not-feel-safe/

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~ BO

https://www.mediamatters.org/outnumbered/fox-host-attacks-concept-generational-poverty-only-thing-crippling-anyone-country

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an raw 6 23

no lnx

let’s review.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) calledDaniel Penny a “hero” after the 24-year-old former Marine killed street performer Jordan Neely on a subway despite the fact New York Police Department sources said Neely had not become violent that day, May 1, nor had he threatened Penny.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has vowed to pardon Daniel Perry, who in April was convicted of murdering Garrett Foster in July 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas, after Perry texted a friend, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex," anddrove his car threateningly into a crowd before shooting Foster.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was among Republican officials who mocked the assault last October on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sharing conspiracy theories about the right-wing vigilante who fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

In November 2021, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), tweeted an altered anime video showing him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) with a sword to the neck, earning him a formal censure from the then-Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives … and pats on the back from Republican colleagues.

The 2020 Republican National Convention glorified a white couple who, on the lawn of their St. Louis mansion, brandished firearms at peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Republican support for violence is so prolific, it has become a staple of campaign ads. Vice, for one, sees this as evidence vigilantism seeps up from the base, and incendiary media such as Fox News amplify it. While demagogues such as Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have a history of inciting violence, the godfather of modern-day vigilantism is Donald Trump.

Vox counts more than 40 instances, from the launch of Trump’s presidential campaign in June 2015 to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, in which he encouraged or endorsed violence. Following his election, threats against Congress memberssoared more than tenfold to 9,625 incidents in 2021 alone. “Far-right terror,”says Vox, “is currently the most significant ideological threat in the US,” with a proliferation of right-wing threats against elected officialsacross the country. Axios published a roster filled with others.

In a notorious call for vigilantism, Trump praised child soldier Kyle Rittenhouse “as the ‘poster boy’ for the right to self-defense,” according to CNN. Weeks before traveling to Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020 where he killed two people with an AR-15-style rifle at a Black Lives Matter protest, the then-17-year-old Rittenhouse fantasized about shooting looters.

While the corporate media recognize the GOP has “made violence part of their brand,” it doesn’t answer the most important question: why this happened.

Trump’s scorched-earth racism is the pivotal factor. By winning the presidency in 2016, Trump blazed a social-media shortcut to power. His victory inspired a surge of fascist gangs such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and obscure but even more violent outfits including Patriot Front, Resist Marxism, Rise Above Movement, Jericho March and American Guard.

Trump made it possible for any dime-store bigot to jump on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, demonize entire groups — particularly leftists like anti-fascists and BLM — and threaten violence. For those with persistence and a bit of prowess, social-media demagoguery was an easy path to notoriety, money and followers. Operating under the protection of the demagogue-in-chief, and indifference if not sympathy from elements of police, formed by the history of white supremacy, these new hatemongers were able to jump from virtual violence to the real world.

The violence began with a bang the night of Trump’s inauguration when a right-wing couple shot and nearly killed a left-wing protester in Seattle. Within months, far-right riots — and killings — took place in leftist bastions such as Berkeley, Calif., and Portland, Ore., culminating in the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a neo-Nazi rammed a crowd of counter-protesters with his car, killing Heather Heyer. The shock of the murder, and hundreds of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” during a torch-light parade, put extremists back on their heels.

[White supremacists march on Charlottesville, Va., during the August 2017 "Unite the Right" rally that left a woman dead. Image via Karla Cote/Creative Commons.

But far-right gangs reconstituted themselves, aided by police in Portland who allowed the Proud Boys to turn the city into their fight club with almost no consequences. The George Floyd protests supercharged vigilantism as police aligned with the far right in seeing BLM and antifa as public enemy number one.

This time the explosion was even bigger: the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The only reason Trump’s attempted coup did not succeed is because his mob of thousands did not use guns, which convicted seditionist Stewart Rhodes regretted afterwards, against a police force who had every warning imaginable of the coming insurrection.

Far from squelching the taste for violence, the failed coup whetted the appetite of Republican politicians and voters alike for lawless justice.

This raises a more fundamental question. Why do GOP voters believe it necessary to circumvent legitimate channels to enact their vision?

It wasn’t always this way, and the growing desire for vigilantism is an ominous warning sign for the future of America. In short, there is a vicious cycle from media that stokes fears for profit to a middle class fed the message that those at the bottom are to blame for society’s woes to politicians who claim deep-rooted social problems can be solved through policing at home or abroad: the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on terror.

A crucial similarity in criminalizing social problems is they are racialized, as well. Blacks are to blame for crime, Mexicans for illegal drugs, Muslims for terrorism. This approach begins with Nixon’s Southern strategy that delivered him the White House. He used coded racial appeals such as “law and order,” “war on drugs” and “benign neglect” toward the Black community to indicate Black people were a threat whom he would protect the “silent majority” of whites from.

Before winning the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan used overt dog whistles, talking of “welfare queens,” “strapping young bucks” buying steak with food stamps, saying the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South,” and kicking off his general election campaign with a segregationist friendly speech endorsing states rights near Philadelphia, Miss., site of the infamous murder of three civil-rights activists in 1964.

As the right’s racial rhetoric got hotter at the presidential level, with George H.W. Bush relying on the Willie Horton ad to win the 1988 contest by implying a victory by Democrat Michael Dukakis would mean “Black rapists running amok,” the era of hate radio simultaneously dawned after Reagan gutted the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

Soon, Republican voters were sucking on vitriol from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin for decades. The relentless drumbeat that “real Americans” were under attack from feminists/Blacks/Muslims/Marxists/immigrants/Mexicans/queers — take your pick — stoked volcanic rage on the right.

But for years, Republican voters couldn’t adequately vent that anger. Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution that put Congress in the hand of the bomb-throwers in 1994, eight years of the Bush-Cheney “war on terror”, and the white backlash to Barack Obama under the banner of the Tea Party, were unable to satisfy the desire of a rabid right to not just defeat, but to smash their foes.

The torrent of right-wing hate helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in 1995 in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, but the atrocity undercut support for far-right extremism. The attraction of racial violence soared after the 9/11 attacks and exploded into a reinvigorated militia movement and a series of racist murders after Obama was elected.

On one side was Fox News incitement of viewer rage to stay relevant, profitable and powerful, and on the other was wild fantasies of the politics of revenge that government could not fulfill.

Enter Donald Trump. His 2016 campaign completed the electrical circuit triggering a bomb. Millions of Americans, saturated with racist grievances, could now take matters into their own hands. And many did. Trump promises even more unchecked violence if elected again in 2024, telling supporters a few months ago, “for those who have wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump has turned the party of law and order into one of lawlessness and chaos.

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AHA: racism does not exist, US not founded on slavery, lazy POC just want to leech off govt soc safe net; us is divided, but trump/fox/gop to blame despite hype blm violent crime riots in democrat run urban

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race hustle

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-rachel-campos-duffy-some-say-america-runs-dunkin-democrat-party-runs-racial

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right-wing media figures uncritically amplified a now-debunked New York Post story to demonize immigrants and attack Democratic lawmakers.

On May 13, the New York Post published a story alleging that a group of 20 homeless military veterans had been “evicted” from two upstate New York hotels to make room for immigrants who had settled in New York City. The Post claimed the supposed migrants were part of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ plans to secure temporary housing for immigrants entering the city. 

After the New York Post published its story, local outlet the Mid Hudson News spoke with hotel management and service providers the Post claimed were involved in the removals. On May 18, the paper reported that not only had no homeless veterans been removed, but they were never there to begin with — one hotel manager “had never heard of” the veteran's group supposedly involved, while another said it “had not put any veterans in the hotel for ‘a long time.’” The report also discredited a receipt presented by State Assemblyman Brian Maher as supposed evidence that the group representing the homeless veterans had paid for the rooms. The Post later reported that the group’s longtime advocate had lied to the newspaper about the entire situation, and today the Mid Hudson News uncovered that 15 homeless men were paid to pretend they were veterans who had been staying at the hotel.

[twt]

by the time the story fell apart, right-wing media had already latched onto the now-debunked narrative and immediately weaponized the shoddily reported story as part of their ongoingfear campaign over a so-called “invasion” of migrants coming across the southern border.

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right-wing media are yet again running to the side of an accused vigilante killer, framing Daniel Penny — who has been charged with choking Jordan Neely to death on a New York subway — as a “hero” deserving of “unwavering” political and financial support.

On May 1, Penny placed Neely in a chokehold that lasted at least three minutes. One witness who filmed the homicide claimed Neely — an unhoused Black man who had long suffered with mental illness following the murder of his mother — was restrained for as long as 15 minutes.

Bolstered by years of coverage setting the stage to legitimize extrajudicial violence, right-wing media quickly attempted to justify the killing, accusing the left of creating a “race hustle” and framing Penny as a good samaritan who protected the vulnerable. Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter on May 12, resulting in an immediate cycle of outrage from conservative figures who have not only lionized Penny, but also launched a widespread effort to help him escape criminal charges.

With this wave of promotion — including personal donations from right-wing commentators Tim Pool, Candace Owens, and Tammy Bruce — Penny’s defense fund has raised over $2 million on GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising site previously used by January 6 rioters.

Right-wing media figures have lionized Penny

A number of right-wing media figures engaged in outright hero worship of Penny:

Others encouraged further vigilante violence:

Some right-wing media figures alleged that Penny was prosecuted because he is white and would have been richly rewarded otherwise:

Right-wing media figures contributed to and promoted Penny’s legal defense fund:

Right-wing media’s close relationship with vigilante justice

Penny is far from the first vigilante killer to receive the full backing of conservative media. After Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two, at an August 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, right-wing media figures similarly jumped to his defense, soliciting donations and painting him as a victim who engaged in justified self-defense. Drew Hernandez — a frequent Tucker Carlson guest who has worked with Turning Point USA, Steve Bannon, and Infowars — even served as a witness for Rittenhouse’s defense.

Since the Kenosha shooting, Rittenhouse has turned into a conservative icon and used his new platform to advocate for other vigilantes. Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight in April, Rittenhouse and Carlson petitioned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to pardon Daniel Perry, another right-wing media darling who was found guilty of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in July 2020 after prosecutors revealed a history of messages in which he called protesters “monkeys” and threatened to kill them.

With a campaign of support behind him, Penny has joined the ranks of George Zimmerman, Travis and Gregory McMichael, Andrew Lester, Byron Smith, and various vigilante patrols and right-wing militias whose extrajudicial violence has been excused by conservative media.

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// wilding central pk 5?

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-goes-unhinged-racist-rant-prowling-blacks-go-around-fun-go-target-white

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mma 5 23 no vid

Right-wing media figures are celebrating both Florida’s expansion of the death penalty for people who have sexually assaulted children as well as the extrajudicial homicide of Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man killed by a white former Marine on the New York City subway on May 1. The two stories illustrate a growing trend in right-wing media to argue that the deaths of marginalized and criminalized populations are not only justified but actually desirable, whether those killings are carried out by the state or by vigilantes.

Bloodlust is nothing new in right-wing media. From the proto-fascist Father Charles Coughlin through Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, conservative pundits and writers frequently fantasize about violence aimed at their political opponents or marginalized people. In 1989, Donald Trump, who was a media personality for decades before entering politics, called for the execution of the wrongly convicted Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers railroaded into false confessions by the New York Police Department. The conservative ecosystem made a celebrity of Kyle Rittenhouse — who killed two people and injured a third during an August 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and tried to justify the killings of Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, and Eric Garner. 

Building on this history of right-wing calls for state-sanctioned and extrajudicial violence, there now appears to be an increasing frequency of calls from conservative media for their enemies to be put to death. Much of this new intensity has been driven by the two leading hopefuls in the Republican presidential primary, Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Trump has called for expanding the death penalty to include people convicted of selling illicit drugs to someone who later overdoses, an idea he has bandied about for years. He also engaged in a “killing spree” in his final months in office, carrying out 13 federal executions in six months, according to recent reporting from Rolling Stone — “more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined.”

But DeSantis has recently captured the right-wing media’s attention with a bill he signed earlier this month that would make convicted child rapists eligible for the death penalty. The new law violates Supreme Court precedent set in Kennedy v. Louisiana, a 5-4 decision in 2008 that found that the death penalty can’t be applied in the case of the rape of a child that didn’t result in murder. Legal challenges to the new Florida law are widely expected.

Conservative media figures cheered on DeSantis’ signing of the bill, often in language mirroring anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that is now ubiquitous on the right. Over the last year, right-wing media have revived a longstanding myth that LGBTQ people are dangers to children, frequently referring to them as “groomers” or pedophiles and endorsing violence targeting their events and communities. Conservative commentators have adopted eliminationist rhetoric toward trans people, openly calling for them to be expelled from public life entirely.

Matt Walsh: “Just execute them all”

It’s in this context that the right-wing media response to DeSantis’ bill needs to be understood, as typified by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh[vid]

"On the merits of this legislation, it's clearly the right thing,” Walsh began on his May 2 show. “The idea that you can only have — we can only impose capital punishment on someone who kills another person, it's completely arbitrary. There's no, nowhere is that written in the heavens. Certainly the opposite. I mean, if we want to talk about biblical precedent, then that's not biblical precedent.”

Walsh then indulged in an extended thought experiment about having to choose between which types of convicted criminals should be executed, happily concluding that the state doesn’t in fact need to make that choice and should be killing many more people.

“If we have this weird rule that we've imposed on ourselves that we can only execute one, either murderers or child rapist, like if we had to choose between those two categories of people to execute, then I would say, well, if we don't do one, then I'd probably murder the — I'd probably execute, rather — execute legally the child rapist,” Walsh said. “But in fact, we don't have to choose. You know, that's the wonderful thing.”

“We don't have to make choices. We can execute all of them,” he continued. “We should be able to, anyway. Execute all the worst people, all of the worst criminals. Just execute them all. And this is the right first step. There's a lot more that needs to be done. I mean, this is actual criminal justice reform.”

Walsh further justified his desire to drastically ramp up executions on the grounds that the people he wants killed are drains on society, and he argued that their sentences should be carried out with no appeals process.

“Because the other thing about these worst, you know, the worst of the worst, the people that commit heinous, the most heinous sorts of crimes like child rape — well, they are so evil and so monstrous that even the other criminals in prison don't want to be around them,” Walsh argued. “Which means that we don't put them in the general population. So then they are in protective custody. So we're spending more money, society is spending more money just to keep these absolute lowest-of-the-low dirtbags alive.”

“I would say that along with everything else, it is an unjust and undue burden on society. You know, as a taxpayer, I should not be required to keep child rapists alive just because we're too squeamish to execute them as we should,” he continued. “And if we're really starting to understand that society — if we're really starting to reform the system, you know, then we're going to start talking about not only are we executing these people, but we're doing it quickly. We're not giving them 30 years to appeal, OK? The conviction is passed down, you're convicted, you're guilty, you've been found guilty, and then the execution is carried out the next day — how about, carried out at dawn following the conviction.”

Walsh recently argued that the punishment for a false rape accusation should be life in prison, and also implied that he’d be in favor of the death penalty for convicted rapists and those he refers to as “false accusers.”

“I think that actually guilty and convicted rapists should go to prison for life,” Walsh said on his May 9 show. “I'd be in favor of life sentences, at a minimum, for actual rapists. And I would be in favor of life sentences for those who falsely accuse someone of rape because to falsely accuse someone of rape is just as bad as being a rapist. There is no moral distinction between the two.”

Michael Knowles: “I think it’s quite natural, biblical”

Also on May 2, Walsh’s Daily Wire colleague Michael Knowles addressed DeSantis’ bill, supporting it “in principle” but not “in practice."

[vid]

"Ron DeSantis says we’re challenging that now if you rape a child, pretty much the most heinous crime you can imagine, you get the death penalty. I totally agree with that in principle,” Knowles said. “I see no problem with that in principle. I see no problem with the death penalty in principle. In fact, I think it's quite natural, biblical.”

Knowles later clarified that the law could create unintended consequences, which gave him pause.

“I don't actually agree with this particular instantiation of the death penalty in practice,” he said. “In principle, I do. But in practice, the only reason I don't is that as a matter of prudence, if you don't kill child rapists, if you, if the punishment is not execution, then it creates some incentive for the rapist not to murder his victim. So if there's any way that through the law, we can incentivize a rapist not to murder his victim, I think that's probably wise and prudent. In principle, they deserve death, certainly.”

After attempting to thread that needle, Knowles made it clear that the way this policy cashed out would be beneficial for DeSantis in a potential 2024 presidential run.

“Broadly speaking, ‘execute pedos’ is a very popular campaign slogan,” he concluded.

Alex Jones to Steven Crowder: “Hang them in the public square” as a deterrent because “these damn predators are everywhere”

Walsh and Knowles are hardly alone in his violent impulses. On the same day the two Daily Wire personalities delivered their blood-soaked monologues, Steven Crowder hosted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Rumble show and the two also discussed the new Florida law with nearly identical rhetoric [vid]

"I think this is good news to celebrate, right, some actual good news here,” Crowder said to introduce the segment. “Monday, Ron DeSantis — this is really good news — signed a bill that’s going to allow the death penalty for child rapists.”

Crowder played a clip of DeSantis celebrating the bill’s passage and then returned to continue his discussion with Jones.

“First off, you rape a child, you deserve to — you forfeit your right to live,” Crowder said. “You deserve to die actually, not forfeit your right to live. You play the knockout game, you forfeit your right to live because someone has the right to defend themselves. You rape a child, in my opinion, you deserve to die.”

Jones responded, making typically unhinged remarks about supposedly lax liberal state law.

“I think this is good also because it goes against laws in California that they're trying to pass — they passed one where you can have sex with a 12-year-old, you can give people HIV and it's not a felony,” Jones said. “I mean, they're trying to normalizethis, the U.N. is trying to normalize this. That's a very strong message we're not going to allow this.” (In 2017, California reduced penalties related to the transmission of HIV, in accordance with public health best practices; it is not legal in the state for an adult to have sex with a 12-year-old.)

“I think if you're caught with evidence that you did it and it's irrefutable, there should be a high burden of proof, but if it's proven I say we take those people out after they've been given their jury trial, we hang them in the public square and let all the other pedophiles know you do this, you're dead,” Jones added.

“Yep,” Crowder replied.

“These damn predators are everywhere,” Jones continued.

“No, you're absolutely right,” Crowder agreed. “I don't think there's any greater evil. And by the way, all societies have recognized that since the beginning of time.”

The two ended the segment by distilling their argument: “Just to be really clear though, to go back and end on the point — someone who rapes someone 12 years old or younger, hang them in the town square?” Crowder said.

“Yes,” Jones responded. “If an adult rapes a child and there’s proof, we kill them.”

Right-wing media agree that the ex-Marine who killed Jordan Neely is a “hero”

In calling for the public execution of people convicted of sexual battery of a child, Crowder’s initial phrasing was nearly identical to the way he characterized the killing of Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man, by Daniel Penny, a white Marine veteran, on the New York City subway on May 1.

“You start going crazy in a subway car and attack people for the umpteenth time —we don't know if he was attacking there, but we know that people felt attacked, and we do know that he attacked people before in the sub — you do forfeit your right to live,” Crowder said. “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one — completely, by the way, not of their own volition; you've put them in that scenario — you forfeit your right to live.”

Right-wing commentators almost universally praised Penny’s actions, and several went even further than Crowder, referring to him as a hero.

Racist-policing apologist Heather Mac Donald of conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute was typically effusive in her praise of Penny, who she suggested was justified in carrying out the role of law enforcement.

Right-wing commentators almost universally praised Penny’s actions, and several went even further than Crowder, referring to him as a hero.

“For these activists now to be playing the race card here is preposterous, but if the government is unwilling to protect its citizens, you are going to have a certain degree of vigilante justice,” Mac Donald said on the podcast of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “And this guy, as far as I'm concerned, from what we know now, is an urban hero.”

“And if Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brings some sort of criminal charge against him, there should be a public uprising, because the reason he was there is because Alvin Bragg refuses to enforce the law against turnstile jumping.”

Fox & Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy made the same argument.

“I think it’s really important as a culture, we need to send very clear messages about how we, what we feel about heroes who step in and protect people in need,” she said. “Now imagine being in that car. You know, we raise our boys to step in and protect those who are vulnerable. But when moms see this, see someone now facing prison time for trying to protect those who are weaker, it makes us wonder: Do we want our kids to be the guy that steps in and protects people or do we want our men in our culture to be the guys who just film crimes on their cell phones?”

Later on the show, Fox News contributor Leo Terrell echoed Campos-Duffy.

“Jordan was a erratic person who had a history of erratic behavior, but you also have other individuals restraining this individual,” Terrell said. “There is no intent and that Marine is a hero. A hero.”

The list goes on. Both Walsh and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, called Penny a “hero.” So did rape apologist Mike Cernovich and Scott Adams, the openly racist creator of the comic strip Dilbert. Federalist contributor Peachy Keenan (a pseudonym) referred to Penny as an example of “the bravest and most selfless heroes.” PragerU founder Dennis Prager read approvingly from a tweet by cryptofascist online personality Aimee Terese calling Penny a “hero” as well.

“That’s correct,” Prager said. “They don’t want that ethos to catch on. They want a nation of cowards.”

The accolades continued and even escalated after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Penny with second-degree manslaughter, including from the faux high-brow organs of conservative commentary. Echoing a tweet from Gov. DeSantis, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board referred to Penny as one of the “good samaritans,” and worried that “the charges against him will surely deter other potential samaritans from intervening to subdue a seemingly dangerous person or even to stop a robbery or assault.”

At The New York Times, conservative Trump critic David French posed a related counterfactual designed to exonerate, or at least excuse, Penny. “What if Penny had done nothing? Would everyone — including Neely — have emerged from that subway car unscathed?” French wrote. “We can’t know for certain, and that lack of certainty creates the conditions for violence.”

Fox News’ on-air talent uniformly praised Penny. Ingraham responded to the charges by calling Penny a “hero,” and saying he “deserves our thanks.” The Five’s Greg Gutfeld called Bragg’s decision “pro-criminal, anti-hero.” A day later on the same program, Fox News’ Will Cain said “this was not just reasonable behavior by Daniel Penny, but potentially heroic behavior by Daniel Penny. Our society, to be absolutely clear, needs more Daniel Pennys.” On America’s Newsroom, Fox’s Geraldo Rivera predicted Neely’s death would be ruled a “justifiable homicide,” implicitly endorsing that conclusion.

Others in right-wing media joined in as well. YouTube streamer Tim Pool tweeted that he donated $20,000 to a fundraiser supporting Penny, referring to him as the “Subway Good Samaritan.”

Walsh openly celebrated Neely’s death, calling the victim “a terrible person.”

“The community is better off without him — like, everyone is safer without him” Walsh said. “This community, pretending to mourn — you are better off without this guy. You’re all safer because he’s gone.”

This list is illustrative of the conservative media response, and their collective, reflexive justification and celebration of a white person killing a person of color extends far beyond Neely’s death.

Conservatives defend, justify extrajudicial killings not officially sanctioned by the state

Recent examples abound. In April, Carlson and Rittenhouse urged Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted that month and sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Other Fox News stars soon got on board, and Abbott has now promised to pardon him.

In Arizona, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, currently running for Senate, has on at least two recent occasions defended a white person killing someone who isn’t white on the grounds that the shooter was simply exercising theirproperty rights.

On April 21, Lamb attempted to justify Andrew Lester’s shooting of Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old, in an appearance on a white nationalist show. Lester, who is white, “was trying to protect his property, stand his ground,” Lamb said. “You know, he felt that his life was in danger. He took some action and now he's being persecuted.”

Lamb made an almost identical argument to excuse Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly’s lethal shooting of a migrant who he believed was trespassing. Speaking on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in February, Lamb said the episode looked like “self-defense,” adding, “We have the ability to protect our properties.”

“What right do they have to protect their property?” Lamb continued. “If he feared for his life, and the life of his wife, or the life of somebody else, or feared serious physical injury, then that certainly falls within the justification of using deadly force, whether they’re armed or not.”

Lamb then claimed that “criminals are not being held accountable,” but “then a good citizen does something like this to protect his property and he’s held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.” He then described Kelly as “this poor old guy” and someone who “seems like a very nice guy.”

From Mississippi burning to the police killing of Tyre Nichols

The above examples don’t even touch on right-wing media apologia for police violence, which is reflexive and ubiquitous. Conservative pundits responded to video of Memphis police beating to death Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, by pushing for more police power and autonomy and blaming Nichols for his death. Mac Donald, the Manhattan Institute police propagandist, argued without evidence that Nichols could’ve been on drugs, as though that would have justified his killing.

Taken together, all of these examples underscore a point The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer made in 2018: “The cruelty is the point.” The reactionary desire to enact vengeance winds throughout U.S. history, braiding state and extrajudicial violence together, linking the first and second formations of the Ku Klux Klan to white citizens councils to Jim Crow to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential announcement at the site of the 1964 killing of three civil rights activists.

The viciousness that right-wing media are expressing now isn’t new, but their growing comfort with openly cheering for the deaths of their political opponents and marginalized people is an alarming trend. When conservative media figures proclaim their desire to “just execute them all,” we should take it very seriously.

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ANDREW KLAVAN (HOST): I also want to say something about Memphis. And if you live in Memphis and you love it there, forgive me. I was there for one day. I'm sure there were many lovely parts of it. All I know is it was one of the ugliest American cities I have ever seen - not in terms of structure, but in terms of the people on the ground.

I wanted to see the jazz clubs and I was told in my hotel, you can't go there at night. And I said, well, who's going to a jazz club during the day? I took a walk to see the area where the jazz clubs were, and I was afraid. I was afraid for my safety. A lot of, like, lurking, you know, sullen, baleful, thuggish people, all of whom were Black. And I think all of us know that there are many, many neighborhoods in urban cities, in urban areas with -- that are Black neighborhoods that are bad. They are bad neighborhoods, and many of these neighborhoods are dangerous. And there -- there's a whole subculture, you know, because a lot of Black people, thank heavens, have moved out of that subculture. But there's a subculture of places that where you don't want to be, because they're Black.

And why is that happening? We don't know why. There are different theories. Different people have different theories. So the left says it's history. It's a history of slavery. It's the history of racism. There are other people, Charles Murray says there's a genetic element involved. I myself don't really buy into either of those theories. I believe that it's policy, because Blacks were rising until the Great Society, the Lyndon Johnson Great Society programs, which I believe unintentionally destroyed the Black family, which made everybody more prone to crime and also taught people to be dependent on government largesse unless they were smart and disciplined and driven, then they got out and they left behind the people who are hurt by those programs.

...

You know, when I was talking about Memphis, those people, all of whom were Black and that who were threatening looking, if one of them moved in next to me I would sell my house and move away. Why? Because of the color of skin? Obviously not. I live in a neighborhood where there are plenty of people of color, that that's not the thing. It's because of the behavior, right? It's because of the way that people -- that guy acts and probably the things he does. I mean, I could tell these were not good people.

So, you know, and then they call it white flight. But is it -- are you fleeing because you're white and they're Black, or are you fleeing because of actions and principles? These are things that should be discussed in this country, but they are not being discussed because too many people have a stake in making sure this is purely a racial issue with one explanation, which doesn't make sense.

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A new report from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism reveals that all extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists. More than four out of five extremist-related murders last year were committed by white supremacist right-wing extremists.The report finds that nearly all extremist-related mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, and warns the number of those mass murders "is of growing concern."

"All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds," the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) reports, "who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012)."

"Left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence."

RELATED:Watch: Club Q Owner Testifies Before Congress About 'Hundreds' of Messages of Hate He Received After Anti-LGBTQ Attack

The report adds: "White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists. Again, this is primarily due to mass shootings. Only one of the murders was committed by a right-wing anti-government extremist—the lowest number since 2017."

Last year, COE notes, "domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S., in 12 separate incidents. This represents a decrease from the 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021 and is comparable to the 22 extremist-related murders in 2020. It continues the recent trend of fewer extremist-related killings after a five-year span of 47-78 extremist-related murders per year (2015-2019)."

The Associated Press, pointing to the "especially high number" of extremist killings "linked to white supremacy" reports they "include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black shoppers dead and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado."

READ MORE: Watch: Alaska GOP Lawmaker Says It's a 'Benefit to 'Society' When 'Child Abuse Is Fatal' Because There’s a 'Cost Savings'

The "main threat in the near future will likely be white supremacist shooters, the report found," The AP adds. "The increase in the number of mass killing attempts, meanwhile, is one of the most alarming trends in recent years, said Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal."

In a separate article on that LGBT nightclub mass shooting, Club Q, also published Thursday, the AP reports the "22-year-old accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in November ran aneo-Nazi websiteand used gay and racial slurs while gaming online, a police detective testified Wednesday."

"Anderson Lee Aldrich also posted an image of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade and used a bigoted slur when referring to someone who was gay, Detective Rebecca Joines said."

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// gamergate incursion?

https://www.mediamatters.org/google:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:**/newsmaxs-benny-johnson**:{-:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{black-national-anthem-should-be-illegal-:(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}::{you-shouldnt-be-able-do-there

https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-complains-about-all-women-flyover-during-super-bowl

https://www.mediamatters.org/health-care/anti-choice-figures-twist-rihannas-pregnancy-and-powerful-super-bowl-performance-anti

https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/daily-wire-host-complains-about-lift-every-voice-and-sing-performance-super-bowl-it-libs

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https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-says-gang-racist-foaming-mouth-black-people-are-coming-your-family-advises

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5 blk cops elite all fired 150 lb superhuman energy

brutal video near house called mom

Newsmax guest reacts to Tyre Nicholsvideos: “It's Black on Black crime”

01/28/23 10:31 AM EST

Fox News guest blames Black single mothers for the killing of Tyre Nichols

01/27/23 9:11 PM EST

Tucker Carlson says white people are victims of “racial hatred” amid coverage of Tyre Nichols killing

01/27/23

01/27/23

Tucker Carlson says white people are victims of “racial hatred” amid coverage of Tyre Nichols killing

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So, whatever you think of them, white people did not play any role in this particular tragedy.Whatever this story may be about, it's not about racial bias. Any honest person could see that immediately. But you would never know it from watching the so-called news coverage of this tape today. The only person whose race most media outlets identified was the victim. "Another unarmed black man murdered by the police," they said.

Moments ago on MSNBC, they just described what you just saw as white supremacy. Really? How? CNN's Van Jones did acknowledge that the police who hit Tyre Nichols were black, but, "they might still have been driven by racism." Van Jones didn't take the time to explain how. It was a lie, of course.

They're all lying, and Joe Biden himself, the president of the United States, swiftly reinforced that lie.Referring to an event in which every single participant -- and their supervisors -- was the same color, Biden lectured the United States that "fatal encounters with law enforcement have disparately impacted black and brown people."

So the one thing we know, no matter how you feel about the video, most people don't think that's right. But the one thing we know for sure is that there is a highly aggressive propaganda campaign underway tonight, designed to manipulate you, and using the sad death of a young man in Memphis to do it. That propaganda campaign, like all propaganda campaigns, is, by definition, dishonest.

But it's more than that. It's worse than that. This is yet another attempt by our leaders of our country to inflame racial hatred in the United States.

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Fox News host Jesse Watters says Tyre Nichols was killed because “police tactics have been hamstrung”

01/27/23 8:00 PM EST

Fox News host demands representation of “the cops’ perspective” on the killing of Tyre Nichols

01/27/23 5:53 PM EST

Facebook caved to right-wing media demands to reinstate Trump. They keep attacking the platform anyway

01/27/23 5:29 PM EST

Fox host justified conspiracies about attack on Paul Pelosi because “Democrats have a tendency to ... not be transparent”

01/27/23 2:13 PM EST

Fox News guest suggests societal “treatment of police” contributed to Tyre Nichols' killing

01/27/23

mma

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an 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/send/desantis-ap-history/

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aha yikes used to be k12? see campus free sp BS

an maya 1 23

Amid his attempt to ban race-related conversations from higher education classrooms, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis distributed a memo requesting course data from state colleges that teach “diversity, equity and inclusion,” reports ABC News.

The request comes after a judge recently temporarily blocked the passing of the governor’sStop WOKE (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which would ban race-related coursework, also known as critical race theory (CRT) from college and university classrooms.

In a statement from his office regarding the proposed law, DeSantis said, "No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida."

READ MORE:'Tone of humility': Florida columnist issues dire warning to Ron DeSantis

Those who support DeSantis’ law believe CRT is “discriminatory” and that students should not learn about the history of oppression and privilege in the U.S.

Critical race theory — taught in mostly graduate school programs, and not K-12 classrooms — according to The Brookings Institution, asserts that “U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race.”

ProPublica recently reported that DeSantis referred to the Stop WOKE Act as the “the strongest legislation in the nation against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.”

On the other hand, those who adamantly disagree with the law say it restricts free speech. Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali called it “a racist dog whistle but with a facially neutral cover.”

READ MORE:'Cold War' getting 'hotter and hotter' as Trump and DeSantis conflict comes to light

The memo says, “Governor Ron DeSantis has prioritized a cost-effective higher education system that delivers high-quality service to Floridians to best prepare them for employment.” It continues, “Additionally, state law requires dutiful attention to curriculum content at our higher education systems.”

A State University System of Florida Board of Governors representative said all 12 colleges confirmed receipt of the governor’s memo, according to ABC. And each institution is required to submit requested data by Friday, January 13.

READ MORE:How 'authoritarian' Ron DeSantis has made Florida a 'laboratory of fascist politics': scholar

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steven-crowder/blazes-steven-crowder-launches-vile-personal-attacks-brittany-griner-shes-not-best

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-attacks-brittney-griner-drug-addict-america-hating-criminal-who

“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander claims he was “offered a job at Twitter in 2018”

12/09/22 9:03 AM EST

Tucker Carlson claims Joe Biden wants Paul Whelan to remain imprisoned in Russia because he's white

12/08/22 9:03 PM EST

Fox News host says hostage exchange for Brittney Griner “should never have been made, ever”

12/08/22 8:01 PM EST

Washington Post columnist criticizes hostage exchange that freed Brittney Griner, claims it will “create more hostage-taking”

12/08/22 7:37 PM EST

Elon Musk reinstates Twitter accounts of proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer and bigoted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone

12/08/22 5:57 PM EST

Matt Walsh: Brittney Griner will “return to us more committed to her own self-victimization and personal resentments than ever before”

12/08/22 4:49 PM EST

Timcast contributor gives full-throttle endorsement of Ye for president

12/08/22 3:29 PM EST

Dana Loesch: If other American prisoners in Russia “were as anti-American as Brittney Griner” then “maybe they'd be released a hell of a lot quicker”

12/08/22 3:24 PM EST

Charlie Kirk: “If you're a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine?”

12/08/22 2:40 PM EST

Right-wing media praised Herschel Walker’s decision to double down on anti-trans attacks before he lost the Georgia Senate election

12/08/22 2:25 PM EST

Climate deniers gain traction on Elon Musk's Twitter

12/08/22 2:15 PM EST

The Blaze's Steven Crowder launches vile personal attacks on Brittany Griner: “She's not the best among us”

12/08/22

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aftershock docu on AA mom mortality 3-4x

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going for rehab

aha:  sins were pre-trumpista, and gt replac now central; dodge racism by saying for POC not problem, just their culture (and presumably religion

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-scrapes-bottom-barrel-friendly-interview-steve-king-one-most-racist

Fox News’ top star Tucker Carlson recently interviewed former U.S. Rep. Steve King on his subscription-only show, offering the disgraced politician an opportunity to defend himself after racist remarks he made to The New York Times in 2019 torpedoed his political career.

The almost-hour-long conversation aired on Tucker Carlson Today on Fox Nation, the network’s streaming platform that has invested heavily in Carlson-branded content. Carlson also hosts a documentary-style series available on Fox Nation, in addition to his regular cable show hosting duties. King appeared on the long-form, conversational show to plug a book he published earlier this year detailing his downfall and exile from the Republican Party after losing his primary in 2020. King spent the entire time either denying, downplaying, or justifying his various bigoted remarks over the years, as Carlson nodded along and interjected to praise the former congressman.

King had previously appeared on Fox News 14 times since 2017, including 6 appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, sometimes for clean-up interviews after pushing white nationalist talking points. King hasn't been on the show in years, but Carlson defended him throughout his various scandals. After the then-congressman tweeted that Americans “can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” (and then later doubled down on the statement), Carlson hosted him on Fox News, saying, “Everything you said I think is defensible and probably right.”

King has a long history of making racist remarks, dating back to at least 2002. “They just want to have this equivalency of multicultural and they say every culture is equal,” he told local news outlet Cleveland.com during the Republican National Convention in 2016, referring to his critics. “Well, every culture has not equally contributed to the civilization we have today."

Then, in 2019, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel interviewed King for a piece that framed him as a precursor to Donald Trump. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King said in the interview, as reported by Gabriel. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?"

King disputed the quote, saying he had been referring to “western civilization” when he posed the question about offensive language, rather than “white nationalist” or “white supremacist,” according to follow-up reporting in the Times.

Before Carlson even laid out that context for his audience, he began the interview by praising King effusively, after calling most politicians “sick” and “screwed up people.

11/10 [vid]

"So if you come across someone who's actually a good person, like a decent person who cares about other people, who loves other people on a basic level, you remember,” Carlson gushed. “And Steve King of Iowa was always that guy."

Carlson then made an allusion to the racist great replacement theory, which both he and King have repeatedly espoused. “You were always a, not a crazy, but like an immigration restrictionist,” Carlson said. “Like, we should take care of the people who already live here before we, like, just replace them with new people, because that’s our duty as a government."

Carlson then defended the comments King made to Cleveland.com and CNN, beginning by playing tape of both. [vid]

"I’m just going to start with that intro comment and then let you tell the story,” Carlson said. “Maybe times have changed a lot, but those seem like — that’s not hate, those are obvious observations.”

“A healthy civilization has kids, and a healthy civilization is proud of itself, and every civilization is the product of certain cultures,” he continued. “Those are not white supremacist positions, those are like obvious positions.”

King explained himself by describing the political context at the time, summarizing the widespread, xenophobic fear of Muslims and other people from the Middle East migrating to European countries.

“The ‘somebody else’s babies’ were the young men – 80% of them that were pouring into Europe at the time, horizon to horizon and shoulder to shoulder on gravel roads, pouring into Europe by the thousands daily —I went and walked with them,” King said.

“They were somebody else’s babies 18 and 20 years ago,” he continued. “And so it’s too late for them, they’ve already bring their culture with them.”

Later in the conversation, Carlson gave King an opportunity to challenge the Times’ reporting that led to party leadership stripping him of his committees and his eventual loss to a primary challenger. King described talking with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), arguing his remarks had been misconstrued and that he had simply been defending “Western civilization.”

“I brought with me a sheet of paper on what I believed was said in that interview — there’s no tape and there’s no notes,” King said. “I said, ‘There’s a separation between these two odious ideologies, a pause and separation between white nationalism and white supremacy – I’m defending Western civilization.’”

The Times stood by its reporting, and even on King’s own terms, the phrase “Western civilization” is frequently used as a dog whistle to signal racist beliefs that at the very least heavily imply an adherence to white supremacy.

King’s loss in 2020 relegated him to the dustbin of U.S. politics, at least for now. Even before his defeat, his open racism was something of an embarrassment to Republicans, because of not what he said but how he said it. To Carlson, however, King is the victim. Toward the end of the interview, King claimed that the few members of the Republican Party who had stood by him were scorned and punished for it.

“It almost feels hopeless,” Carlson said, shaking his head sadly. “Becausethat kind of cowardice just abets evil. It really does.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/liberal-democracys-enemy-is-white/

10 22

The Times is virtuosic not only for its ability to bring us news from around the world, but for its ability to talk about the politics of white power without mentioning “white,” “power,” “politics,” “the” or “of” in any combination – or those benefitting from its built-in advantages.

In the absence of a vocabulary that might otherwise accurately characterize the political landscape that we inhabit, it invented a value-free vernacular to do two things: avoid talking about the white people who are most afraid of losing their built-in advantages to the rise of liberal democracy; and two, avoid talking about, to any serious degree, the real consequences of what they will do to protect them.

Case in point is a news report published in the Sunday Times with this hed – “Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated” – and this dek – “The white majority is fading, the economy is changing and there’s a pervasive sense of loss in districts where Republicans fought the outcome of the 2020 election.”

READ MORE: The GOP's foremost concern is the protection of white power

The content of the piece is familiar. White people feel anxiety about changes to the American national character. Those changes are rooted in demographics, economics, religion and culture. But the details of the story, which I’m not bothering to recount, are not important compared to its broad contours, which are this: white people don’t like change so they’re voting for the Republicans.

But “change” and “loss” and “the economy” – as well as “working class” and “middle American” and “non-college voter” – are words in the Times’ value-free vernacular, that others replicate, that obscures who is doing what to whom. For that, we must turn to the pull quotes, as we journalists call them. Here they are in order of appearance:

One: “In Fort Bend County, Texas, things are changing.”

Two: “Mosques and Hindu temples draw thousands, farmland is giving way to suburbs and some Republicans feel their county is becoming more like majority-minority Houston.”

READ MORE: How a radical third of the electorate dictates the terms of American democracy

Three: “Once predominantly white, Fort Bend has quickly become one of the most diverse places in the country. Its congressman is an outspoken denier of Donald J. Trump’s defeat.”

If there is a way of saying that white people in Fort Bend County, Texas, are prepared to go to war with liberal democracy in order to protect the political advantages built into the politics of white power, these three quotes, in order of appearance, are the closest we’ll get.

That is, unless an authoritative source of spells it out:

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated, white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority-majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

'A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,' she said, 'because they see it as a way to protect their status.'

Actually, that’s close but not close enough.

The face of liberal democracy’s enemy is white.

Perry Bacon doesn’t go that far, but the Post’s columnist has come the closest, as far as I can tell, to naming names. Most Republicans are white, he wrote recently. White people dominate the electorate. Most white people, by way of supporting the GOP’s assault on democracy, and are doing so without being held accountable by the press. Bacon:

Because white people are likely to be the majority of voters for at least two more decades, America is in trouble. Across the country, GOP officials are banning books from public libraries, making it harder for non-Republicans to vote, stripping away Black political power, aggressively gerrymandering, censoring teachers and professors and, most important, denying the results of legitimate elections. The majority of America’s white voters are enabling and encouraging the GOP’s radical, antidemocratic turn by continuing to back the party in elections.

It’s not, as much of our political discourse implies, that the Democrats have a working-class or Middle America or non-college-voter problem. The more important story is that America has a white voter problem. And there is no sign it’s going away anytime soon.

An apparent counterpoint is that white people are not afraid of losing the built-in advantages of white power so much as afraid of the rising costs of energy, groceries and so on. These are much-talked-about “kitchen table” issues that are always presented as if they have nothing to do with the political landscape that we all inhabit.

Economic issues are cited, by the far right and far left, as reason for Donald Trump’s election and the rise of redhat fascism around the country. But when you look closer, even “race-free” concepts like inflation and “being left behind” are rooted in white power politics.

Kevin Seefried and his son Hunter were sentenced to two years in federal prison Monday for their role in Donald Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover, on January 6, 2021, of the US government. Kevin Seefried became a household name after a photo (above) circulated of him carrying a Confederate flag into the US Capitol.

Jeremi Suri recounts the moment in the introduction of his latest work of American history, Civil War by Other Means:

Like many others in the mob, Seefried brought his son, Hunter, to the insurrection. It was a proud moment for a father who had spent many of his years in and out of work, living in an economically depressed area two hours from the Capitol. He and his son were taking back their country, showing that they could make a difference, standing up for fellow working-class families who felt forgotten. They would not accept a president elected by nonwhite voters. The Confederate flag was their battle flag.

It’s here that we get to the real meat of the issue – the real reason white people are prepared to abandon liberal democracy in order to protect their precious privileges built into our political system.

It’s not that they love their country. It’s not that they love the Constitution. Their opposition to liberal democracy, and all that it costs them politically, does not rest on positive principle.

It rests on laziness.

Most white people don’t want to compete.

They don’t want to compete for jobs, for resources or for political representation in a republican government of, by and for the people. They would rather use their already existing advantages to get out of working harder in the public square, the marketplace of ideas or a truly fair and level political economy. The Republicans are saying, in effect, vote for us. We’ll save you the effort of competing with people who are putting twice the effort into participating in a democracy.

That’s what truly frightened them after 2008.

“Sussex County, Delaware, where the Seefrieds resided in a rundown house, fit the pattern,” Suri wrote in Civil War by Other Means.

This rural region of chicken farms entered a tailspin that triggered higher crime and drug dependence, lower incomes, and diminished expectations for the future. Everything seemed to be going the wrong way, and the election of the first African American president in 2008 only made things feel worse. Barack Obama symbolized an emerging country that the Seefrieds believed they could never enter. They lacked the education and pedigree to compete in a multiracial meritocracy that promised so much for some, leaving many others out. Obama’s diverse supporters were winning, while the traditional white families in Sussex and other rural counties were not. The Seefrieds felt like losers (my italics).

Liberal democracy’s white-faced enemy is lazy.

That doesn’t mean they will fail in the coming congressional elections. The white-faced enemy has many things on its side.

Even the Times.

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an 822

the founder of a neo-Nazi terror network comprised of former military service members who sought to create a base in Idaho appears to be talking to federal prosecutors about a potential plea deal.

Posting on Iron March — a now-defunct global online forum for accelerationist neo-Nazis — in 2017, Liam Montgomery Collins wrote, “I live in the Northeast, so I have a tightknit crew of ex-mil and security I train with. We do hikes, gym sessions, live firing exercises, and we eventually plan to buy a lot of land. Can’t really specify the name or details because it’s an inner-circle thing, but it will serve its purpose when the time comes.

“Think of it as a modern-day SS,” Collins added, referencing the elite corps of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.

It was through Iron March that Collins met Paul James Kryscuk, an actor who specialized in a subgenre of pornography that is degrading to women of color and helped him build theterror network that they called “BSN.”

Collins entered the Marine Corps in August 2017 and recruited fellow Marine Jordan Duncan and Justin Wade Hermanson while stationed at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina.

In 2020, Kyrscuk relocated from New York City to Boise, Idaho. Members of the network stalked Black Lives Matter members in Boise and held a live-fire training that attracted Joseph Maurino, an enlisted member of the New Jersey Army National Guard. Another member, Joseph Zacharek, joined the Lafayette, Ind. Police Department as a probationary recruit in the summer of 2020, and remained employed there for four months until he was doxed by an antifascist researcher and was fired.

In an Instagram chat on Oct. 1, 2020, Kryscuk and Duncan fantasized about shooting protesters in Boise, according to a federal indictment.

Duncan: “How the BSNs finna be pulling up to chipotle after hitting legs.”

Kryscuk: “Death squad…. Assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols.”

Duncan: “People freaking tf out.”

Kryscuck: “About what?”

Duncan: “The end of democracy.”

Kryscuk: “One can hope.”

When the FBI raided Kryscuk’s home in Boise in October 2020, they found a list of assassination targets that included Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, and a list of intersections that were consistent with power stations. The investigation revealed a plot to attack the power grid to create a blackout before undertaking an assassination campaign. A fourth Marine who joined BSN after serving in the same unit as Collins and Hermanson began cooperating with the authorities in October 2020, along with Zacharek, the former police officer, according to testimony by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Chris Little.

Kryscuk and Collins wereinitially charged with conspiracy to illegally manufacture and transport firearmsin October 2020. A superseding indictment the following month added Duncan and Hermanson as defendants. A second superseding indictment filed in June 2021 added Maurino as the fifth defendant. And in August 2021, a third superseding indictment expanded the charges to include conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.

Kryscuk and Hermanson accepted plea deals earlier this year that include agreements to cooperate with the government’s investigation and testify against their codefendants.In return for their cooperation, the two men could receive reductions from expected prison sentences of up to 15 years.

Collins was previously scheduled to be arraigned in the Eastern District of North Carolina on Sept. 6, but last week Chief District Judge Richard E. Myers agreed to push back the date to Nov. 1. The new date gives Collins and the government time to work out a deal.

In a motion filed on July 27, Collins' lawyer, Elliot S. Abrams, wrote, “Undersigned counsel has been in discussions with the government about a potential resolution of this matter. These discussions have been fruitful and undersigned counsel requests this additional time to continue discussions with the government regarding non-trial disposition.”

Duncan and Maurino, the two remaining defendants, are both currently scheduled to be arraigned in Wilmington on Sept. 20.

Kryscuk’s sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20 in Wilmington, while Hermanson’s sentencing is set for the Sept. 22 term.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/voter-fraud/

ProPublica

His last night as a prisoner in North Florida, Kelvin Bolton couldn’t sleep. Fifty-five years old, with a wispy goatee the same color as the gray flecks in his hair, he was about to get out after serving a 2 1/2-year sentence for theft and battery. The last time he’d seen his brothers and sisters at a big family gathering, he’d marched onto the dance floor ostentatiously, turned away and wrapped his arms around himself to caress his own back. As he swayed goofily to the music, everybody laughed.

Now Bolton was so close to being free and seeing his family again. The next morning, a bright Wednesday in April, he was already dressed in his street clothes and cleared to go when the woman processing his paperwork stopped him.

“The lady said, ‘Hold on, you can’t go anywhere,’” Bolton remembered in a recent phone call.

Confused, he asked her what was going on, he recalled. There was a warrant out for his arrest for incidents in 2020, she explained gruffly. But that was impossible. He’d been in jail at the time, awaiting his prison stint.

Guards loaded Bolton into a van, then drove an hour and a half south to deposit him in Alachua County Jail.

There, he found out what he’d done wrong.

He’d voted.

In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, in a historic ballot initiative that restored the right to vote to most state residents with felony convictions. Until then, Florida had been one of only four states — the others were Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia — where people who had committed felonies needed to petition the governor to have their voting rights restored. It was a grim legacy of 19th-century laws passed after the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote.

Supporters applauded the law as restoring voting rights to what experts estimate is over 1 million people in Florida, about 5% of the population of the state.

But the state’s dominant Republican lawmakers quickly installed a financial hurdle to those new rights. The following year, they passed a law to clarify that people convicted of felonies could only vote if they first paid off any money they owed for committing their crimes. The penalty for registering or voting without doing so: a felony charge for voter fraud.

On the surface, the mandate seemed reasonable: Even advocates for Amendment 4 agreed that requiring paying off fines and restitution to victims was just. In Florida, however, that task proved a sometimes insurmountable challenge — one that disproportionately hit Black people. Florida has no centralized database to allow people to figure out what legal financial obligations they owe to the state. Instead, its 67 counties and various state agencies each maintain their own databases. The state also does not track information for federal or out-of-state convictions, which people are also required to pay off before voting.

On top of the fines and restitution, Florida layers on court fees that can run into the hundreds of dollars. Together, a voter’s debt can run into the thousands, a financial hole that some may never climb out of.

“That’s kind of the bottom line of the absurdity of this — it’s Kafkaesque,” said Dan Smith, chair of the political science department at the University of Florida. “It’s very troubling that we would have state attorneys prosecuting individuals who did not know their status, and there was no way for them to determine their status.”

Florida’s voting hurdles are part of a national pattern. For years across the country, Republican state lawmakers have been implementing new restrictive voting laws, including reducing access to vote-by-mail ballots, stricter voter identification rules and limits on early voting. These efforts have accelerated since Donald Trump promoted the false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed to expand voting access.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that in 2020, Florida, a swing state with a history of contentious elections, “held the smoothest, most successful election of any state in the country,” while he also signed a flurry of voting law changes that he said would further strengthen the integrity of future votes. And DeSantis has tacitly endorsed prosecuting people convicted of felonies for voter fraud. In April, he signed a bill establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which will investigate alleged election violations.

Despite the increased scrutiny, voting fraud remains so rare in Florida that it hasn’t come close to altering election outcomes. The Florida Department of State in 2020 received 262 election fraud complaints, just 75 of which were referred to law enforcement or prosecuting authorities, according to the agency.

“Florida is an outlier, because the intentional targeting of citizens with felony convictions as a way to undermine democracy has been a throughline in that state,” said Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project. “And the attempt to address that, by popular vote, has been undermined by the legislature.”

In 2020, a representative of the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections conducted a series of outreach efforts at the local county jail to let inmates know of their new rights and offer to help them add their names to the voter rolls.

During three visits to the jail, the official helped sign up at least 10 inmates, including John Boyd Rivers, Dedrick Baldwin and Bolton.

Rivers, 44, felt a visceral thrill at the prospect. Sitting in his cell in February 2020 facing a battery charge for hitting his wife, he was told by the county representative that he could register to vote. The official, he said, told him that he could disregard the check box on the form that asks whether the applicant has a felony conviction because he didn’t have a disqualifying felony. That seemed odd to Rivers, since he had a previous felony conviction. (He subsequently was sentenced for the battery charge.) No one told him anything about needing to pay off his financial obligations before registering to vote, Rivers said, and the jail didn’t give him an accounting of those debts when he was later released.

Back at home, Rivers was excited when his voter registration card arrived in the mail. He’d lost his right to vote at 18, he said, after voting just once. Now he could vote in a presidential election. He and his wife went to their polling place, and he cast his vote for Donald Trump.

Bolton, too, was excited to sign up. He also said no one told him he’d need to pay off his debts before casting his ballot. Although he registered as a Republican, he said he decided to vote for Biden.

In all, 10 of the men who the official helped register to vote have been charged with voter fraud on the grounds they were ineligible.

Their alleged illegal voting was first spotted by a citizen who analyzed Florida’s voting rolls and then shared the information with the state. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement subsequently launched an eight-month investigation, after which it identified the 10 inmates.

State investigators found that some jail employees remembered the elections official giving clear directions to inmates about having to pay off financial obligations, while others did not. The investigation concluded that the jail visits were “lacking in both quality and longevity” and “showed a haphazard registration of inmates.” But the state prosecutor nevertheless proceeded with charges, although not against county officials.

Officials at the Alachua Supervisor of Elections office declined to comment to ProPublica. But Supervisor of Elections Kim Barton denied any wrongdoing in a statement released in June.

Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, defended his office’s prosecutions to ProPublica, saying he believed the 10 men knew they were committing fraud. “I’m not going to say I will prosecute or not prosecute because it’s politically popular or unpopular,” he said.

Four of the 10 have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to between 364 days and three years in prison. Bolton and three others have vowed to go to trial, while the remaining two await arraignment. They face charges that carry a penalty of up to five years in prison, five years of probation or $5,000 in fines. Eight of the men are Black, and two are white.

Critics say the charges are unjust and, at a bare minimum, excessive. In nearby Lake County, the state prosecutor declined to bring charges against sex offenders who had registered to vote despite the law prohibiting voting rights restoration for those charged with sex offenses or murder. In April, two white men living in The Villages in Sumter County, an overwhelmingly white county in central Florida, pleaded guilty to each casting two ballots for Donald Trump during the 2020 election. Rather than face prosecution, they entered a pretrial intervention program, under which they must serve 50 hours of community service and attend an adult civics class, among other requirements. Because the men in Alachua County have prior felony convictions, they are ineligible for pretrial intervention and face harsher sentences.

“I’m thinking I’m doing something good for the community, so that’s why I chose to try to do it,” Bolton said. “It was not malicious — I was not trying to commit a felony of voting fraud. I never would have voted.”

Baldwin, 47, who is in prison on a manslaughter conviction, was sentenced to an additional 364 days. He felt “set up,” he said, since nobody told him he wasn’t eligible.

“There’s no way Biden was that important to me to vote for him,” he said in an email to ProPublica from prison. “We were flat out tricked into voting.”

The elections official who visited the jail denied telling the men that they could disregard the check box and said he warned them that they’d need to pay off their financial obligations, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named because he feared reprisals. The elections official declined to comment to ProPublica on the record.

The voter fraud charges were especially bitter for Rivers. By the time they were filed, Rivers said, he had already used part of his federal stimulus check to pay off more than $3,000 in costs related to his criminal record so he could reinstate his driver’s license and return to work.

“I should have known there would be some kind of catch,” Rivers said.

Florida’s history of felon disenfranchisement dates back to 1838,when the state’s first constitution prohibited people convicted of bribery or assorted “high crimes and misdemeanors” from voting. After the Civil War, faced with the prospect of formerly enslaved Black men voting, the state expanded the law so that anyone convicted of a felony lost the franchise. But in 2018, 64% of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, allowing people convicted of felonies, except for murder or sexual offense convictions, to vote.

This embrace of new voters became more complicated the following year when the state legislature passed its law. It required that people convicted of felonies must determine their own eligibility before registering to vote. The Florida Department of Corrections and county detention facilities are required to provide notice to inmates at the time of their release of their outstanding financial obligations.

But it is unclear if all of the facilities do so.

Florida charges those convicted of crimes with an array of fines and fees, some of which statutorily cannot be eliminated or reduced. Defendants facing felony charges are assessed $100 to use a public defender, as well as a $100 prosecution fee. At least one person already sentenced in the Alachua County cases has been charged an additional $671 for his voting fraud charges on top of the financial obligations he already owed.

Finding out what someone owes is time-consuming and expensive. An analysis led by Traci Burch, a political science professor at Northwestern University, tried to determine the legal financial obligations owed by a random sample of 153 Florida residents convicted of felonies and found consistent information for only three of them. Counties often keep poor records, have cumbersome websites and employ unhelpful clerks.

What’s more, it can cost money merely to find out how much money you owe. Four in 10 Florida counties charged either a payment or processing fee to look at their databases, and 15% charged a fee to access certain records, according to Burch’s research.

In 2020, Smith, the Florida political scientist, estimated that just over 1 million people would be eligible to vote under Amendment 4. Of that number, about 77% had outstanding legal financial obligations, rendering them ineligible to vote under Florida’s new law until they paid their debts. Four out of five Floridians with felony convictions owed at least $500 in fines and fees, Smith’s analysis found. More than 59% owed more than $1,000.

The state legislature immediately disqualified about 750,000 people from being able to vote when it passed its law requiring people convicted of felonies to pay their debts first, Smith estimated. And the new law’s impact was felt much more harshly by Black people, who faced greater fines and fees: 26% of white Floridians with a felony conviction would be eligible to get their voting rights restored under the new requirement, but only 18% of Black people, according to Smith.

In May 2020, a district court judge ruled that parts of the law were unconstitutional and that the law had established a pay-to-vote system. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling the following September, saying it was in the state’s power to require the payoffs and the law didn’t violate people’s rights. The state Supreme Court has also issued an advisory opinion that deemed the law legitimate.

Unsurprisingly, the number of people with felony convictions who have registered to vote has fallen far short of what supporters hoped. More than 85,000 such people registered in Florida ahead of the 2020 election.

Supporters of the law say that it’s only fair to have people fulfill their full sentences, including paying any crime-related debts. Some state attorneys, including Kramer, the attorney prosecuting the Alachua cases, have also developed processes within their jurisdictions by which people with felony convictions can verify their voting eligibility or request to reduce their fines and fees.

Felons who have not yet registered to vote can also appeal to the state to have certain fees reduced or eliminated, said Republican State Sen. Jeff Brandes, the sponsor of the law demanding the payoffs before voting rights restoration.

“We truly believe there are people who are indigent that will just simply never be able to pay,” he said. “The court only collects a fraction of what is given out anyways. And so there should be a way for the state to grant some grace or for the court to grant some grace and provide people flexibility.”

Kelvin Bolton has been sitting in the Alachua Council Jail since April, waiting for his case to proceed.

He’s been in and out of the system since he was 16, piling up a long record of mostly nonviolent crimes, most recently for stealing a car, groping a woman in a store and taking cigarettes from a Dollar General.

He aims this time to keep a vow he made to his family and himself to stay straight. He said he is frustrated that the prosecutor subsequently created a program for people convicted of felonies to check their voting eligibility while he and the others are still facing charges.

“Why would they want to keep charging us for something that they’re in the wrong for?” he said. “The state is in the wrong for what they did to us.”

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an 7 222

lt Governor Dan Patrick, a far-right Republican, is comparing migrants crossing the border into Texas to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2335 people. He is calling it an “invasion” and says that gives the state the right to “put hands on people.”

Patrick, who because of Texas’ unique structure is more powerful than the governor, told Fox News on Tuesday, “we are being invaded, and if we’re being invaded under the constitution I think that gives us the power to put hands on people and send them back. Put hands on people and send them back,” he said repeatedly.

“These people are a danger to America,” Patrick said in a rant. It was unclear if he was referring to migrants or President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

READ MORE:

The Lt. Governor, who has hawked the racist “great replacement theory” repeatedly, and used the term “invasion” repeatedly, told Fox News that Texas is now spending $4 billion annually on the border, while Texas National Guardsmen and Texas Rangers complain of being called up to serve, having to abandon their regular jobs, for no apparent reason.

“This is the biggest danger we have, to your family,” Patrick says of the fentanyl crossing the border. “It’s all on Biden,” he claimed.

Last week Texas Governor Greg Abbott drew extensive criticism for using thedeaths of more than 50 migrants packed into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer as a political opportunity to attack President Biden. Even some conservatives attacked Abbott for his inhumane remarks..

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an 7 22

A new analysis is breaking down how Republican lawmakers and candidates are further contributing to the spread of dangerous rhetoric. From "replacement theories" to other conspiracy-driven rhetoric promoting misinformation, USA Today's Candy Woodall is shedding light on Republicans' increased use of aggressive ad campaigns.

Woodall wrote: "Experts who study language, rhetoric, and communication see a disturbing pattern between a string of violent incidents across the country and an increase in 'dangerous' language from Republican candidates and sitting GOP members of Congress in ads, social media posts, and speeches."

The Congressional reporter went on to highlight the issues withRepublican-backed political ads currently circulating as the 2022 midterm elections approach. "During the 2022 midterm cycle, more than 2,700 ads have aired on television and social media focusing on racist tropes, according to a compilation by America's Voice, a progressive immigration advocacy group," Woodall wrote.

She added, "More than 100 directly mentioned the racist Great Replacement Theory and 'invasion' language, accusing Democrats of deliberately encouraging migrants to cross the southern border illegally to replace white voters. And more than 300 ads cite critical race theory, claiming Democrats are trying to indoctrinate children with fake history lessons about systemic racism against Blacks, according to a USA TODAY analysis."

She went on to highlight some of Republicans' main focal points. "For example, the Republican candidates' claims that liberals were 'grooming' children by pushing for LGBTQI+ rights were repeated by the Proud Boys when the extremist street gang disrupted a drag queen story hour on June 11 in California."

Although these types of ads may prove to be effective among Republican voters, critics have also expressed concern about the toll they can take on America's society. Zachary Mueller, the political director for America's Voice, shared his projection of the problems that could arise in the near future. "Without a doubt, there are serious downstream violent consequences," said Mueller.

She also explained how this type of political strategy appears to be working in Republicans' favor although they are facing deep criticism for it as it has taken its toll on America's democracy. "It has become a political strategy," said Sophie Bjork-James, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an expert on race relations, "and it's working very well."

"Many historians and professors who study U.S. democracy place the blame of escalating rhetoric squarely on Republicans," Woodall wrote. "They say it is highly unusual for leaders of one of America's two major political parties to be engaging in, much less condoning, such dangerous and divisive speech."

"It elevates extreme views to a legitimacy they haven't had in the past," said Ziad Munson, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University. "Words that used to be in the fringes of political life are now part of major political campaigns."

The latest analysis comes just days after U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas weighed in on the department's efforts to monitor and surveil extremist groups.

"Individuals spurred by ideology of hate, false narratives, personal grievances, to acts of violence and it is that we respond to and we seek to of course prevent," Mayorkas said. "We are in a heightened threat environment." [vs prev DHS that ignored warnings/suppresed on white supr]

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/right-wing-keeps-suggesting-country/

no lnx vid

The right wing keeps suggesting that most of the country just doesn’t count

Former President Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2022 in Orlando, Florida on February 27, 2022, Wikimedia Commons]

Alex Henderson June 03, 2022

When Joe Biden was hitting the campaign trail in 2020, he bragged about how — during his decades in the U.S. Senate — he was able to work with right-wing Republicans, find common ground and get productive legislation passed. Many of today’s MAGA Republicans, in contrast, brag about refusing to compromise with Democrats and act as though millions of Democratic voters simply don’t exist or don’t matter.

That mindset was evident when Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club, made a June 2 appearance on One America News — a cable news outlet that’s known for promoting far-right conspiracy theories and prides itself on being to the right of Fox News and Fox Business. OAN’s Kara McKinney brought Wax on the show “Tipping Point,” which she hosts, to discuss gun control, and Wax’s comments went beyond the usual gun lobby and National Rifle Association (NRA) talking points.

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Wax told McKinney, “We certainly have a lower rate of mass shooting from many other countries across the world, and if you take out some of the big cities in the U.S. and the gang and drug-related instances of mass shootings, the United States is actually one of the safest places in the world. But of course, you know, the Democrats and the media are going to politicize and weaponize this issue because their end goal is to disarm law-abiding U.S. citizens and make us a less free country as a result.”

Watch below via Media Matters for America:

First, the U.S. is much more violent than countries in Europe are known for being. Residents of the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Sweden and many other European countries are horrified by how common mass shootings are in the U.S., where a May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas left 19 children and two teachers dead. It came less than two weeks after a May 14 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York that claimed ten lives.

Second, Wax’s comments showed total indifference to residents of major urban areas, many of whom vote Democrat. Those comments reflect a MAGA mindset that the concerns of voters don’t count if they live in large cities.

But Wax is hardly the only Republican who thinks that way. Just as Wax implied that voters who are worried about violence don’t count if they are urban dwellers, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana recently commented that his state’s high rate of maternal mortality isn’t bad if you don’t focus too heavily on African-American women.

Cassidy, in May, told Politico that when it comes to pregnancy-related deaths, “If you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.”

Journalist Tat Bellamy-Walker, reporting on Cassidy for NBC News, explained, “Louisiana has some of the highest Black maternal death rates in the country. A report from the state’s health department shows that four Black mothers die for every White mother and two Black babies die for every one White baby. In the United States, Black mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth than White mothers.”

The fact that so many of the maternal deaths in Louisiana involve African-American women doesn’t mean that Louisiana doesn’t have a major problem with maternal deaths; in fact, it underscores the problem.

Following the 2020 presidential election, far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit seeking to throw out millions of votes in four states that Biden won: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. The fact that Biden was the clear favorite in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — all of which have a lot of Black voters — didn’t matter to Paxton, who couldn’t have cared less about the will of voters in those cities. And he wanted their votes invalidated.

In a op-ed/essay published by the New York Times on June 3, journalist Mimi Swartz — executive editor of the Texas Monthly — expresses her extreme frustration with Gov. Greg Abbott, arguing that he is totally indifferent to millions of Texans who aren’t “hard-right culture warriors.”

During his June 2 appearance on OAN, Wax angrily railed against “RINOs” (Republican in Name Only) who are willing to work with Democrats on gun control legislation. Wax’s mindset is very much an us-versus-them mentality, and in today’s Republican Party, it isn’t at all uncommon.

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nice network viz widget

https://plotagainstimmigrants.com/network/

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5 22

Liberals still take right-wing propaganda too literally. This is partly because we are liberal. We are often annoying pedants. If there’s an error in one’s thinking, liberals can be trusted to rush in and correct it.

That’s usually as far as it goes, alas.

Consider the reaction among liberals to the latest bit of incoherence by the Republican National Committee. It tweeted: “11,007 pounds of methamphetamine was seized at the southern border in April alone!”

It’s a variation on a familiar theme. “Joe Biden has created the WORST border crisis on record,” the account said last month. Also: “234,088 illegal immigrants were encountered crossing the border in April.”

The RNC says these facts are evidence of a “border crisis” that the president – as well as the vice president – are ignoring. We are not told, but expected to understand, that this “border crisis” is part of a leftwing “open border policy” that’s bent on “replacing Americans.”

What was the reaction among liberals?

Pretty typical.

Rightwing word-power

If immigrants are being apprehended and detained at the border, that means they didn’t get away with breaking federal immigration law.

The law is working as it’s supposed to.

Ergo, there is no border crisis.

If the border patrol is seizing drugs and contraband at the border, then law enforcement officers are doing what they should. So … what crisis?

Among liberals, the question appears to be: Why do Republican propagandists keep saying there’s a crisis at the border when the evidence they present to prove a border crisis proves the opposite?

I don’t think anyone is satisfied, because virtually no one has gone beyond the fact that claims of a border crisis are self-evidently bunk.

Worse is when liberals are content with pointing out the flaws in logic. Liberals, as is their wont, confuse liberal virtue for liberal politics.

And liberals lose.

To the rightwingers, language is about power. It’s not about meaning or coherence or sense-making or freedom of speech or thought.

Why would they use language everyone understands when such a social, democratic and equitable approach to language undermines their goal of protecting and defending the natural order of things?

Instead, they use words that everyone else thinks they understand fully but that only the natural and chosen in-group fully understands.

Liberals should presume their word-power is a fetish.

Fetish? Yes, fetish

I do not mean an obsession.

That’s a common understanding of the meaning of the word “fetish.” To be sure, a fetish can be an obsession, but it’s not only that.By “fetish,” I mean a thing that’s really a stand-in for another thing. It’s a blank line that Republican propagandists know rightwingers will gladly fill in.

I mean there’s no there there.

The principle there is the one that isn’t there.

A man with a foot fetish isn’t not aroused sexually by feet or the visual representation of feet. Feet are a stand-in for something else. Feet are a vessel into which fetishists pour associations with sexual pleasure.

Once liberals see the there that isn’t there, they can react effectively. Instead of meeting righting politics with liberal virtue, as they usually do, they can meet it with equal and opposite liberal politics.

Abortion isn’t about abortion. Immigration isn’t about immigration. Gun rights are not about guns. I have explained all this before.

What I haven’t explained is that laws at the center of these “hot button issues” is not the right-winger’s principal concern. It can’t be.

The closer you look, the clearer it is that “the law,” “lawlessness,” “law-abiding” and “the rule of law” are not what they seem to be.

The law is supposed to apply equally to a people created equally. When right-wingers say “the law,” they can’t mean equal treatment under law.

Equal treatment undermines their goal.

“The law” is, therefore, a fetish, a blank line, an empty vessel.

“The law” is a stand-in for “white power.”

Rightwing politics, liberal virtue

A Senate subcommittee held a hearing last week about a proposed federal law similar to a Connecticut statute permitting police to seize guns owned by perpetrators of domestic abuse and violence before they have a chance to murder women fleeing their abuse and violence.

US Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, is on the panel. He said:

If the objective is to stop violent crime, what is effective is targeting actual violent criminals. The approach of today’s Senate Democrats is to try to go after the firearms of law-abiding citizens instead of targeting the violent criminals that are the real threat. Firearms, yes, are used by violent criminals but they are also used over and over and over again by victims of violent crimes to defend themselves.

In response, US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said:

Congress … should have eliminated the loopholes that leave women in the crosshairs of violent spouses and partners with guns a long time ago. What we’re talking about, I say to my colleague from Texas, is not going to take away gun rights for law-abiding citizens.

Wyden is correct. No law-abiding citizen would be affected by a federal version of Connecticut’s “Lori’s Law.” It would instead affect citizens who have committed criminal acts of domestic violence.

But Wyden did what most liberals do when confronted by statements that are not intended to make sense. He took them literally. Cruz’s words are mistaken, he said, before “correcting” Cruz’s word-power.

Wyden met rightwing politics with liberal virtue.

He failed to see the there that isn’t there.

White is the law is a gun

When Cruz talks about “law-abiding citizens,” he’s not talking about law-abiding citizens. That’s a fetish, a blank line, an empty vessel.

It’s a stand-in for white men, for white power.

White men are “the law” by dint of being white men. No one else can be the law. If nonwhite people try to enforce the law equally, white men are under no obligation to respect their effects, because the law, when it’s prosecuted by nonwhite people, isn’t legitimate. It’s lawless.

Cruz accused President Barack Obama of being “the most lawless president in the history of the United States.” He said it was because the former president refused to enforce federal immigration law.

What he really meant was that “the law” and “a Black man” are incompatible terms in America. A Black man is subject to “the law” – to white power, yes. He is not, however, enforcer of “the law” – of white power. That can’t be. That would be a perversion of the natural order.

Indeed, “the rule of law” was seen as “rule by a Black man.”

After the reelection of the first Black president, and after 20 school children were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook, the GOP made sure to right the wrong of “rule by a Black man.” They passed laws allowing white men to take “the law” into their own hands – with a gun.

Legal is white, illegal is not white

The Senate subcommittee hearing occurred the week after a law-abiding citizen legally purchased a semi-automatic rifle, drove 200 miles to the East side of Buffalo and shot to pieces 10 Black people.

The Democrats wasted a chance to see the there that’s not there – that “law-abiding” is a stand-in for white power, that it’s an empty vessel into which a white-power terrorist by the name of Payton Gendron poured meaning in order to take “the law” into his own hands.

Liberals should pay less attention to what right-wingers say and more attention to what they mean. Liberals should presume the principle there is the one that isn’t there. And they should spell it out for normal people in order to ask if this is the kind of country they want to live in.

You can’t beat right-wing politics with liberal virtue.

You can with liberal politics.

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an 5 22

The latest mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 10 Black victims in Buffalo, N.Y., has reignited concerns about dangerous rhetoric perpetuated by far-right media and conspiracy theorists.The Guardian's Cas Mudde recently explored how right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have contributed to this ongoing problem.

"The problem is, we can talk endlessly about better regulating social media or calling for even more funding and powers for public and private 'counter-terrorism' organizations, but none of that will make us safer as long as the broader conservative movement embraces and propagates far-right propaganda," wrote Mudde, who is also a professor for the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. "This is a point worth repeating, even if I and others have made it many times before."

Mudde went on to validate his point by highlighting how the Buffalo shooter's manifesto echoed dangerous talking points from far-right media. The disturbed terrorist referenced concerns about "the Left," America's "open borders," and immigration.

"The so-called 'manifesto' of the terrorist included a lot of the standard tropes of the far-right, including the so-called Great Replacement Theory. Often linked to antisemitism, this conspiracy theory holds that 'the Left' is supporting 'open borders' to replace the 'original people' with 'immigrants,' who are inferior and therefore easier to control. Variants of this theory go back to at least the original Populists of the mid-19th century, but in its current iteration it has been around since the start of the 1980s postwar far-right in Europe."

He also expressed concern about Republican lawmakers' conflicting position on this topic. "Since the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, I have had various informal conversations with people who work in Congress or in other state agencies about the far right," Mudde wrote. "They tell me that they want to talk about the threat it poses, but then rapidly narrow the focus to 'online radicalization' and violent groups with scary names like Atomwaffen Division or Feuerkrieg Division.This is not just because these groups get disproportionate attention in the media and the counter-terrorism industry, but because they are politically safe. These groups are so extreme that they are out of bounds for almost all political elites, even on the right. But they are also small and marginal."

He added, "This is not the case for most other more mainstream actors and ideas of the far right. In fact, their power is now so great in Washington, that it is almost impossible to come up with a term that is acceptable to both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans are skeptical about terms like 'far-right' and 'racism,' fearing this would include groups and ideas they sympathize with. This is not without reason."

"The Grand Old Party has become a far-right party that advances racist arguments in both implicit and explicit form. And many organizations within the broader “conservative” movement have followed suit, from Fox News to Turning Point USA."

With the direction the Republican Party is going toward, Mudde emphasized the reality America is facing as he offered a piece of advice to President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

"The sad reality is that fighting the far right has become a highly partisan affair in the United States," Mudde wrote. "Any attempt to make this a bipartisan effort means watering down of measures and limiting them to the most extremist fringes. If Biden and the Democrats really want to fight white supremacy, including institutional racism, they must do it without the Republican party."

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Three things happened this weekend.

They are connected.

They are the GOP’s three-legged stool.

First, several high-profile Republicans, including the No. 3 House leader, accused the president of giving preferential treatment to undocumented Americans at the expense of “native” white Americans.

The administration provides baby formula to mothers detained at the US-Mexican border while they see through the deportation process. (Baby formula is scarce due to issues relating to trade, monopoly and the covid pandemic. The national shortage is reaching crisis levels.)

New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, chair of the GOP conference, alleged on Twitter that “Joe Biden continues to put America last by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves. This is unacceptable. American mothers and their babies shouldn’t suffer because of the #BidenBorderCrisis.”

In September, the representative ran a series of ads on Facebook accusing “radical Democrats” of “planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants willoverthrowour current electorate andcreate a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

The second thing that happened this weekend was tens of thousands of women, mostly white, demonstrating in Washington and other major American cities to protest the Supreme Court’s imminent ruling that will almost certainly strike down Roe. Organizers say the marches preview a “summer of rage” happening before the midterm elections.

Third was a trio of mass shootings in California, Dallas and Buffalo.

Buffalo’s is getting the most attention.

The shooter is an18-year-old white supremacist from rural New York. His semi-automatic rifle was emblazoned with the n-word as well as the names of notorious white terrorists: Anders Breivik (Norway, 2011), Dylann Roof (Charleston, 2015), Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh, 2018), Brenton Tarrant (New Zealand, 2019) and John Earnest (El Paso, 2019).

Payton Gendron went to an eastside Tops, a grocery store not far from where I lived in the 1990s. Of the 13 people he killed and injured, 11 were Black. He’s in custody. He was arraigned Saturday on a charge of first-degree murder. Hate-crime felony charges are likely forthcoming.

Two days beforehand, Gendron posted online what appears to be a manifesto. According to Ben Collins, who covers right-wing extremism for NBC News, it “laid out specific plans to attack Black people andrepeatedly cited the ‘great replacement’ theory, the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence.”

Collins wrote that, “the manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely claims white people are being ‘replaced’ in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of nonwhite people.”

Three things happened this weekend. They are connected.

The “great replacement theory” is the link.

More precisely, democracy is.

Democracy in the 21st century isn’t yielding the results the right-wingers want. It produced the first Black president. It produced his reelection.

The rightwingers cannot trust democracy until they are certain that “demographic change,” which the Democrats love to talk about, has been stopped. They can’t trust democracy until there are enough white people around to make sure white people are still in charge.

Immigration.

Abortion.

Guns.

These are the three-legged stool of the Republican Party.

The stool animates the rightwing imagination. It animates the Republican incumbents running for reelection. It animates a third of Americans who believe “an effort is underway” by the Democratic Party “to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to a recent AP poll. It animated Payton Gendron.

On immigration – stop it.

Stop all of it, even legal immigration. The more nonwhite people, Muslims and Jews in America, the more risk there is to white power.

On guns – more of them in more white hands.

Rightwingers can’t get rid of Black people and Latinos who were born here or immigrated years ago, but they can terrorize or (legally) lynch them. More guns in more white hands overlap with police officers who already serve an unspoken mandate to control nonwhite people.

On abortion – more white babies.

Most of the women who get abortions are white. By forcing them to give birth, the rightwing attempts to “repopulate” the country so that, over the years, there are more white people who can vote. Only at that point can the right-wingers' return to trusting American democracy.

Gendron’s manifesto spells it out: “If there’s one thing I want you to get from these writings, it’s that White birth rates must change. Everyday the White population is fewer in number. To maintain a population, the people must achieve a birth rate that replacement fertility levels.”

It also says “critical race theory” a rightwing talking point that has come to “encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews,” Collins wrote.

When Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said “CRT, CRT, CRT,” his voters didn’t hear anything about education or even children. What they heard was that the Democrats are trying to replace them. What they heard was a plan for “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.”

This weekend, the three-legged stool was in full view.

Few Americans believed it beforehand.

A “white supremist killed my mother and other family members,” the Rev. Sharon Risher said Saturday. “Again, we deal with death because of hate and a gun. Thoughts and prayers won’t cut it. Something must be done! Can I count on you to help change this narrative?”

When democracy betrays you, where do you turn?

To hate and a gun.

Will more Americans believe it now?

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/cheney/

Buff NY mass shooter

no twt lnx

S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has become the face of the Republican Party’s embrace of the racist, white supremacist, and white nationalist “Great Replacement Theory” after a white 18-year-old man drove 200 miles and allegedly slaughtered 10 Black people in Buffalo. Stefanik’s Facebook ads and her rhetoric in recent months have been highlighted as contributing to advancing the baseless conspiracy theory, but rather than pull back and apologize the chairwoman of the House Republican Caucus is being accused of “doubling down” on her “terrorist rhetoric.”

“Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity,” Stefanik tweeted Monday morning.

“There is nothing humane or compassionate about Joe Biden & Democrats wide open border and amnesty policies. It is Joe Biden’s Border Crisis. A tragic humanitarian crisis. A national security crisis. An economic crisis. And the American people know it,” she also tweeted Monday.

Immediately before those tweets, Stefanik issued a press release attacking the media for “disgraceful, dishonest and dangerous … smears” that accuse her of the very same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric she minutes later went on to invoke.

Noted economist David Rothschild, a frequent political commentator, calls Stefanik’s tweets “terrorist rhetoric.” He criticized her Monday morning, saying the New York Congresswoman “is doubling-down with numerous [tweets] this morning echoing the Buffalo’s terrorist’s manifesto with baseless, hateful rhetoric designed to encourage violence against minorities, immigrants, and Jews.”

Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy Professor Don Moynihan agrees Stefanik is doubling down:

As does historian Kevin M. Kruse:

Some more responses to Stefanik’s tweets from this morning:

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edit bd 4 22

I’ve come to believe no one knows exactly why candidates win or lose elections for public office. We say we do. We don’t, though.

We would know why Candidate X defeated Candidate Y if we had direct knowledge of every single cause and effect accreting toward one irrefutable end. We can’t know, though. Our brains are limited.

Explanations for what happened are always after the fact. So they are never exact or complete or conclusive. And it can’t be otherwise – this is how it will be until we can see the world from God’s point of view.

As a storytelling species, we end up making everything that happened before the end fit the end. Why do we tell these stories? Well, again, the end is all we know for sure. Maybe we just like stories. Anyway, do you like thinking about how much of life is determined arbitrarily?

This is not to paper over obvious errors in campaigning. However, it is to say that even a campaign run “perfectly” can end in defeat. Terry McAuliffe got more Democratic voters to show up for this year’s race for Virginia governor than any Democratic candidate ever. He still lost.

For all the above reasons, I have sympathy for the Democrats running for reelection. I’m particularly sympathetic to Democrats holding seats in swing districts. They can’t know how the race will end. Every choice is like swimming to the surface after being underwater while upside down and blindfolded. They can’t afford to retrofit chaos and chance.

That doesn’t stop the Democrats’ liberal critics. For them, the way to beat the Republicans is obviously obvious. Democracy is facing an existential crisis! The Republicans are stoking political violence by calling opponents pedophiles! That goes for their own, too! They lie and lie and lie! All you gotta do is tell swing voters the whole truth!

Case in point is Kevin Kruse, a superlative historian and very loud and very confident critic of Democratic orthodoxy: “You'd think this would be an easy call for Democrats -- the GOP attacks aren't just baseless; there are many examples of pedophiles and sex traffickers in the GOP! -- but Democrats never miss a chance to miss a chance.”

To me, Kruse represents a genre of writing, found mostly on Twitter, in which the Democrats never do what they should be doing if they cared about beating back the tide of right-wing authoritarianism.

When the Republicans say the quiet part out loud (eg, that state legislators plan to steal the next presidential election), these critics call on the Democrats to pounce. When the Democrats dodge though, and instead stick with kitchen-table stuff, like the cost of health care, their critics say they don't have the guts. Welp, they say, we’re doomed.

I think liberal critics of the Democrats fail to think about something the Democrats think about. The voters they need to keep the Congress don’t know democracy is in crisis, don’t believe democracy is in crisis or kinda-sorta perhaps maybe don’t mind if democracy is in crisis.

It depends.

It depends on what the Democrats offer.

For these voters, it’s difficult to accept the fact that the Republicans have gone full fascist. It’s so hard it’s easier not to. And that’s easy, because, well, these people are not far from where the Republicans are. That’s what happens in a society organized by white supremacy.

That’s what the Democrats understand.

White supremacy is on the Republicans’ side.

So: What do you say to people who don’t believe the Republicans are dangerous? What do you say to people who believe democracy is fine now that the former president is out of power? What do you say to people who are already leaning toward the Republicans, because, you know, whiteness, but open to giving the Democrats a fair hearing?

You avoid “hot buttons” issues.

If you don’t, you lose.

You talk about the cost of health care.

If you do, you might win.

By urging the Democrats to do what they think the Democrats should be doing without respecting them enough to appreciate the stakes involved, these liberals critics reveal their faith in the American people.

A totally misguided faith.

They seem to think these swing voters will do the right thing once presented with the facts. I don’t know why they would when it’s easier, and more pleasurable, to believe the dulcet lies of white supremacy.

Look, the critics might be right. They might be wrong.

But let’s be honest.

The Democrats are asking respectable white people who are indifferent to suffering, who are immune to the painful outcomes of white supremacy and who are perhaps open to the Republicans suggesting that democracy has gone too far to vote for them.

That’s a huge challenge.

Let’s respect it.

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4/22 edit bd

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.

The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.

Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.

“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”

He added:

“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”

His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.

The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.

He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”

“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”

So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.

Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)

Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.

You read that right.

The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.

They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.

At gunpoint.

Everyone should see what Schatz sees.

So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.

Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”

Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?

My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.

In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.

He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.

It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.

Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.

I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.

But not everybody can serve.

Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.

That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.

If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.

There are just not enough white dudes left.

When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.

Sounds like you’re angry?

I amangry.

The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.

Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.

That's the nature of it.

But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.

One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.

Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.

A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.

The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.

I do not say this lightly.

This is incredibly dangerous.

They attack the military leadership as “woke” because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.

I've never seen that in my lifetime.

You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?

No, I don't think so.

The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.

Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.

It's terrifying to think where this could go.

I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.

I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.

All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.

But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.

At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!

How horrifying that is.

Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.

Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.

Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.

Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.

That needs to be stomped out.

There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....

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an 3 22

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), like many other Republican lawmakers, has made this week’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson into more of a political circus than a professional inquisition.

From subtly misogynistic insinuations the blatantly racist remarks, Republican lawmakers have been deeply criticized for their treatment of Jackson.

Now, The Daily Beast's Matthew Fuller is offering an unfiltered breakdown of all that has transpired this week. At one point during the 200th episode of The Daily Beast podcast, "The New Abnormal," Fuller joined the panel to speak with the show's co-host Andy Levy as they rehashed the Republican senator's bizarre behavior.

Fuller, who bluntly describes Republican lawmakers' actions as "the full-flavored version" of “straight racism," weighed in with his reaction to the grotesque displays during the confirmation hearings.

"I think I expected it to be maybe a little bit more coded, a little bit more dog whistle-y," Fuller said. "'Certainly, I knew that they were gonna bring up stupid things like critical race theory. I didn’t expect the line of attack to be just so overtly racist, with false suggestions that 'Jackson is soft on crime, she’s soft on child pornographers' even though her sentencing practices were well in line with the average sentences people were getting.'”

Fuller went on to express concern about the bigger problem as he noted the real reason for Republican lawmakers' antics during the confirmation hearings.

“But the broader issue,” Fuller explains, “is Republicans know Democrats have all the votes. At the end of the day, I'd be very surprised if Jackson is not confirmed, and confirmed with probably a couple Republican votes. They know that, and the hearing is just about scoring points, which is why you see Cruz giving his speech and then checking his Twitter mentions. This isn’t about actually moving people. This is about raising money. This is about adding to their own clout. And it’s been frankly a pretty disgusting confirmation.”

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aha not an accident it's women's rights roe v wade and griswold ANDbrown v bd for AA POC that are under attack by trump gubmint  authoritarian xian nat'list STATES RIGHTS BS

AN 2 22

A debate between the Republicans running for Michigan attorney general confirmed warnings from reproductive rights advocates that Republicans aren’t going to stop with abortion bans—they’re coming for birth control next. In the last question of last Friday’s debate, all three men said they thought the 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down laws banning the sale of contraception had been wrongly decided, because states’ rights.

At least two of the three candidates did not know what Griswold v. Connecticut was about—which itself is kind of an issue in people campaigning to be Michigan’s top lawyer, since Griswold is a pretty damn famous case. (I literally learned about it in high school, and I am not a lawyer.) But all three agreed, once they learned what it was, that it was bad.

The Connecticut law struck down in Griswold allowed the prosecution of married couples for buying contraception. In Griswold, the Supreme Court said that the law violated the “right to marital privacy,” foreshadowing the privacy right that would be invoked in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Here’s what the Michigan Republicans seeking to be the state’s top law enforcement officer had to say about the marital right to privacy around birth control decisions.

“Remind me,” Tom Leonard, the former speaker of the state House, said. After an explanation, he was ready to condemn the decision.

“Yeah, okay, I just, and I wanted clarification,” Leonard said. “This case, much like Roe v. Wade, I believe was wrongly decided, because it was an issue that trampled states’ rights and it was an issue that should have been left up to the states.”

State Rep. Ryan Berman literally pulled out his phone during that exchange.

”Yeah, you know what, I wasn’t familiar with Griswold v. Connecticut,but I’m an advanced legal researcher so I pulled it up real quick to look what it’s about,”he said. “And it says the court ruled that the Constitution did in fact protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on contraception. Again, I would have to look more into it and the reasoning behind it, but I’m all about states’ rights andlimiting federal judicial activism.”

Matthew DePerno, endorsed by Donald Trump for enthusiastically signing on to the Big Lie about the 2020 elections, had the same basic answer, minus the admission that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

”Listen, all these cases that deal—Griswold, Roe v. Wade, Dobbs— these are all state right issues.I think that’s what we’re gonna see with the US Supreme Court. They’re gonna come down on the side that these liberty issues—number one, the wide expanse that was given on Roe v. Wade and this litany—are unworkable. The Supreme Court has to deal with that, has to decide, mark my words, that the privacy issue currently is unworkable. It’s going to be a state right issue on all of these things—as it should be!”

DePerno wasn’t done. “We need to start defending state rights as attorney generals, across this country,” he said. “Too many people, even in our own party, too many people have lost the idea of what states’ rights means. They haven’t read the works of our Founding Fathers. They haven’t read The Federalist Papers. They continue to push the idea that we need to give rights away to the federal government. We don’t. We need to take state rights back. We need to stand in our borders. When the feds come and try to take our rights, we need to stand as citizens in Michigan and hold the line and protect states’ rights.”

So, yes. Republicans are 100% coming for the right to obtain birth control once the Trump Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, with that decision likely coming this June. Already some states are advancing personhood legislation, which would declare an embryo or fetus to be a legal person. Such laws criminalize abortion, but they also potentially ban forms of birth control like the pill, IUDs, and emergency contraception.

”All 3 Republicans running for Michigan Attorney General just stated that they oppose the ruling in Griswold v Connecticut which outlawed prosecuting married couples for using contraception,”Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel tweeted Friday evening. “You read that right. Terrifying.”

Lots of people who support abortion rights spent years responding lackadaisically to warnings that Republicans were stacking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and legalize abortion bans. Now we see how true those warnings were, as they come to fruition. It’s time to sit up and listen to the warnings that Republicans won’t stop there.

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this rachets up on builds on d'souza BS about how dems are predatory on POC AA?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/

no lnx vid twt?

Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report

[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022

This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.

It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.

"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."

The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”

The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”

The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.

In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”

The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.

Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:

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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.

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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"

The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.

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2nd or 3rd time pro gerry?!

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/scotus-voting-rights/

in 2013 Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts effectively declared racism in America was over, as he penned the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder,a case that neutered the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On Monday Chief Justice Roberts sided with the Court’s three remaining liberals in a case that pounded yet another nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act.

University of Michigan Law School Asst. Law Professor Leah Litman, commenting on the just-released Supreme Court decision writes: “One way of understanding how radical this step is: It is a position on voting rights/the voting rights act that is SO EXTREME, the author of Shelby County v. Holder (the decision invalidating the preclearance regime) did not join it. They _lost John Roberts_ on voting rights.”

On Monday conservatives (except Roberts) on the Court decided to allow a racially unfair congressional district map “even though a lower court said it violated the Voting Rights Act by denying Black voters a new district,” as NBC News reports.

The Economist’s Steven Mazie, who covers the Supreme Court writes:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-unloads-sesame-street-after-learning-puppet-character-has-race

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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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/gop-southern-strategy/

thom h

on Wednesday, all but two Republicans in the House of Representatives went on record saying it's okay to openly encourage the assassination of one of their own, a person of color and elected Member of the House.

That part about Representative Ocasio-Cortez not being white was no coincidence, by the way. It was really at the core of the issue: Republicans now openly refer to her and the women of color who call themselves "the Squad" as the "Jihad caucus." As in "Muslim terrorists," as in "the Other."

Earlier in the day, known antisemite and racistRepresentative Marjorie Taylor Greene called for her followers to prepare for warbecause "Joe Biden didn't win the 2020 election" and "the only way you get freedom back after you've lost it is with the price of blood."

We heard this rhetoric, too, many years ago when a much earlier generation of white supremacists tried to gin up bloodshed in America.

"The time for war has not yet come," Stonewall Jackson said in a speech to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute in March, 1861, "but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard."

Jackson and his ilk frequently tried to pretend the Civil War was about some high principle instead of just being a naked defense of legal enslavement, but their own proclamations of secession betrayed them.

No matter how much Republicans — and some white Democrats — want to try to pretend that the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties today isn't primarily about race, it is. And it's only a small part of a much larger Republican political strategy that, itself, is also all about race.

There was a time in America when straight white people lived in nice, comfortable white bubbles. I grew up in one of them in the 1950s; the most "exotic" people in our lower-middle-class Lansing, Michigan neighborhood were Jewish, and I didn't even realize that distinction until I was a teenager.

The only people of color we saw were on TV; even the milkman, mailman and delivery people were white. And the non-white folks we saw on TV were always,alwaysdepicted as either criminals or buffoons. And gay people? Even discussing Liberace's sexuality was a no-no.

Mom was in the kitchen or pregnant, and knew her place. One white man with a union job could raise a family without debt beyond a mortgage and car payment. People of color need not apply for the American Dream.

This is the straight white world today's Republican Party wants to take America back to. They're all but shouting it with slogans like "Make America Great Again!"

When the GOP went nuts about six Dr. Seuss books being dropped by the author's family from publication, it was — no coincidence — the six books in which Seuss had drawn racist caricatures. And he wasn't violating the norms of his day: caricatures of buck-toothed Asians, swarthy gun-toting mustachioed Mexicans, and big-lipped Black people were all over the cartoons we watched as children in the 1950s. They are shocking today, but they were normal and common then, and the GOP wants to go back to that.

When we studied American history in elementary school the 1950s, we learned that Christopher Columbus was a great man who defied conventional wisdom and monsters at the "edge of the earth" to discover this golden land, just waiting for white people to show up and tame it. (A woman around my age who called into my program yesterday noted that she was "really pissed off" when, in her first year of college, she took a history course and discovered Columbus was actually a rapist, child-trafficker and a slaver.)

We also learned that most slave-masters (particularly the Founding Fathers) were really, really nice and thoughtful people who took good care of the poor, uneducated, primitive folks they "had under their care." To this day, there are still some textbooks in America that emphasize how slaveholding white people generously provided not only housing, food and clothing but also medical care for their charges.

Republicans today want to go back to that type of history for their children. They dress it all up with fancy language about "Critical Race Theory" but the bottom line for these white people is that they don't want their kids to grow up knowing that Black people and other people of color are just like them but with a different amount of pigment in their skin. They want that pigment difference to be THE defining characteristic, and they want teachers, police, and other authority figures to enforce segregation based on it.

In the years after the Brown v Board decision in 1954, entire public school systems shut down to avoid racial integration; one Virginia county went five years without a public school opening.

There was an explosion of "religious schools," from private elementary and high school "academies" to centers of higher education like Bob Jones University that were explicitly and entirely whites-only. Promoting these types of functionally all-white schools continued from the 1950s right through Betsy DeVos's time as Trump's Secretary of Education.

When white people show up at school board meetings shouting that "We know where you live!" and leaving death threats on people's home phones, it's not because they're flipped out by historic and legal nuances having to do with past discrimination: it's because they want their safely segregated schools back.

And they're getting them: American schools are more racially segregated now than they were in 1968.

And when those schools are almost entirely "whites only" (the school districts where we're seeing the majority of these "protests"), those "parents" want them purged of anything that might shatter for their white children the idea held by white people in this country for 400 years that everybody who's not white — from genocidally slaughtered Native Americans to Africans brought in chains to Mexicans whose land we also stole to Asians we once excluded from immigration — are all basically sub-human.

This is how these Republican white supremacists think, and if that sounds outrageous simply check out their literature and behavior. A good starting point is with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The news media sanitized the Virginia election, saying that Republican Youngkin won "on education issues." That's patently false: he won on racism. And it's damn well time that the media start pointing it out. It took them three years to start calling Trump's lies "lies" — how long will it take to call Republican racism "racism"?

When I went into the job market in the 1960s, the headings in the "Help Wanted" part of the newspaper were "Help Wanted – Men" and "Help Wanted - Women." There was no "Help Wanted – Black People" because everybody knew there was a very, very narrow range of jobs for which Black people could be hired. Like in much of America then, Black people (and most other minorities) were limited in where they could work, get a mortgage, live, and even walk or drive; if they pushed the boundaries, they risked violence and a horrible, painful death at the hands of police or vigilantes.

When I was a kid, Richard and Mildred Loving were rousted from their wedding bed by police for the crime of getting married; he was white and she was Black. They were sentenced to a year in prison: interracial marriage was a crime in parts of America until 1967.

When I got my first job in 1965 as a teenage hamburger-flipper in an all-white burger joint, there were large parts of Lansing where Black people simply couldn't go. I still remember my parents taking me to a fancy downtown hotel's restaurant for some celebration in the mid-1950s and there was a sign off to the side of the door that pointed toward the rear of the building and said, "Colored Entrance." That, at the time, was considered enlightened: at least the hotel let Black people into its public areas.

But race has always permeated politics, and voting is at the foundation of the political process.

In 1993, no state in the union required ID to vote, even though Paul Weyrich (co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and then with the Reagan campaign)said right out loud that, "I don't want everybody to vote. … As a matter of fact, quite candidly, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down."

But then Democrats in Congress pushed through the 1993 "Motor Voter" law that required states to let people register to vote when they got their drivers' licenses. Republicans went insane, charging that "millions" of brown-skinned "illegals" would now get drivers' licenses, get registered to vote in the process, and begin flipping elections toward Democrats.

We then used signature-matching to confirm identity (you showed ID to register to vote, and your signature was kept on record), which is the most secure form of identity confirmation easily available. You can buy a reasonably good fake ID for $50, but try forging somebody else's signature while an election official is watching you: it's pretty much impossible. Signatures are called "biometric markers" and they're even more secure than ID.

But Republicans were so certain that hoards of Brown people were going to show up at the polls that they passed laws in state after state to require ID at the polls on top of comparing the voter's signature. It's a pathetic and futile effort: those "illegals" never showed up. Virtually all of the extremely rare "voter fraud" that happens in America is done by white people (most Republicans, based on those busted after 2020) or ex-felons who didn't realize they couldn't vote in their state.

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back, the past thirty years have seen a grotesque orgy of laws, regulations and policy changes designed specifically to make it easier for white suburban voters — and harder for college students, Black city dwellers, and social security voters — to cast a ballot.

Using the political power they get from skewing elections, Republicans want schools to help their children to grow up like many in my generation did, thinking at some unconscious (and often conscious) level that those racist caricatures were depictions of reality and only white people could be thoughtful, intelligent, peaceful problem-solvers like Dad on Leave It To Beaver or Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon or Superman. Or members of Congress or presidents.

White is good, they want their kids told: everybody else is weird, odd, comical, dangerous or "one of them." Or a Democrat.

The last Democrat running for president who won a majority of white people in his election was Lyndon Johnson.

While it's sometimes mentioned tangentially that Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden all lost the white vote, a sort of parenthetic footnote to election results, it's the foundation of the entire Republican strategy and has been since Nixon invented it with his "Southern Strategy."

When LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964/1965 he left the white racists who'd supported the Democratic Party since before the Civil War without a home. Nixon prepared one, Reagan fluffed up the pillows, and Trump stood out front with a bullhorn and a "whites only" sign.

As it's becoming increasingly obvious to these "racially apprehensive" white people that America as a whole is never returning to the Leave It To Beaver era, they're falling back on their old intimidation and segregation strategies. Red counties in Oregon, for example, are teaming up with white voters in next-door Idaho and won nonbinding ballot measures to secede from Oregon. That sort of thing is popping up all over the country.

It won't work, any more than liberal fantasies of avoiding the armed and angry racists by having California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii split off into their own country will work.

Red/Blue rhetoric aside, America is one country. The Mike Flynn's and Donald Trump's of the world realize this and are calling for straight white people to rise up and take over by force, imposing a single religion, rigid gender roles, putting women "back in their place," and re-marginalizing all nonwhite minorities.

The "battle for the soul of America" so often highlighted, headlined, and bemoaned by the media is real, but they almost always miss the real story, the signal, for all the noise (to paraphrase Steve Bannon). It's actually a battle between a vision of America that's once again entirely under the thumb of straight white people versus one where everybody has an equal voice and an equal chance.

There are a hell of a lot of white racists out there; enough to put Trump in the White House, put race-baiting Republicans in the House and Senate, and secure control over thirty states.

But culture is inexorably changing. People from a multitude of hues and gender identities are showing up in media and business, and their numbers are growing. White supremacist school board assaults aside, educators and their students are teaching and learning the true racial history of America. (It's increasingly hard to avoid!)

No matter how much people like Marjorie Taylor Greene talk up civil war and bloodshed, they can't stop progress. They may win for a short while, maybe even a few years or election cycles, but time and history run against them.

The fight for democracy and humanity will continue, no matter how many people vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or the cops kill, no matter how many racist white Republicans threaten the lives of their nonwhite colleagues.

Genuinely patriotic Americans who want a country that pulls together for the good of all — an E Pluribus Unum ("Out of Many, One") America — are on the ascent across America, even as the GOP has gone insane.

Nonetheless, it will take a lot of involvement and work to overcome both our racist history and the forces (both domestic and foreign) that seek to exploit racial divisions in this country.

Racism and violence are the GOP's brand these days, and if the media doesn't start calling them out explicitly for it, things are going to continue to get worse.

A new poll by the Marquette Law School found that while the GOP is largely united behind a 2024 Trump run for the White House, only 28 percent of all Americans agree. Seventy-one percent of Americans want Trump to leave our politics alone and go back to being a billionaire grifter.

Racist Republicans are the outliers, but they are motivated and well armed with significant white billionaire backing.

If we want democracy and decency to ultimately prevail, we have an enormous amount of political and restorative work to do before we rest. Don't lose faith: as Winston Churchill famously said, "Never give up!"

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2018? 30 pp

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/CR_5154_25YRS%20RightWing%20Terrorism_V5.pdf

grab

...White supremacists are responsible for most of the racial and religious targeting.Virtually any person or institution associated with a nonwhite race can be a potential target for white supremacists, but African-Americans, Hispanics, and multi-racial couples/families have been the most common groups victimized. The most frequent religious targets were, not surprisingly, Jews and Muslims (including non-Muslims perceived as Muslims). Actual or perceived immigrants, as well as LGBT targets, were also subject to victimization. Abortion-related targets, typically clinics that provide abortion services as well as the people who work at such places, were also common.

While anti-abortion extremists were the extremists most likely to attack abortion-related targets, other rightwing extremists, most noticeably white supremacists, also occasionally attempted such attacks. Right-wing extremist have also taken aim at a variety of other targets. Commercial targets have included various businesses and, in particular, financial institutions. Infrastructure targets include a wide range of installations, from refineries to dams to water supplies. In some cases, extremists have simply targeted crowded public areas, hoping to cause significant human casualties....

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color blind means racism does not exist, esp systemic, CRT dog whistle ~ affirmative action

https://www.mediamatters.org/five/foxs-jesse-watters-praises-glenn-youngkin-claiming-hes-bringing-back-martin-luther-kings

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an 11 21

how the critical race theory hysteria may be a death blow for affirmative action

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson

Independent Media Institute

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strict fr pathological strain?

1021 an

So much depends on respectable white people. Those are white people who care about appearing respectable to other white people, who themselves care about appearing respectable to other white people. They are the great globular middle of American politics that determines electoral outcomes in this country.

For the longest time, they sided with the Republican Party on account of tax cuts and other goodies. My hope is that, for the foreseeable future, they will side with the Democrats on account of tax cuts and other goodies being a banner for hiding the fact that sadism is the GOP's point.

Sadism isn't only about sex, though it can be, obviously. When I say "sadism," I mean the pleasure derived from seeing other people suffer. The Republicans have no policy goals. Their only goal is creating legal and political conditions in which the in-group is protected while the out-group is punished. But it doesn't end with punishment. It can't.

When the out-group gains power, the in-group feels powerless. When the in-group feels powerless, the in-group feels oppressed. When the in-group feels oppressed, it cries out for freedom. But in order to feel free, the in-group must do more than merely punish the out-group. It must derive pleasure from seeing pain and suffering. This is what I want respectable white people to understand. When they vote for tax cuts and other goodies, they are doing far more. They are helping the GOP's authoritarian base feel a freedom that depends on suffering.

When white police officers pulled a Black paraplegic man out of his vehicle by his hair last month in Dayton, Ohio, on illegal drug suspicion, that might appear to be another case of police brutality. (Body cam footage of the incident was released Friday. An investigation by the police department is underway.) But to the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, what the Dayton cops did was the goal itself. Seeing the man's pain produced pleasure. It made them feel free.

It is sadism. It is not cruelty. Cruelty is not the point. Sadism is. You can be cruel without meaning to. You can be cruel without taking pleasure in pain. You can be cruel because you can't help it (on account of repeating past traumas, for instance). But sadism takes intention. It takes the desire to set aside priorities, like tax cuts and other goodies. It is its own cause. It is its own effect. This is another thing I want respectable white people to understand. Sadism isn't an unintended consequence. It's the point. When you vote for the Republican Party, when you give money to Republican candidates, you are joining a concerted effort to bring more suffering to more people, and you are complicit in the derivation of pleasure from suffering. You have become a sadist.

This sounds extreme. That's because sadism cancels equality. If the Republicans had some degree of commitment to equality, they might seek conditions in which the in-group feels free regardless of whether the out-group feels pain. But there is no equality. Therefore, there is no equal protection under law. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between in-group freedom and out-group pain. Put another way, it's quite impossible for the in-group to feel free when the out-group does not feel pain. Sadism is the GOP's vital link.

Given the reality of this one-to-one relationship, you can see they don't mean freedom when they say freedom. They don't mean the presence of choice. They don't mean the absence of coercion. They don't mean freedom in any conventional sense. What they mean is the pleasure of seeing other people's pain, because their freedom can't exist without their suffering. Respectable white people need to understand this. Cries for freedom are in fact cries for sadism.

Just as they don't mean freedom when they say freedom, they don't mean borders when they say borders. Ten Republican governors went to the southern border to pressure the president to do more about immigrants coming in. Most of them were from non-border states. And that's the tell. The border they are defending isn't the border. It is the border between us and them, between the GOP's authoritarian base that can't feel free unless someone suffers, like immigrants, and everyone else who can feel free as they share power with others.

This is the last thing I want respectable white people to understand. There is no middle way. There is no neutral position. "Every state is now a border state," said Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany last week while visiting the border. Every state is a border state. Every issue is a border issue. Every person is a border person who must choose a side. Are you with us or against us. Sadism is the point.

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no lnx twt

'Deeply dangerous': MSNBC host reveals the history behind the GOP embrace of a deadly conspiracy theory

Mehdi Hasan // Hasan

Alex Henderson October 01, 2021

Fox News' Tucker Carlson generated considerable controversy when, on his April 8 show, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory — a racist conspiracy theory that has become prominent in white supremacist and white nationalist ideology. And almost half a year later, Carlson is still claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to "replace" white voters with immigrants from developing countries. MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan called Carlson out on his show this week, warning that he is promoting a claim that "gets people killed."

The progressive firebrand described the Great Replacement as a "conspiracy theory so vile, so extreme, so dangerous" that it was, in the past, avoided by mainstream conservatives and kept "on the furthest fringes of the far right."

Hasan told viewers, "What is the Great Replacement? It's a story, or a theory if you will, about liberal elites secretly changing our demographics, helping Black and Brown immigrants to invade America and replace white people. It's a white supremacist story about so-called white genocide. Scary, right? Bonkers, too. And yet, this year, Fox's Tucker Carlson came along and thought, 'Hmmm, let's bring this idea into the light to a prime-time cable audience."

The MSNBC host went on to say that the Great Replacement Theory has become a "rallying cry for the neo-Nazi far right," noting that it originated in France with white nationalist author Renaud Camus and his book "Le Grand Remplacement." And Hasan noted that a series of terrorist attacks have been carried out by White supremacists who embrace and promote that theory.

"The Great Replacement Theory gets people killed," Hasan warned. "And yet, you now haveTucker Carlson— the most influential right-wing cable news host in America — defending it, promoting it, mainstreaming it. And elected Republicans are now following in his footsteps…. Members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric."

Hasan showed clips of Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas promoting the Great Replacement Theory, arguing that "members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric" rather than simply using racist "dog whistles" like Republicans of the past. And he noted thatRep. Matt Gaetz of Floridahas vigorously defended Carlson by explicitly promoting the Great Replacement Theory by name.

"This is how white supremacy is normalized in America today: the marriage between Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Donald Trump's GOP," Hasan warned. "And they make us numb to this stuff…. This is a deeply dangerous moment for America."

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an 921

...Cruz asked Tolson, "In your judgement, are voting ID laws racist?" — to which she replied, "It depends." And when Cruz wanted to know which ones in particular she considers racist, Tolson responded, "Apologies, Mr. Cruz, your state of Texas, perhaps."

Cruz told Tolson, "OK, so you think the entire state of Texas is racist" — and the USC law professor clarified, "I'm not saying the entire state of Texas is racist…. The voter ID law was put into place to diminish the power of Latinos, with racist intent."

Cruz asked her what the evidence for this claim was, and she quickly had an answer: A federal district court ruled that the voter ID law was enacted for an "unconstitutional discriminatory purpose." Cruz had no response to this reply, so he just moved on.

The hearing was titled, "Restoring the Voting Rights Act: Combating Discriminatory Abuses."

Here are some responses to Tolson's testimony:...

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http://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/february-2000/

Black Magic

A cautious but useful endorsement of racial differences.

Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, Jon Entine, Public Affairs, 2000, 387 pp., $25.00.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

To the usual yelping that accompanies the slightest dissent from racial orthodoxy, someone has finally written a book that states the obvious: blacks dominate many sports because they have a genetic edge. Bravo for author Jon Entine but bravissimo for Public Affairs publishing, which has broken with what is one of the most conformist and cowardly industries in the country (see Mr. Entine’s account below).

Only two kinds of people will be surprised or offended by this book — crazed egalitarians and people who have never watched the Olympics or a pro basketball game. Since it is the former group that sets the intellectual tone for the country, reviewers will probably either ignore this book or cluck worriedly over it, but whatever happens, another blow has been struck against anti-scientific foolishness.

But is this a good book? For people who like their racial analysis stuffed with facts and close reasoning, and devoid of pulled punches — for people who enjoy Michael Levin, Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, and Richard Lynn — this is thin gruel. It’s breezy and meandering, and does its own share of clucking about the “slippery slope of racism,” but it does a great many useful and important things. And by doing them in a mass-market book that will probably find its way into the hands of a great many sports fans it could accomplish more than books by scholars and scientists.

The first useful thing Mr. Entine does is attack the goofy notion that race is some kind of optical illusion. He argues instead that race differences may be as old as the human species. He points out that whether one accepts the out-of-Africa-recent-differentiation theory or theories of dispersed evolution, “there has been ample time for [racial] differences to have evolved.”

To be sure, there is a great deal of the human genome that is common to all races, but Mr. Entine explains that tiny differences can have huge consequences. After all, he writes, dogs and humans differ in only five percent of their genome, and there are plenty of gene sequences unique to different races. Speaking of dogs, Mr. Entine notes that in 1998 the American Kennel Club recalled the latest edition of The Complete Dog Book after complaints that it perpetuated “pernicious stereotypes” about breeds rather than treating them all as equals. Breeds are the equivalent of races, he explains, adding that “the belief that dog breeds do not have stereotypical personalities is as intuitively ridiculous as claiming that there are no meaningful differences between human populations.”

Different kinds of dogs even get different diseases, just like different races of humans. Why is it so hard to accept racial differences in athletic ability, asks Mr. Entine, when it is widely accepted that the races differ in susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia, prostate cancer, Tay-Sachs disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes?

One of Mr. Entine’s most effective tactics is to use the record book to show just how concentrated certain kinds of athletic performance are in certain groups. The chart on this page, reproduced from the book, is worth studying carefully. It is a percentage analysis by race or country of origin of the 100 fastest times in the eight most common distances in track and field. In the sprints up through the 400 meters West Africans (including British, American, and Canadian blacks who are of West African origin) are crushingly dominant, but they are completely out of the picture at distances greater than 800 meters. Beginning at that distance, other Africans take over — North Africans and East Africans, especially Kenyans. At 5,000 meters, African dominance (here represented in three separate bars) exceeds 90 percent, with the remaining times held by whites. East Asians appear on the chart only in one event, the marathon. As Mr. Entine points out, only genetic differences can plausibly account for such marked athletic specialization by race.

The reason Kenya gets its own separate bar on the graph is due almost entirely to the remarkable running abilities of one tribe, the Kalenjin, who have won 70 percent of Kenya’s Olympic gold medals. Kenya’s Nandi district, in the heart of Kalenjin country, has only 1.8 percent of the country’s population but accounts for 35 percent of its top runners. Mr. Entine reports that the Kalenjin laugh at anything other than biological explanations for their prowess; they know they are naturally gifted runners. Another little-known tribe of prodigies are the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Mr. Entine reports they are best in the world at the gruesome 100-mile Leadville, Colorado, race that ends at an elevation of 11,000 feet. They don’t often bother to compete, but have been known to breeze to the finish in traditional sandals rather than running shoes.

In the United States, black dominance of basketball and football is virtually complete, and blacks are over-represented in baseball. For women, too, the racial differences are almost as stark, with whites offering no competition in sprints and not much in basketball. Seventy percent of the players in the National Women’s Basketball Association are black, as were nine of the ten women chosen in 1999 for the first and second all-NWBA teams.

Mr. Entine points out that during the Soviet era, there was a plausible argument to be made that with enough training white women, anyway, could compete with blacks. East German and Soviet women who had been through the national sports factories kept West Africans from dominating the sprints. Now we know that those Communist women looked so mannish and performed so well because they were doped up on steroids and hormones. Coaches wouldn’t let some of them speak to reporters or into a microphone because they had such deep voices. In the decade or so since Communism collapsed and drug testing became more sophisticated, Russian and East German athletes have dropped back in the pack to join the rest of the whites.

100 Fastest Times By Country or Ancestry

East and North Africans do not (yet) dominate women’s middle- and long-distance events, but Mr. Entine says this is only because African societies have kept women out of sports. As more African women start competing, whites and Asians will be squeezed out.

Champion sprinter Frankie Fredericks of Namibia prepares to lose.

Blacks didn’t always crush whites in sports, of course, but this was because many American sports were segregated, blacks got little training, and Africa was a primitive wilderness. Even so, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Not since the 1950s has a white ball player had the most steals in a season, and it has been 40 years since a white man, Armin Hary of Germany, held the world record in the 100 meters.

Needless to say, it is not just American sports teams that are now larded with blacks. Only two percent of the population of Britain is black, but 20 percent of its pro soccer players are. A track meet between the Canadian and American national teams would settle only the question of who has the fastest Africans.

Physical Differences

What are the physiological correlates of black athletic superiority? Mr. Entine writes that as long ago as 1939, Eleanor Metheny of Iowa State University looked into sports biology and found that blacks had longer arms and legs, a shorter trunk, narrower hips, and heavier bones than whites. Hundreds of studies have since confirmed and supplemented her findings. We now know that West African blacks have more muscle, less fat, hands relatively longer than forearms, and feet relatively longer than lower legs (which are relatively longer than thighs). They have higher serum testosterone levels, which increases muscle mass and aggressiveness, and smaller chest and lung capacities, which is why they wear out at longer distances. Heavy bones and less fat explain why so many blacks are “sinkers” in the pool, and low lung capacity is a problem in swimming events as it is in long-distance running.

West African blacks have a larger percentage of what is called fast-twitch fiber in their muscles, which is what the body needs for explosive bursts of speed. It also helps blacks jump. The best whites can jump straight up 50 percent of their height; blacks can go over 60 percent.

East African blacks have a larger lung capacity than whites and process oxygen more efficiently. They do not suffer as much from lactic acid buildup in their muscles and are therefore less susceptible to fatigue. They naturally have the slim build of good distance runners.

Mr. Entine writes that blacks respond to athletic training more quickly than whites and require less of it. Sprinter Carl Lewis worked out only eight hours a week when he was training for the 1984 Olympics; whites may work out nearly that much in a day. East Africans can reportedly take months off from training but quickly regain top form.

This sort of thing is fascinating and entirely to the point, but there is not that much of it in Taboo. Mr. Entine could have made his case in about 100 pages. The rest of the book is taken up with stories about Kipchoge Keino and other famous Kalenjins, stories about the Communist sports factories, and a long, wandering history of race and American sports. This may be interesting to sports fans, but the chart on the previous page is worth a hundred stories about Jesse Owens and Michael Jordan. The early heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, who snarled over prostrate white opponents and carried on publicly with white women, was a colorful figure, and very few people know professional football was (re)integrated with no fanfare the year before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947 — but so what? Mr. Entine seems to be trying to parry charges of “racism” with sympathetic accounts of black sportsmen who fought segregation.

Still, he has assembled the necessary facts and they all hang together. What we know about racial differences in biology conforms perfectly with what we see on the playing field and in the swimming pool. So what’s the problem? Why can’t the country admit what everyone knows and make it official? The problem — and the answer to the question in the book’s subtitle — is that honesty about athletics could lead to honesty about intelligence. This is why we have near-universal dishonesty, which leads to all sorts of nuttiness. Mr. Entine quotes Bob Herbert of the New York Times, that praising blacks for athletic ability is “a genteel way to say nigger.” An early pre-publication story about Taboo in the Times, quotes a black who says scientific investigation of athletic ability is an “underhanded way” of saying that blacks are “closer to beast … than they are to the rest of humanity” and it quotes a white as saying, “Didn’t we hear all this in Germany in 1936?” Mr. Entine has collected many examples of this sort of non-thinking.

Sadly for the egalitarians, the evidence for racial differences in intelligence is far more systematic, far more carefully studied, and much better understood than the evidence for athletic differences. Everyone knows this, which is why everyone pretends so diligently and hysterically not to.

Mr. Entine knows it, too, but tries not to show it. He has laced the book with anti-racist pieties, calls the Pioneer Fund “a magnet for white supremacists,” sneers at Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and writes happily that the 1938 rematch victory of heavyweight Joe Louis over the German Max Schmel-ing “was a knockout blow to the smug Nazis and their legion of Aryan-supremacist sympathizers around the world.” He even stoops to what can only be called disingenuousness: The book’s “only real message,” he writes, is that “for all our differences, we are far, far more similar.” That is not the book’s real message; it is a transparent sop to the censorship commissars.

However, despite all the jabber about “racism,” Mr. Entine is careful never to deny the possibility of intelligence differences. He even writes sentences like: “The evolutionary crucible has left population groups with distinct physiques, musculature, testosterone levels, metabolic efficiency, reaction time, and a slew of other characteristics.” (emphasis added) He even writes that black babies are born after a shorter gestation period and mature more quickly than white babies. He knows, all right.

Some day Americans will start saying what they really think about race. If they can’t yet talk about intelligence let them at least begin with sports. May Taboo sell and sell.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/

cdv

In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney proclaimed that Black people have "no rights that the white man is bound to respect." Today's Jim Crow Republican Party, and the white right more broadly, have taken the spirit of those words and updated them for the 21st century, effectively by arguing that "white people are not bound to respect historical truth or established facts — at least not as they pertain to Black and brown people in America".

As the next step in their war against multiracial democracy, the Republican Party and its allies have launched a moral panic about "critical race theory." Of course, their version of "critical race theory" is a type of racial bogeyman or psychological projection, a function of white racial paranoia about the "browning of America" and the threat of "white genocide."

Facts do not matter in the right-wing echo chamber. It is of no importance that the white right's version of "critical race theory" has nothing to do with the scholarly paradigm of the same name.

As the truism holds, history is written by the victors. To that end, in dozens of states across the country, the white right is engaging in an Orwellian campaign of rewriting school curricula to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory" -- which in practice means stopping any serious engagement with America's real and often uncomfortable history of racism and white supremacy.

The white right's campaign against the teaching of real American history involves actual thoughtcrimes.

For example, in Florida, a law was recently passed mandating a survey of students and faculty in public colleges and universities to determine their political beliefs. Of course, Florida has also banned the teaching of "critical race theory."

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, perhaps the single most influential voice on the white right, recently suggested that cameras should be placed in classrooms to ensure that no teachers will deploy "critical race theory" or other facts and arguments deemed to be "unpatriotic."

The Republican-controlled Texas Senate recently passed a bill eliminating a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement and other human rights struggles be taught in public schools. The bill also removed a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan from course requirements as well.

As Yahoo News reports, the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Projectand "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."

This Republican legislation has been met with widespread outrage. But that reaction should just be the beginning. The next step involves doing the harder work of understanding why so many other (mostly white) Americans actually believe that "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history should be banned. Understanding these beliefs and motivations is essential to defeating American neofascism and its white supremacist social and political project.

Many Americans have been propagandized by their schools, news media, the internet, churches and other social institutions to believe in a large set of interlocking lies and myths about the country's past and present. To intervene against these lies often causes emotional pain and/or narcissistic injury to those who hold such beliefs.

This dynamic is especially powerful for those who are emotionally, psychologically, financially and politically invested in defending and protecting white privilege and white people's control over almost every aspect of American life. In that context, the personal truly is political: Whiteness, as a concept and a social force, has become linked at an individual level to the maintenance of white power.

How does this right-wing fantasy machine work? The Root has exhaustively documented how some of America's most widely used history textbooks misrepresent the real history of the color line and distort such topics as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and social injustice more generally, through the use of what sociologist Joe Feagin has called the "white racial frame."

Michael Harriot offers this analysis:

So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country's schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It's why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual — because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie. …

This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn't racialized. But, apparently, it's perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness. They can't be opposed to learning a different historical perspective because they never learned history; they were spoonfed fiction in bite-sized morsels.

To be fair, it's understandable why they are so adamant about what they believe in.

Imagine you are a white man. Now imagine what it's like going through 12 years of school, four years of college, graduate school and an entire career that made you one of the most powerful people on the planet. Now imagine a group of Black journalists, led by a Black woman, told you that you don't know shit.

To that point, the right-wing echo chamber consistently repeats neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myths, such as the oft-repeated lie that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" rather than white-on-Black chattel slavery.

The right obsessively depicts the Democrats as "the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and slavery". This is a deliberate distortion of history because the pro-slavery, pro-segregation faction of the Democratic Party became solid Republicans after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Right-wing propagandists also love to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a "Republican," or at least espoused Republican values. This is a ludicrous allegation: In contemporary terms King was a democratic socialist or progressive who opposed racism, poverty, military adventurism and injustice of all kinds. King would have viewed the modern-day conservative movement as a great force for evil in American society and the world.

Black conservative propagandists play an important role in the right-wing echo chamber, validating racist fantasies that slavery was a "gift" to Black people because it brought them to America. In this twisted perception of history, chattel slavery is understood as a "necessary evil" because it gave Black people Christianity and taught them the value of "hard work".

These same Black conservatives love to repeat the vicious lie that the Democratic Party is a type of "plantation." In reality, the plantations of the antebellum South were prison camps, charnel houses and places of torture, rape, suffering and death. Black conservative propagandists frequently announce that they are special and uniquely capable of "thinking for themselves," as compared to the vast majority of Black people who support the Democratic Party and are therefore deemed to be ignorant or uninformed.

The campaign against "critical race theory" — and against teaching America's real history — must be understood as part of a larger fascist strategy of attacking public schools and other institutions of learning with the aim of creating compliant followers and a public that is not equipped to participate in democracy — or to defend it.

This plan involves placing white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, Trump supporters and other right-wing extremists — to the degree those categories of people can be separated — on local school boards and library advisory councils, banning "controversial" books, and the surveillance or intimidation of teachers deemed too "liberal" or suspected of "politicizing" the classroom, i.e., by refusing to teach right-wing dogma and other lies.

The fascist assault on education and critical thinking also involves think tanks, right-wing activists and advocacy groups, along with a network of wealthy funders committed to remaking American society to fit their racist, theocratic and plutocratic vision.

The Texas Republicans' attempt to literally whitewash the Ku Klux Klan out of American history is so ridiculous that it approaches parody. That doesn't make such historical erasure and distortion any less dangerous. Those dangers are further amplified by the crisis of democracy caused by the Jim Crow Republicans and ascendant neofascist movement.

As historian Timothy Snyder warned in a recent essay in the New York Times:

Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.

We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.

When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks on "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history echo some of the worst aspects of the country's past. In his book "Trouble in Mind", historian Leon Litwack details how history was taught during the Jim Crow reign of terror:

The history to which Black children were exposed in the classroom and the primers made a virtual gospel of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ways of thinking and acting…. What little they learned of their own history consisted often of disparaging caricatures of Black people as the least civilized of the races — irresponsible, thoughtless, foolish, childlike people, satisfied with their lowly place in American life, incapable of self-control and self-direction. The history of Black people was a history of submission gladly endured and of services faithfully rendered. Transported from the darkness of heathen Africa to the civilized and Christian New World, grateful slaves found contentment and happiness…. The treatment of emancipation depicted Blacks passively waiting for Massa' Lincoln to strike off their shackles. And Reconstruction saw the enthronement of Black ignorance and inexperience, with the Ku Klux Klan in some account redeeming Anglo-Saxon civilization from alien rule. The history lessons taught in public schools were calculated to produce patriotic citizens, albeit with a distinctive southern bias.

The Jim Crow Republicans and the white right view this approach to American history as admirable, something to be resuscitated from the dustbin of the country's past.

In the self-serving stories told by the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorist organization had noble origins, represented "Christian values," did charity work and helped the poor, served the community by dealing with drunks and other miscreants, and protected "white families" as well as the "good Blacks". This is the fake history that the Jim Crow Republicans want to see taught to America's young people.

The neofascist movement understands that if it wins the battle over the teaching of the past, it can in turn control the future. In total, the right wing's moral panic over "critical race theory" resembles the kind of hearts-and-minds indoctrination favored by the great villains of history. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Goebbels would be proud to see their legacy continued.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/pro-trump-gop-group-sent-out-a-newsletter-so-racist-it-could-make-a-ku-klux-klansman-blush-report/

never apologize?

no lnx few

Alex Henderson July 12, 2021

Pro-Trump Republicans often engage in subliminal racism or "dog whistle" attacks — that is, code words that they will insist aren't racist. But when Florida resident Rip McIntosh, an adviser to far-right Trumpista Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, sent out a fundraising newsletter on April 29, there was nothing subtle or subliminal about the racism in the newsletter.

In the newsletter, Talking Points Memo's Nick R. Martin reports, someone going by thepen name E.P. Unum wrote that Blacks have "become socially incompatible with other races" and that "American Black culture has evolved into an unfixable and crime-ridden mess." Martin described Unum's rant as being "so racist it might make a ku klux klansman blush."

According to Martin, the newsletter that McIntosh e-mailed, "also said White people aren't racist but 'just exhausted' with Black people. It portrayed post-Civil War America as a 150-year-long 'experiment' to see whether Black people could be 'taken from the jungles of Africa,' enslaved, and then integrated into a majority-White society. It said that experiment had failed."

McIntosh is on Turning Point USA's advisory council. Although McIntosh is 85, Turning Point is a youth outreach organization; its mission is to convert Millennials and members of Generation Z into far-right Republicans.

Martin explains, "The newsletter, which McIntosh says has more than 25,000 subscribers and which he sometimes publishes as often as five times a day, is frequently filled with culture war rants, conspiracy theories, racism, and other types of bigotry, but this e-mail stood out even among that toxic stew. In an interview, McIntosh said neither Turning Point nor its co-founder Charlie Kirk, whom he considers to be a personal friend, has any role in the publication of his newsletter. McIntosh also denied writing the essay, which was published under the fictitious byline 'E.P. Unum.'"

00:31

McIntosh told Talking Points Memo and The Informant that E.P. Unum is "a nom de plume of a friend" who "doesn't want his name out there because he's a teacher" and "doesn't want to be canceled."

Unum's racist rant in the newsletter was headlined, "On the Question of Systemic Racismin the United States."

Martin writes, "McIntosh acknowledged that the essay, which it turns out borrowed heavily from an article first published years ago on a prominent racist website, was 'a bit extreme,' but said he had no regrets about publishing it. He also said he believed both Turning Point and Kirk would stand by him.

Unum's rant wasn't the first time someone associated with Turning Point USA has been overtly racist. Martin recalls, "One of the most prominent examples of racism within the organization came in 2017 when Turning Point parted ways with Crystal Clanton, a white woman who was Kirk's second-in-command. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, as part of a larger article looking at allegations of racial bias and financial issues within the organization, reported that Clanton sent a text message to a colleague that said: "I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story."

Martin adds, "In 2018, HuffPost reported that Shialee Grooman, a White woman who replaced Clanton, had previously used the N-word on social media and bragged, 'I love making racist jokes.' The news site also uncovered other examples of Turning Point employees and volunteers using racist and anti-gay slurs in text messages and on social media."

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holy oligarch batman! (plus Az fraudit) AHA  not 1/6 but ~ blm AA and border latinos

omg

Unbelievably dangerous': Top Democrat slams Gov. Noem for using the National Guard as a 'private militia'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 01, 2021

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee is blasting South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem for fulfilling the request of a wealthy GOP donor who asked her to deploy....nat'l gd in texas abbott border

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ABBOTT PVT $ FOR wALL 621, ALSO TAX $?

we must keep the homeland pure, immaculate, virginal vs dark invasion/infection; we need strict fr and wALL TO REPELL THEM/OTHER/ENEMY

critics denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick's 'invasion' rhetoric on immigration

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dan-patrick/

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an 621

franklin Graham urges school boards to fight the '**godless socialist agenda' of CRT

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

Evangelical and anti-LGBTQ activist Franklin Graham is urging Americans to "pray for the Christians" who are fighting what he calls a "godless socialist agenda," an agenda he says now...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/loudoun-protest/

Loudoun County is an affluent suburb outside of Washington. Its public school board held a meeting last night. It was cut short. According to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, the board unanimously voted to end a period of public comment "after a capacity crowd descended into shouting and after numerous requests that attendees remain silent were not heeded." Loudoun County Sheriff's deputies cleared the meeting room. Some protesters were frog-marched out. Videos of the evening went viral on social media.

That's why I'm bothering telling you about what would otherwise be a local event of no consequence to national politics. I think what happened last night is something we're probably going to see more of in the weeks ahead. It has the feeling of a "Tea Party"-style "movement" in which "righteous" Americans "revolt" against the "infringement" of their liberties. It's premised on a garbage pile of lies, but lots of white people in this country are willing to believe them, because lies tell them what they want to believe. They see themselves as victims. They will prove it, though the proof is delusional.

By the time the press corps picks up the story, the truth will be lost and the reported "controversy" will be about what liberalism's enemies say liberals say, boxing out of "debate" almost entirely what liberals themselves say they say.

It all began when Virginia State Senator Dick Black blasted the board for a decision regarding a teacher at Leesburg Elementary School. That teacher is Byron "Tanner" Cross. Cross was put on administrative leave after remarks he made last month during a public comment period. During that period, Cross promised to disobey a proposed rule that would require teachers to recognize "students' preferred gender pronouns or names if they choose to not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth."

"If his comments were not protected speech, then free speech does not exist at all," Senator Black said before adding, that, "It's absurd and immoral for teachers to call boys girls, and girls boys." According to the Times-Mirror, he also accused to Loudoun County Public Schools of "teaching children to hate others because of their skin color." The crowd reportedly roared. It did not stop. That's when the board ended the meeting. That's when the handcuffs came out. That's when the videos went viral.

If the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, had its druthers, that's where things would stand—with images of righteous (read: white) Americans standing up for what they believe in for the sake of their children and their liberty. And to be honest, that's where things will stay for a lot of people, because most people are casual consumers of news, which is to say they have better things to do than pay attention to politics. But it doesn't take much to see all this is staged to look worse than it is.

First, telling the school board you promise to break a proposed rule is kinda sorta begging for a reprimand, and no, the US Constitution does not protect you against being reprimanded for promising to break a proposed rule.1 Second, and important to a revamped "Tea Party," is that the board has repeatedly denied Loudoun schools are "teaching children to hate others because of their skin color." But that fact can't compete with a belief, manufactured by a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, that a critical race theory is hiding behind every bush and tree in America.

As I mentioned recently, critical race theory is a useful mode of intellectual inquiry whose precepts you don't really need to understand because the people making all the noise about critical race theory don't care about understanding them.2 They "know" everything they need to "know" about it, and what they "know" is that it's anti-white. It's not anti-white, but that fact falls on deaf ears same as the Loudoun County school's denial of teaching critical race theory falls on deaf ears. These people believe the garbage pile of lies being fed to them by a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, because the lies tell them what they want to believe. Democracy is producing results without their OK. Democracy leaving them behind is tyranny.

None of this will do too much damage to public opinion as long as stays on Fox et al., but that's probably not going to happen. With a Democrat is in the White House, the Washington press corps has the incentive to start paying attention, and once it does, the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, will be, in effect, the sitting judge of who gets to say what when, where, why and how. By the time the press corps picks up the story, the truth will be almost entirely lost and the "controversy" will be about what liberalism's enemies say liberals say, boxing out of the "debate" almost entirely what liberals themselves say they say.Even as these people demand their freedom of speech, what they're also doing is shutting down speech. Two hundred and forty-nine people were scheduled to speak during last night's period of public comment. Thanks to just one raging idiot, only a sixth of them got to have their say.

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"woke" military aha last fed/gubmint institution to fall, once sacrosanct b/c manly, trad conservative and defend us from evil commies; god bless our troops almost secular so common?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/

gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]; i'm a wht guy want to understand rage; biggest 2 wars bloody ~ racist = nazi and csa/kkk? read mao and marx, not commie; attack on west pt curric?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/

Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys

Raw Story June 23, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.

Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.....

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// juneteenth

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/fox-nation-tucker-carlson-and-charles-murray-discuss-race-science-and-speculate-race-war

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sounds like TP ~ BO?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/demographics-of-trump-supporters/

cdv

Five months ago, supporters of Donald Trump attempted a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, launching a lethal attack on the U.S. Capitol. Since then, the Republican Party has chosen to try to erase or rewrite the story of what happened that day, in order to conceal its culpability. Public opinion polls and other research show that the Republican Party's war on the truth about Jan. 6 — and reality more generally — is working. A majority of Republicans actually believe that the election was "stolen". A not insignificant number of Republicans also believe that the events of Jan. 6 either did not occur or were somehow crimes committed by antifa or Black Lives Matter activists as part of a plot to "discredit" Donald Trump.

In the months since Trump's supporters attacked the Capitol, what have we learned about them? To this point, 510 people have been charged with crimes for their participation in the Capitol attack, and 130 of those have been charged with assaulting, or otherwise causing harm to police or employees at the Capitol. Out of those 130 defendants, 40 have been charged with using deadly or dangerous weapons or causing serious bodily harm. Several dozen of those who raided the Capitol that day have been charged with conspiracy, and three defendants have also been charged with terrorism.

At least 62 members of right-wing paramilitary organizations and street gangs were among Trump's attack force on Jan. 6. Some of those present that day did in fact have serious plans to capture and kill Vice President Mike Pence and prominent Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Many of Trump's foot soldiers believe that they are "patriots" who were following his direct commands to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and keep him in power. Dozens of active-duty and retired military and police also participated in the attack on the Capitol.

Right-wing propaganda media, the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy cult, and white right-wing churches and other extremist groups played an outsized role in radicalizing Trump's supporters — which in turn led to the Capitol attack.

Trump's attack force was not exclusively "working class." It also included middle- and upper-class white people from all parts of the country — not just "red states" — who have been radicalized by racist fears of somehow being "replaced" by nonwhites.

Robert Pape, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, recently discussed the demographics of the Capitol assault in the Washington Post:

The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.

Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists' backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.

In an article for the Atlantic, Pape provides further context:

[T]he demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.

In total, Trump's loyalists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 represent a wide swath of American life. Those same people also collectively embody so much of what is broken in America.

One dominant narrative about the rise of Trumpism is that it reflects a type of "working class" revolt, in which the feeling (and the reality) of economic precarity made Trump's fake populism seem like a viable solution to the country's problems. But such claims often obscure as much as they reveal about the rise of American neofascism and Trump's enduring power over his political cult members.

Research shows that the median household income of Trump's voters is around $72,000 a year — significantly higher than the median household income in the United States as a whole.Other research shows that white supremacy, racial resentment and a desire to protect white privilege are the central or perhaps principal values and beliefs that motivate Trump's followers.

Many members of the white upper class and rich voted for Donald Trump for reasons of personal financial self-interest (i.e., greed). Other Trumpists were attracted to his movement for ideological reasons such as a belief that America's secular democracy should be replaced by a Christian fascist autocracy.

One of the main rebuttals against a simple claim that working-class angst and rage was the swamp that birthed Trumpism is the fact that Black and brown members of the working class (and poor) overwhelmingly rejected Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

In an attempt to better understand these complex relationships between race, class, Trumpism and the events of Jan. 6, I recently spoke with Arlie Russell Hochschild. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of nine books, of which the most recent is "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."

In this conversation, Hochschild explains how a group she describes as "the elite of the left behind" are Donald Trump's real base of support.She discusses how Trump exploited feelings of shame, failure, entitlement and fear among the white working class to win them over to his fake populist movement. Hochschild also shares her thoughts on the Jan. 6 attack, which she sees not merely as an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election but an attack on the idea of democracy itself.

Given the Age of Trump, his coup attempt and the Capitol attack, along with the myriad of other things he has wrought, how are you feeling?

I'm anxious. Was Jan. 6 a planned coup? Yes, I see it as definitely planned. But was it intended to kill people? I feel like it was a mixed event in that regard. Part of what happened that day was Donald Trump putting on a type of reality TV show. People were dressed in horns, for example. It was entertainment. The events of Jan. 6 were a type of assault — not just on people and property but on the very seriousness of democracy itself. So I had a double reaction. It was killing something, but what was it killing? It was killing a culture of faith in government and respect for civil servants.

You are absolutely right that there were mixed elements at work among Trump's attackers. But they did have a core group of people who were screaming that they wanted to kill Mike Pence, senior Democrats and others they targeted as enemies. If Trump's attack force had been successful and killed enough congresspeople, a quorum would have been impossible. I believe that was Trump and his co-conspirators' plan, to create enough death and chaos to declare martial law. How did you make sense of the obvious rage shown by that mob?

The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons. There were those who voted for him because of taxes or social issues, guns or being "pro-life." Others because they liked Trump's bravado. Some because they feel a generalized sense of decline. Some Trump people supported him because of racism. I think that the dominant group of Trump voters are people I would call "the elite of the left behind." These are not the abject poor. However, they are not rich either.

They're rural or small-town and white. They sense themselves as being part of a declining part of society. I believe such feelings are also global with right-wing populism, as seen in response to such issues as race and immigration. Fear and anger is displaced onto scapegoated groups.

But the group that's doing such things here in the United States specifically are the "elite of the left behind." Going back to 1970, there are winners and losers to globalization and the winners are generally coastal and more cosmopolitan and better educated. They can have jobs that are not as vulnerable to being automated or off-shored.

These losers from globalization consist of different kinds of people. But the people who are mobilized are the elites of that group. I remember going to a Trump rally in a bus. This was in New Orleans, with a member of the Tea Party who I had gotten to know and who I was following around for my research. On the bus, people were saying, "Oh! Look how many of us there are! We're all for Trump!" Trump has mobilized them. He's pulled them together. He's gotten them to see each other.

And here is how I believe race is operative. The white Trump supporters I met actually see themselves as some type of minority group: "We're being put down. We are being prejudiced against. They call us rednecks and hillbillies."

The Age of Trump is a story of emotions. One of the main emotional beats is that Trumpism is a response to a declining sense of social capital on the part of his followers.

The folks that I got to know around Lake Charles, Louisiana, go to church once or twice a week and they know each other. They are the ones who stayed. Black people have left the community. The highly educated entrepreneurs and other change-makers have left too.

We see lots of rage on the television from these communities. But there are other emotions at play as well. We need to discuss shame. This is a group that is ashamed of itself. This is partly the fault of American Individualism. If you're doing well, you take credit for it. If you're failing, that's your fault and you feel ashamed. That is connected to being part of the economy and community that is vulnerable to offshoring, which is part of a more general story of the American Rust Belt.

These people are not doing as well as their fathers, which is the classic male comparison to make in terms of the American Dream. They are supposed to be doing better than their parents did, but they are not.

In many ways the data shows that class differences cut deeper than they did 20 or 30 years ago. In 1970, if you had a B.A. or you did not, it didn't make too much difference in terms of the likelihood that you're married, that you're staying married, that you're living with the mother of your children, that you're coaching basketball, that you're going to church, and that you're employed. Those things were pretty similar whether a person had a B.A. degree or not.

But now a B.A. degree has an entire biography attached to it in terms of what it means and represents. Now a person without a B.A. may have a narrative where they are living with their third partner. They lost custody of the kids. Their grandparents or parents are taking care of them.

Another version of this story sees you having a hard time kicking an addiction. You're out of the labor force. You're selling drugs. You've got a little bit of jail time. You're ashamed. This isn't a story just of deprivation or whining about deprivation; it is a story of loss and shame.

Many of these people I spoke to are feeling a sense of loss. They're feeling shame because they are not doing as good as their father and grandfather and the era they harken back to. Donald Trump has brilliantly exploited such feelings and presented himself as an answer to that shame.

Here is how Trump accomplishes it. Trump does something outrageous. For example, he says, "Mexicans are rapists." Then the press and punditry will say, "You can't say that! It is outrageous!" The mainstream news media shames Trump and then he rages at the shamers.

I believe that there is something cathartic there for the "elite of the left behind," a group that is right-leaning. It is about getting rid of shame, almost like going to confession at Catholic church. Trump's followers love him for that. They are proud to "make America great again," and that includes "Make you and your class and your race great again" as well.

The "elite of the left behind," as you describe them are not poor people. As we know from research Trump's supporters have a median household income of about $73,000 a year. These are not poor people. How and why do they believe they have been "left behind"?

Among the 47 percent of people who voted for Trump, some of them are just really rich and wanted to cut their taxes more. They want to get richer. But the people that I talked to, who I consider "the elite of the left behind," are not rich. They're not even upper middle class. These people are middle and lower middle class.

With these intersections of whiteness, class and social capital there is also a deep anxiety that somehow they will "slip down" America's hierarchy and be equal with or perhaps (in their minds) below Black people.

I believe that is correct. They feel very similar to how they imagine poor Black people to be, and they are afraid of that: "Now it's our turn. This is going to happen to us." In one of the chapters of my book, I examined the position of poor whites as being wedged between rich whites and black people. They think the only way out is to identify up to the other white people. That is the psychology at work. It happened in the plantation South and it is still here in the 21st century.

What are your thoughts about the book "Hillbilly Elegy"? I have heard many people speak about your book "Strangers in Their Own Land" with "Hillbilly Elegy" literally in the same conversation. I found the praise for "Hillbilly Elegy" very much unwarranted.

I didn't have that response to the book. I took "Hillbilly Elegy" to be a type of fairy tale. It's a kind of a rags-to-riches narrative. It has the structure of "I was a born of an addict, which means I was born psychologically poor, I had one dad after another." That means there was no steady male figure in the picture. That is the "rags" part of the narrative. Then the narrative becomes "I had a steady partner who was a Supreme Court law clerk, and I will be a better person than I came from." At its heart, "Hillbilly Elegy" really is a psychological rags-to-riches story.

There remains so much superficial writing and other coverage of and about the so-called white working class in the mainstream news media, especially among the pundit class and political reporters. To your eyes, what did they get wrong?

They're listening through a hardened shell. It takes emotional labor to disarm your deep moral and political alarm system and permit yourself a great deal of genuine curiosity about people who you see as some type of Other. That's hard work to do. You have to do it purposefully. That's what I think many people can't do. If one feels like the person in front of you would attack you under normal circumstances, it is not a natural act to open up to them.

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note biden bills popular so gotta go wedge:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/mitch-mcconnell/?rs=182

no lnx pix vid

'Behind us': Mitch McConnell giggles as he shares his extremely whitewashed version of US history

Walter Einenkel and Daily Kos June 03, 2021

The New York Times' 1619 Project was created in order to refocus American history on its story of race and economics. The 1619 date is a reminder of the first enslaved Africans brought by ship to the early European settlements in North and South America. This is history that has long been available to people to discover, but has also been ignored and frequently hidden or suppressed in our country's official retellings of our collective story. Conservatives across the country, bereft of any ideas since feudalism, are recasting the 1619 Project and other critical race theory educational initiatives as an attack on our country. In their estimation, only white males like themselves are allowed to feel persecuted, and any discussion of race and the moral anchor that systemic racism has moored our country's progress forward is an assault on their monopoly on power. They are right about the latter.

On Wednesday, Sen. McConnell took time away from never passing any legislation that wasn't voter suppression-related or a tax break for the richest amongst us, to speak at a press conference in the Citizens Union Bank in Shelbyville, Kentucky. McConnell's fellow Kentuckian Republican Rep. Joseph Fischer recently filed Bill Request 60, for the upcoming 2022 state legislature session that would limit how race and the history of racism in our country is taught.Here's an elementary school level bit of math for you: Kentucky + Republican Rep. + bill about the teaching of race and racism = X* Here's another equation for you math nerds: Mitch McConnell + statement about race and education + microphone = X**

*Answer: Imaginably racist.

**Answer: Very imaginably racist.

On Wednesday,McConnell told the press that the fact the world participated in slavery and the slave trade during the 17th century means that in America historians marking the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas isn't important history. That's what he argued.

"Behind us?"

Man, turtles live a long time.

McConnell's answer came out of a question from The Courier Journal concerning his support or opposition to the kinds of constraints his fellow Republicans are trying to put on public school teachers and educators. He went on to say that the federal government shouldn't tell schools what to teach, and he also didn't seem to knock the fact that Republicans across the country are the only political group telling schools what they should teach.

Mitch McConnell has previously described the focus on the 1619 date in American history as an "exotic notion." He has also categorized any push for education curriculums to include more comprehensive teaching on systemic racism, "activist indoctrination." McConnell's intellectually dishonest angle on the 1619 date is that by calling attention to our country's founding dependence on cheap labor and the evolution of our nation's racism, we "denigrate and downgrade" other, more positive and less uncomfortable, achievements that our country has made.

It's a garbage argument as pointing out our country's systemic racism, and very specifically highlighting 1619 as a date, is clearly an important part of our nation's story. Millions of Americans of all races, cultures, and creeds have been directly affected, and continue to be affected, by those decisions. The Civil War that McConnell says put this sin "behind us," is only fought because of that date, and to deny it and the existence of its reach is incongruous with even the words coming out of the Kentucky senator's disingenuous yap.

McConnell's attempt at speaking out of both sides of his mouth included this statement: "I think trying to completely denigrate and downgrade American historical moments like 1776, 1787,1965—critical moments—is a mistake." If you want to know what truly denigrates and downgrades our country's history, and specifically what those dates mark, all you need to see are McConnell's own actions in orchestrating a filibuster of a commission into the events of Jan. 6—something that had the bipartisan support of his own constituents. As for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party is in the middle of generating hundreds of voter suppression laws throughout the country.

Here's McConnell telling people that systemic racism and our country's use of slavery and racism as a controlling economic foundation is "exotic."

UofL VP of diversity and equity calls McConnell 1619 comments 'troubling'

The Senate Minority Leader said he disagreed with The New York Times' '1619 project.'

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521 raw an

Some members of a rural Wisconsin community wanted to demonstrate a commitment to inclusion during the racial protests last year, but the debate over how to express that has ripped the town apart.

Older white conservatives in Marathon County, whose 135,000 residents are 91 percent white and backed Donald Trump by more than 56 percent in each election, objected to naming the resolution "No Place for Hate," which they found too inflammatory, and the county board's executive committee shot down "A Community For All" last week with a 6-2 vote, reported the *New York Times*.

"They're creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we're white," said supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer and longtime board member. "You can't come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they're racist and they've got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they're racist. People are sick of it."

The proposed resolution grew out of the protests over George Floyd's police killing, with the county's people of color wanting an acknowledgement that they faced some disparities based on race -- but conservatives have been whipped into a froth by local GOP chairman Jack Hoogendyk, who claims it would "end" private property and lead to "race-based redistribution of wealth."

The resolution, of course, would not do those things, but even acknowledging the existence of racism in the community is too much for some residents.

"[Systemic racism] doesn't exist here," said dairy farmer James Juedes, a public opponent of the resolution who's also organized counter protests against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

"I have yet to recall any type of racial instances that has been reported in this community that has caused any type of stress," Juedes said.

La'Tanya Campbell, a 39-year-old Black social worker who was at the meeting last week, related a different experience. Ms. Campbell works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and said she sometimes had to enlist white colleagues to help clients find apartments to rent in Wausau.

"Typically, the racism you experience is behind closed doors, but since I've started on this resolution I can't believe some of the things that I'm hearing," Campbell said. "You feel unsafe being a woman, I feel unsafe being a Black woman, and doing anti-oppression work, it adds up."

The experience has been crushing to non-white residents, who say they're disappointed in their conservative neighbors for seemingly turning their backs -- or worse.

"I don't have the same type of confidence or faith in the community like I used to," said supervisor Ka Lo, a 39-year-old of Hmong descent who fielded death threats during the debate. "I was born and raised here, and I don't recognize the community that I grew up in right now."

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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big aha:

ppl need help b/c of globalization defund soc safety net, but are abandoned by neighbors? church? am indiv macho i only need a gun to protect what's mine from brn horde? nb weyrich wedge issue answer how to brk working class solidarity and vote ~ own interest (plus magical thinking entrepreneur [art brooks magic mantra]lotto dream)

aha fundamental/systemic:  putnam bowl alone esp rural wht ppl marginalized by globalization, digital divide, outsourcing by corps,some hype fear historical trend to blame immigrant other coming to steaL YOur jobs, daughters (rapists) and culture/country, so fill in public swim pool and make it harder for THEM to vote [plus gerrymander so can minority rule anyway; inequality (tax dodge/brk subisdy for rich/coprs b/c buy election w/ dark money so defund public school, health care, pvtize everything which makes it harder and more expensive to be poor, then demonize govt RR /koch libtard GOP TP so not ask them for help/justice/equity GI Bill VA homes mort) but build that wall

sparked by chomsky 521

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aha: Am Exceptionalism means not only do rules not apply, but nor does history; nat am gemocide and slavery are two orig sins, so must be minimized, slaves were happy, indians crude barbarians (both cildish?? incapble of achievement or even self-gov?)

CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture"

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/secret-facebook-groups-reveal-how-prevalent-racist-beliefs-election-lies-and-qanon-theories-are-among-military-members/

a disturbing number of Facebook users who belong to America's military and other special forces have deep-rooted beliefs and views on racism and other conspiracy theories such as the QAnon movement and the falsehoods surrounding the presidential election.

NBC News has conducted an analysis of hundreds of social media posts shared in four secret Facebook groups for "current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors. The publication notes that most of the politically charged content was shared within two groups—SF Brotherhood - PAC and US Special Forces Team Room.

Collectively, there are more than 5,000 Facebook users within those two groups with some users belonging to both private groups. Across the board, the U.S. Special Operations Command consists of approximately 70,000 personnel. Additionally, the special operations forces also have thousands more retired members. The highlighted Facebook posts cover a vast canvas of conspiracy theories.

For example, in one of the posts, a special forces member raised concerns about one conspiracy theory as he claimed "several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a 'Concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the people's government.'"

On Jan.7, just one day after the Capitol insurrection, a member of the U.S. Special Forces Team Room posted a message that read, "Trump was sabotaged once again!" adding, "trying to get to the bottom of the obvious election fraud now looks like it doesn't have a chance."

According to the publication's analysis, there are many disturbing posts that are relatively similar. The analysis has raised concern about the mindset of many members of the United States' lethally trained forces. Jack Murphy, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret recently voiced his concerns about radicalization within the special operations forces community.

"The story of radicalization in special operations is a story that needs to be told," said Murphy. "It has shocked and horrified me to see what's happened to these guys in the last five or six years."

Garry Reid, director of defense intelligence at the U.S. Department of Defense, noted that the Pentagon is currently working to incorporate methods to "better identify, detect, categorize and take action against any such behaviors in this department."

Reid said, "This is very disturbing material for me and very disturbing content that in no way would mirror the behavior expected of persons employed by the Department of Defense, and certainly not serving in the U.S. military."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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see voter suppresion ,sorta neglected

an 321 georgia Republicans push a draconian bill to criminalize giving food and water to people in voting lines

Alex Henderson

March 04, 2021

On Monday, the GOP-controlled Georgia House passed, by a 97-72 margin, a voter suppression bill that would greatly restrict absentee voting, early voting, weekend voting and ballot drop boxes in that state.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/historians-on-donald-trump/

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former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial will likely be wrapping up over the next couple of days and, unfortunately, there is a strong possibility his acquittal could ironically fall on the most sardonic date: President's Day.

According to Axios, historians are focused on evaluating the bigger picture as it pertains to Trump's controversial legacy: "the election fraud lie, the efforts to overturn the results through violence, the impeachment of a president days before his exit, and the actions of his own party to block his conviction."

The publication notes how Trump's impeachment trials have drastically diminished the power of the impeachment process, altogether. In fact, Renee Romano, a professor for Oberlin College, weighed in with her concerns about what a possible Trump acquittal would signify.

According to Romano, the battle between lawmakers amid the impeachment trial signifies the "result of tension between two opposing historical narratives.

One political party identifies with Trump's perspective on the election being rigged. That group believes the violence that ensued at the Capitol is justified based on Trump's arguments. However, the opposing side believes President Joe Biden's victory is legitimate as it is no secret that the American public widely supports the Democratic Party because they have evolved into a representation of a "multiracial" society.

"I think a lot of this is about race, and entitlement," Romano said. "And now, we're at a stage where you basically have to use violence to overthrow the results of a democratic election to protect white minority power."

She added, "In any society where you have such a divide over how you see reality, that's an unstable country," Romano said. "I'm not hopeful for the future of the country."

Andrew Rudalevidg, an expert on the governance behind presidential power, also offered a broad perspective on the message Senate Republicans are sending by failing to hold Trump accountable for a second time. He also noted the extent of how damaging it is that Trump has been allowed to undermine Congress' authority and the rule of law.

"Congress not even pushing back against a physical assault suggests that there's a lot they will put up with," Rudalevige said.

It's a President's Day present: an affirmation of the autonomy of the executive branch."

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aha // hype fear  alt reality; in am hist when stress/crisis blame THOSE PPL POC foreigners; 2 america echo bubble, 2 realities, polarization

think piece SOLUTIONS REPAIR COMMONS

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gop-history/

...A few minutes later, President and First Lady Biden arrived at the rotunda to pay their respects. MSNBC and CNN were there. On Fox, Laura Ingraham briefly acknowledged the Bidens' presence but spent most of her airtime not honoring the slain policeman but trashing Dr. Anthony Fauci and beginning a story about homicides in Chicago with the phrase, "The BLM-fueled crime wave…" Black Lives Matter, you see, is just one more manifestation of the imaginary socialist plot to take over America. No wonder their viewers think the world's aflame, a cynical awful place where progressives plotting evil lurk at every corner pizzeria.

By the way, Officer Sicknick, a 12-year veteran of the force, was a Trump voter in 2016, although *The Washington Post* reports, "Those who encountered Sicknick said his political views did not align neatly with one political party." He was against impeachment but supported gun control.

There hasn't been an official explanation yet as to exactly how Sicknick died but he was attacked and killed while resisting the crazed crowd brainwashed by Trump

...Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to buy into the GOP's big con because, you know, unity. Every time truths are spoken that Republicans don't like, they claim that it's for sure dividing the country further.

So brazen are the attempts at manipulation of truth whether present or past, that in the last months of his term, President Trump and his sycophantic crew appointed a Presidential Advisory 1776 Committee, charged with creating "a definitive chronicle of the American founding." The report partly was a response to The New York Times' award-winning 1619 Project, charting the history of slavery in the United States and our continuing record of racial discrimination....

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aha: trump the disruptor generates chaos, polarization, hype fear/anger (and inequality that drives it) and declares only he is the strong man/strict father alone who can establish law and order, including mex rapists and chicago democrat arson antifa riots

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aha hier is defend position/natural order from encroachment/threat (emotion, reptile brain) from them other foreigner blk/brn ppl

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/psychopath/

new study published in the latest edition of "Personality and Individual Differences" highlights the relationship between psychopathic tendencies, pathological personality traits and prejudicial views. Research suggests people with "calloused, deceitful, and manipulative interpersonal styles" are more prone to align with the beliefs of right-wing authoritarianism, according to PsyPost.

Sandeep Roy, a doctoral candidate with a major-applied focus on clinical psychology at the University of North Texas, explained the correlation between the two.

"My interest in the relationship between pathological personality traits, such as those captured by psychopathy, and prejudicial tendencies originated from my experiences working with offenders in the Arizona correctional system prior to graduate school," said Roy.

He added, "I noticed offenders who were elevated in psychopathic propensities, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), frequently used racial epithets to denigrate me and other staff. When I began studying this personality disorder more in my graduate training, I noticed a paucity of literature relating psychopathy to prejudice."

Roy went on to explain what inspired his research as he noted his concern about the uptick in "hate-based violence" in recent years. The study focused on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-Short Form (SRP-SF) which broke psychopathy into four distinct categories: "a manipulative and deceptive interpersonal style, callousness and lack of empathy, impulsivity, and overt antisocial tendencies."

"Given the increase in hate-based violence in the last few years, I wanted to explore if certain personality traits traditionally studied in the realm of clinical psychology may be predictive of prejudice and provide empirical research on this understudied topic," he explained. "Psychopathy is particularly relevant to prejudice given that facets of the disorder, such as callousness or lack of empathy, are predictive of prejudicial tendencies."

The latest research findings are said to align with previous studies conducted in Austria which highlighted how some people with seemingly "dark" personality traits had an increased likelihood to support right-wing political views and beliefs.

Roy's research also noted a direct correlation between psychopathic tendencies judgmental views. During an interview with with the publication, Roy further explained his findings.

Roy said, "The findings of the study suggest that psychopathic traits, particularly the calloused and deceptive traits, are robustly associated with the tendency to prefer a society that keeps marginalized groups low in status and power and are also predictive of the propensity to use aggression towards violators of traditional social norms, both of which are salient predictors of a variety of prejudicial attitudes."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-right-wing/

"We're all victims," Donald Trump claimed at his first rally after the presidential election, on Dec. 5 in Georgia "We're all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims. Every one of you." That was quite a change from his 2016 election campaign, when he promised "So much winning you'll get bored." Liberals were supposed to be the "snowflakes," right? What happened? How did the once-proud party of masculine self-reliance and "personal responsibility" become such a bunch of whiny snowflakes?

There are lots of reasons one could point to, but in truth it's pretty much a blind-men-and-the-elephant situation. We have an abundance of particular insights, with different bits and pieces of the answer. But surprisingly little is known about the role of victimhood in politics in any organized sense, even though particular examples are well-known, some of them quite broad. A passage on white Southern victimhood in the conclusion of "The Long Southern Strategy" (author interview here) is a case in point, drawing together some of the major themes developed earlier in the book. But there is no shared empirical framework for comparing levels of Southern victimhood with victimhood levels elsewhere — unlike with other measures, such as modern sexism, which is used to great effect in that book. All kinds of political attitudes have been measured and studied over the years—enough to fill a whole volume, more than 20 years ago, but no one's ever studied victimhood with the same kind of rigorous scrutiny.

Until now, that is — in a new paper by Miles Armaly and Adam Enders, "'Why Me?' The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics" (forthcoming in the journal Political Behavior.) Given how much of a role victimhood plays in politics, it's remarkable that this appears to be the first attempt ever to develop a way to measure it, and thereby open up a whole new realm of inquiry. By measuring perceived victimhood, the authors show that it's "largely unrelated to political predispositions or sociodemographic characteristics," but is related to, but various views of government, society and the world (especially with regard to perceived corruption and conspiratorial thinking) and personality traits such as narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

While the authors didn't set out to explain how Republicans became the victim party, Armaly told me in a recent interview, that makes a lot of sense in terms of what they did find. "The idea of many Trump supporters being 'victims' is borne out in our work," he said. "Inasmuch as cueing from political elites is responsible for some of these feelings, victimhood is currently manifesting in Trump supporters in large part because of 'we are the victims' messages," such as Trump's speech in Georgia.

The combination of two processes — top-down elite cues and bottom-up pre-existing attitudes — is one of three major distinctions drawn in this paper that clarify our understanding of victimhood, and how it helps shape the political landscape. "It's bottom-up in the sense that many psychological traits are. It's top-down in that elites can cue feelings of victimhood," Armaly put it.Neither of those things by itself can explain how victimhood functions in politics; both need to involved.But even to begin we need the help of another distinction — between objectively-defined victimhood and a subjective sense of victimhood — in order to focus on the common psychological factors shared by differently situated political individuals and groups.

Finally, "Why Me" develops a highly-clarifying twofold construct of subjective victimhood: It is egocentric, involving a tendency to agree with statements like "I am the victim because I deserve more than I get," and it involves a sense of systemic unfairness, reflected in sentiments like, "I am the victim because the system is rigged against me." The two are strongly correlated but distinct, with egocentric victims more likely to be Trump supporters, for example, while systemic victims are less likely to be.

In an added wrinkle, the paper's conclusion suggests the existence of a third form of victimhood, "an other-oriented, or accusatory one," and goes on to note:

Modern right-wing rhetoric, for instance, decries liberal "snowflakes," "safe spaces," and political correctness culture. In each of these instances, victimhood is projected onto others. This mobilizes the projectors because the "victims" are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting.

If every accusation is a confession, this third form of victimhood offers a very big clue as to how Trump's base has turned snowflake.

Each of these distinctions is worth considering in turn. But first let's note three key points from the paper's conclusion. First, the centrality of victimhood:

Victimhood is central to politics. If politics is, as Lasswell (1936) famously described, about "who gets what, when, how," there are going to be victims.Some will be perceived as victims when they are not, others just the opposite. Political communication is, in no trivial sense, tasked with making some feel like victims, and others look like victims.

Second, victimhood in politics isn't necessarily pernicious:

That victimhood plays such a central role in politics is not necessarily troubling.

It is intuitive that politicians would make their case to constituents in such a way that victimhood is cued. Indeed, we want representatives that work to realize our values, fill our pockets, and facilitate a happy and healthy life.

Third, what's troubling is when a sense of victimhood fuels extremism:

Rather than the mere appeal to victimhood, it is the lengths one is willing to go in order to mobilize victimhood that poses the greatest potential normative threat to a civilized democratic political system. Speaking historically, it is precisely a feeling of hypervictimization that has caused people to turn to authoritarian regimes for relief.

Subjective vs. objective

Let's turn to the three distinctions described above: The objective/subjective distinction comes first. One reason perceived victimhood hasn't been systematically studied, Armaly told me, is because "there are actual political victims." In the course of getting the paper published, he said, "People were talking about 'How are Black people different from white people? How are women different from men?' Because people were stuck in the idea of genuine victims of the political process. I think that's one of the reasons that we haven't had this direct focus on perceived victimhood in political science or similar fields."

In fact, the paper itself notes: "Men seem to be slightly higher in perceived victimhood across the board. … Such an observation underscores our claim that victimhood — as a self-perception — does not require relative disempowerment or subjection to injustices."

In conversation, Armaly was more blunt. "It doesn't matter what's true," he said. "It matters what people think and what they feel."

A broader public understanding of this could be helpful, he said: "If people understand that these are perceptions, that they can be made to feel this way — and that's a powerful source for political elites." Indeed, promoting this kind of awareness was the underlying insight behind the race-class narrative project developed by Ian Haney López, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and Demos, which I wrote about here in June 2018. I described it as a suite of narratives "that call out scapegoating by greedy, wealthy special interests, and that call on people to unify across racial lines for the common good."

Armaly expressed the promise he sees in more general terms. "If an individual can recognize that perhaps they are being told they're victims when indeed they're not, maybe there's something there that people can learn from: 'Hold on, I'm not really the victim here.''"

The race-class narratives didn't specifically discuss victimhood, but they did confront the dynamic. For example:

California's strength comes from our ability to work together – to knit together a landscape of people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place of freedom for all, we cannot let the greedy few and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from or how much money they have. It's time to stand up for each other and come together. It is time for us to vote for leaders who see all of us as equal, whether we are white, black, or brown, who respect all of our families, and who will govern for all of us.

Armaly's work suggests that other elite manipulations of victimhood could be countered with similar kinds of messages. Recognizing victimhood as a subjective state is the first step toward breaking its spell.

Egocentric vs. systemic

This distinction is the most fully elaborated of the three. What both poles have in common is that victimhood is "attractive," Armaly explained, "because it's placing the blame for one's lot in life on somebody else: 'It's not my fault.' It's a psychologically pleasing thing. I don't have to be blamed, because somebody else is doing this." From there, the two types diverge. "With the systemic, people are placing the blame with specific higher entities if you will, and with egocentric, people feel this way, they have the internal feelings of victimhood, but again, it's not their fault. It's always nice to lay blame somewhere else. That's the way to eliminate psychological pressure on oneself."

The difference between the two might seem subtle, and only emerged gradually over time. "We were discussing how to measure victimhood, and we have these ideas central to what we thought victimhood entailed," Armaly explained. "At a certain point we realized these are kind of tapping different things. So if you look at the items we use, four of them refer to the self, or 'me' or 'I' or something like that, and the other four are referring to outward sources."

The paper itself puts it this way: "The major distinction between egocentric and systemic victimhood is blame attribution. Systemic victimhood is a manifestation of perceived victimhood whereby the self defined victim specifically attributes blame for their victim status on systemic issues and entities." By contrast, "Egocentric victimhood ... is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the 'oppressor,' nor the attribution of blame, are very specific."

Indeed, the difference is striking: As mentioned above, egocentric victims are more supportive of Trump, while systemic victims are less likely to be. This makes intuitive sense, in terms of Trump's vague, self-centered language way — about victimization and pretty much everything else. The lack of evidence of voter fraud or any irregularities in the 50-plus election-related lawsuits Trump and his allies have filed does not matter nearly as much to egocentric victims as it potentially would to systemic victims. But the differential support could also reflect the fact that Trump was president when the study was done, Armaly noted. On top of that, "Trump is the establishment, he's wealthy, he's been around forever. So people who see wealth and maybe other systemic issues as victimizing don't support Trump."

There was a similar difference with regard to a set of racial issues, including affirmative action. "Somebody who thinks that they're the victim, an egocentric victim [is] going to view something like affirmative action as taking away possibilities that they think they rightfully deserve," Armaly explained. "Whereas a systemic victim seemingly recognizes that there are systemic forces that need to be corrected, and affirmative action is a correction for that type of systemic racial issue."

A similar logic applies with respect to anti-political-correctness attitudes, Armaly said. "The egocentric victim sees it like, 'I'm being told what I can and can't say. This is an infringement of My First Amendment rights.' Of course it's not. It's not coming from the government. But they perceive society as censoring them."

By contrast, people with a high sense of systemic victimhood "would think you really shouldn't speak to each other the way we do sometimes. Maybe some of this political correctness language is a good thing, because it's more inclusive, It helps people not feel so bad about how other people speak about them," Armaly explained.

With this more detailed understanding of systemic and egocentric victimhood in hand, we are better able to appreciate the significance of the third distinction, between the top-down and bottom-up aspects of victimhood. The primary focus of the paper (and the discussion above) is on the latter: Bottom-up aspects provide the primary data. But top-down elite messaging is central to the political process. There's no way to understand victimhood's political significance (not just potential) without it.

Subjects were presented with identical victimhood narratives attributed to Trump or Joe Biden, according to their partisan identification. "One thing we know from decades of political science research is people only respond to cues from sources they trust," Armaly noted. "Republicans are going to support Trump, Democrats are going to support Biden. Let's see if they can cue victimhood in their followers." The message was simple:

You, the middle class and working people, have been the victims of so much. You never seem to catch a break, and always seem to pay the steepest price. It's sad, it really is. And I'm going to keep fighting for you no matter what.

The result, the paper noted, was that "both egocentric and systemic victimhood increase as a result of hearing Trump or Biden describe the average people's inability to catch a break." In short, Armaly said, "This is not a Trump phenomenon. This is not a Republican or conservative phenomenon. It cuts across ideological lines and partisan lines. But Trump is very effective at it. And it seems like he's weaponizing this victimhood to adhere people to him, to the party, to certain policies. This is a powerful force and it's a powerful feeling.If people feel like victims, it's unlikely that they're going to see the other party as a way to fix victimhood.

"So Republicans who agree with Trump that 'Hey, we are the victims,' they're never going to turn to Joe Biden for the remedy. They're only going to turn to Republicans in the future, maybe even continuing to support Trump. So one consequence of this, we think, is entrenching polarization, furthering extremity in beliefs about politics, and making people set up more in their existing camps."

Of course, Trump election loss and his subsequent behavior has further intensified feelings of victimhood: "That's precisely what the 'Stop the Steal' thing is about," Armaly said. "'We're the victims of fraudulent elections,' even though there's no evidence pointing there and they keep losing in court. But that is definitely a victimhood-cueing rallying cry."

In a way, this helps makes sense of the decades-long thrust of "The Long Southern Strategy." Threatened identities — first around race, and then gender and religion — were key to the whole enterprise. As co-author Angie Maxwell told me, "They didn't have infrastructure in a lot of places for the Republican Party. So they had to create this sense of urgency, and you do that by tapping into things that people feel are fragile and are being threatened." In short, they had to promote feelings of victimhood.

I asked Maxwell to comment on the theme of victimhood for this story. She responded:

In an effort to cut an electoral map path to victory, starting in the 1960s, Republican strategists pushed individualism against the collective — againstcollective bargaining, protest, organizing. Individualism creates blinders that can deny systemic racism, sexism and privilege. Simultaneously, these GOP strategists, in order to shake Southern whites lose from their long-term connection to the Democratic Party, manufactured a sense of urgency about everything from the "war on Christmas" to the welfare queen bankrupting the taxpayer. That combination creates a self-focused, faux victimhood, reminiscent of the Lost Cause in the South but with a national appeal.

This is how, under the "Stop the Steal" banner, we get a majority of House Republicans supporting an utterly frivolous lawsuit before the Supreme Court that flies in the face of decades of GOP "states' rights" rhetoric. Surprise! The Southern strategy was never about states' rights, any more than the Civil War was. (The Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made a mockery of those Southern claims.)

On the role of narcissism

It's worth highlighting how significant Trump's narcissism is in this dynamic. He is utterly incapable of ever admitting he's been wrong. When finally forced to recant his support for birtherism, he double-falsely claimed, "Hillary Clinton started birtherism, and I ended it." Now, having lost an election by more than 7 million votes he claims the election is being stolen from him.

So even though narcissism is only related to victimhood statistically, it's still important to consider the role it plays. For this, I reached out to therapist Elizabeth Mika, whose chapter in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" on "Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism" explained how tyranny is a "three-legged beast," encompassing the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole.

"A sense of victimhood — as opposed to real victimhood — is always based in narcissism: the erroneous, corrosive and inherently destructive belief that we are special — somehow better than others — and thus we deserve special treatment, perks and privileges," Mika said.

There's a logical connection, she continued. "Narcissists are eternal victims, as perpetual victimhood is the other side of the narcissistic coin. It can't be otherwise, because if you believe yourself to be special and the world does not reflect this back to you, as is always the case sooner or later, you are going to feel victimized by the lack of special treatment."

A similar logic applies to groups as well. "You can expect the members of historically privileged classes and groups to have a sense of specialness ingrained in them by the virtue of being part of that class," Mika said. "When their sense of privilege is threatened and/or eroded, by, for example, expanding the privilege to others, members of previously disenfranchised and thus 'inferior' groups, they react with anger and rage that seek suitable scapegoats, more often than not from among those who are seen as 'stealing' their privilege or otherwise responsible for its loss. For narcissists, the loss of privilege feels like oppression."

This description is a near-perfect fit for Trump's white, Christian nationalist base. That base easily delivered landslide re-election victories for Richard Nixon in the 70s and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, but has only managed one popular-vote victory since 1988. Its privileged position has been eroding for at least 30 years now, and has only survived this long because of multiple anti-democratic features of our politics: the Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Senate filibuster and ideologically-stacked courts. The longer that power has been sustained on such a fragile, illegitimate foundation, the more crushing its loss would seem. Hello, snowflakes!

A third kind of victimhood

As mentioned before, a third form of victimhood is proposed in the paper, an other-oriented or accusatory one typified by right-wing attacks on liberal "snowflakes" and political correctness in which victimhood is projected onto others. "This mobilizes the projectors because the 'victims' are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting."

This is clearly more complicated than egocentric or systemic victimhood. But more than projection is likely going on. It may be a process known as "projective identification," discovered by British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, which I wrote about here in late 2015. It involves "introjection (imagining another — or aspects of another — inside oneself) as well as projection—or even both, simultaneously." The first example Klein gave was a specific form known as "envious reversal," in which the projector's unwanted inner states (thoughts, feelings, etc.) are projected (into what Klein called the "container") while the projector steals some desirable state of the "container."

If one is not a victim but claims to be, that's very likely an example of envious reversal. But if one is a snowflake and has spent years attacking others as snowflakes, that's also an example of envious reversal. So, too, if you believe that others are unfairly claiming victim status, when in fact that's been your go-to move ever since Brown v. Board of Education. So there's a potential for this kind of victimhood to lead into a hall-of-mirrors fantasy situation. But remember: This is still subjective victimhood. Questions about how subjective and objective realities align are incredibly important, but to fully address them we need to understand the subjective side as well as can.

The first step in studying "other-oriented victimhood," Armaly said, would be to examine whether the "correlates" are "similar to egocentric or systemic victimhood, or whether we are talking about a third, totally unique type?" His intuition is that such people "would reject the idea that they're victims, most of the time," but might also "reject the idea that others are victims. Other-oriented victimhood doesn't ever seem to be saying, 'Oh yeah, those people are victims of the political process,' It's usually used as a way to say they're not."

The notion of other-oriented victimhood can also have significance for the public as citizens in a democracy, helping us to see things more clearly. "The bleeding heart in me wants to talk about empathy," Armaly said. "Maybe let's not think about victimhood in terms of who is and isn't a victim. Maybe there's another way to approach it. Also, I think victimhood is not zero-sum. Multiple people can be victims — it's not mutually exclusive and not dichotomous in that way."

As a big-picture thought about victimhood as whole, Armaly raised a fundamental question. "We should be asking ourselves, 'Are we comfortable giving victims increased status to make social and political claims?'" he said. "And then, similarly, 'Are we comfortable judging the veracity of different claims?' We don't have a way to do this. Society isn't cohesive. We don't have the same mores and the same norms, necessarily, across all facets of society." He went on to note that, "Elevating some claims over others incentivizes these feelings of victimhood, and that's one of the reasons people are attracted to them. I think we have to consider whether incentivizing that feeling is a good thing."

Recalling the three points from the conclusion of "Why Me?" cited above, the answer may be that victimhood is inevitably central to politics and isn't necessarily pernicious, but that our capacity to deal with it without falling prey to hyper-victimization may be at a historically low ebb. That recognition could help orient us toward civic repair. Eliminating both actual victimhood and a sense of victimhood is not within our power. But continuing to be a victim of victimhood just might be. If, as Armaly argues, victimhood is not zero-sum, the best way to help any professed victims might be to help them all. Yes, even the snowflakes-in-denial who can't let go of their damaged and defeated president.

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an 1220

Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

In total, the Age of Trump was made possible and given life by people, real human beings who should be held accountable to the fullest extent possible, by the law as well as the judgments of history and people of conscience.

The Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

In total, the Age of Trump was made possible and given life by people, real human beings who should be held accountable to the fullest extent possible, by the law as well as the judgments of history and people of conscience.

Miller has repeatedly taken Trump's worst instincts and made them worse yet.Examples include the child separation policy, mass detention centers along the border and a general policy of cruelty toward nonwhite migrants and refugees, sabotaging pandemic relief efforts, and an overarching strategy of mainstreaming white supremacy into public policy and attempting to overturn America's multiracial democracy.

In this conversation, Guerrero explains how Miller was radicalized as a teenager into the ideology of white supremacy and other forms of right-wing extremism. Guerrero also details how the right-wing political machine mentored and elevated Miller, first as a rising star in high school and college and then all the way to the Trump White House. She also offers an explanation of Miller's profoundly damaged sense of masculinity, which manifests itself through an obsession with gangster movies and a ghoulish fixation on violence. This is a trait Miller shares with Trump, and one that helped to bond the two closely together in their shared political project.

Ultimately, "Hatemonger" is a reminder that human monsters must be created. They are not born that way.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Why has there been such denial among the mainstream news media about the white supremacists inside the Trump administration? Most notably, of course, I mean Stephen Miller. This has continued throughout Trump's four years as president.

Stephen Miller does a really good job of laundering white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage" and "economics" and "national security." People who have racist inclinations do not like to perceive themselves as racist. Even those people who are racist and creating those public policies can continue to entertain such a fantasy.

Once you start to familiarize yourself with white nationalism and its literature, those concepts are being repeated almost verbatim by the likes of Stephen Miller and others in the Trump administration, as well as their spokespeople and media. The policies of the Trump administration were drawn specifically from a blueprint created by think tanks supported by John Tanton, the eugenicist who believed in population control for nonwhite people. He also believed in race-based pseudoscience and the genetic superiority of whites.

Part of the denial about that reality is a function of systemic issues, such as a lack of diversity in newsrooms and publishing. There are white managers in those spaces who are really reining in their reporters, telling them to not use terms like "racist" or "xenophobe" when describing people like Donald Trump. There is the narrative that such language should not be used to describe Trump, because we "don't know what is in his heart." I did not write my new book "Hatemonger" to tell the public what is in Stephen Miller's heart. What I can tell you is that Stephen Miller is fluent in the language of hatred. He speaks the language of people who hate. I cannot necessarily tell you if there is hate in his heart. Stephen Miller is a hatemonger. He has been engaging in hate-mongering in a deliberate way. He does this through cruel policies, such as systematically separating children from their parents, basically obliterating the asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border and slashing refugee admissions to historic lows.

What is Stephen Miller an example of?

He is a case study in indoctrination and radicalization.Stephen Miller is the story of what happens when a person is exposed to an extremist ideology during a vulnerable and difficult time in their life. Such a person then ends up becoming consumed by extremism. And then, in the case of Stephen Miller, said person goes on to become the most powerful adviser in the White House.

Stephen Miller was going through a tough time as a teenager. His father is a real estate investor, like Donald Trump, and he was tangled up in legal disputes and bankruptcies related to his business. Miller's father ended up losing a lot of money and the family had to move to a slightly smaller house in a less affluent, less white neighborhood. My conversations with people who knew Miller at the time, people in his family, revealed that Stephen Miller's life was unraveling in a small way, to the extent that he lost his place in line as a rich white male. He felt entitled to that privilege. He was looking for somebody to blame.

At the time there was extreme anti-immigrant hostility in California. The Republican governor, Pete Wilson, was talking about a migrant "invasion" at the border and blaming it for everything that was going wrong in the state. Stephen Miller is really a product of that political and social moment. Miller internalized a lot of that racist rhetoric andended up meeting some very far-right figures, one of whom was David Horowitz.He introduced Stephen Miller, during this vulnerable time in his life, to the idea that values such as equality and freedom, and other parts of America's civic religion and national mythos, are entirely thanks to white men.

Of course, that is obviously and completely ahistorical. Stephen Miller is a Jewish American. He is the descendant of refugees from Europe. But Miller really saw himself as a white man and began to rally around this idea that America was in danger because of brown and Black people who were coming into the country. David Horowitz introduced a young Stephen Miller to the mission that he needed to save the United States from an existential threat, in the form of the Democratic Party and its alliances with people of color.

How did the right-wing political machine elevate Stephen Miller?

David Horowitz was worried that Stephen Miller was not going to get into an elite universitybecause he was so unpopular in high school and constantly attacked students of color, as well as initiatives to remedy the negative impact of racial inequality.

Horowitz allowed Miller to publish self-promotional articles on his website about all the changes that he had allegedly brought to his high school. Another leading right-wing figure, Larry Elder, allowed Miller to come onto his radio program regularly, when he was a teenager, to complain about his high school.

At Duke University, he continued to use David Horowitz's ideas to get a bigger and bigger platform. For example, Miller was given a column at the Duke newspaper by leveraging the language of "diversity." That tactic is something that Horowitz taught him: Use the language of the civil rights movement against it. He was consistently drawn to racial controversies while at Duke. Miller would get national media exposure from that. But Miller graduated without a job. He was again a fringe figure.

Horowitz comes to Stephen Miller's rescue and gets him his first job, with Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party congresswoman. And then from there he gets Miller a job with Rep. John Shadegg from Arizona, and finally with Sen. Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Over time Stephen Miller became extremely well connected in the far-right movement, and that helped him get a job working for Donald Trump.

What does Stephen Miller want?

There are two answers to that question.

One of them is very much focused on immigration. He was indoctrinated into the belief that too much immigration from brown and Black countries is detrimental to the United States. What Miller wants is to attack immigration from those countries through whatever means available. That could be through reducing the actual number of people allowed to come to America from those countries or implementing cruel policies in order to deter or frighten nonwhite people from coming at all.

Secondly, and this is why the Stephen Miller story is so important regardless of whether one cares about immigration or not, he is responsible for Donald Trump's most polarizing rhetoric. Miller is also responsible for why Trump was so combative in general. Stephen Miller is truly a master at pitting groups against one another by using wedge issues.

He understands that when you get people fighting with each other, whether it's based on their skin color or their political affiliation or whether they want to wear a mask during the coronavirus crisis, it creates media attention.

Both Miller and Trump believe that any media attention is good media attention, regardless of whether it is negative or positive. Those distractions also allowed Miller and Trump and the administration to push through their agenda. For example, the disastrous response to the coronavirus public health crisis. Instead of focusing on the distribution of masks and medical equipment, Trump and Miller divided the American people by closing the door to legal immigration and denying green cards.

For Stephen Miller, what does it mean to be "white"? Jewish people were not necessarily considered "white" in America until the 1950s or 1960s. Miller has taken that to the most grotesque extreme by becoming a white supremacist.

I believe that Miller would avoid the question. He tries to avoid the topic of race and skin color because he has been taught to launder white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage," "economics" and "national security," as a way of making hate more palatable.

I believe that an honest answer to that question from Stephen Miller would be that whiteness to him is associated with positive values and ideals. Stephen Miller has been brainwashed to perceive people who are not white as being something evil and beastly. Stephen Miller's reading preferences are very powerful evidence of his beliefs.

Miller has endorsed theexplicitly white supremacist novel "The Camp of the Saints."

In 2015, through his connections at Breitbart, he urged staff there to write articles showing parallels between that book and real life. "Camp of the Saints" is about the destruction of the "white world" by this horde of brown refugees who are described as animals and beasts and monsters. The book explicitly promotes hatred and violence against brown and Black people by white people as a way of ensuring the latter's survival. "The Camp of the Saints" is a book about the "white genocide" conspiracy theory, the same conspiracy theory that white terrorists have used to justify their acts of violence. We saw this in the horrible massacre in El Paso.

From a very young age, Stephen Miller would write things such as, "I'm Jewish, but Jewish people are a minority and so even though Jewish holidays are important to me, American holidays are much more important to me." Stephen Miller was very obsessed with the idea of being perceived as American. And for him to be American was associated with whiteness and the white male heroes he held dear, such as John Wayne. The types of movies and the types of people that Stephen Miller idolized were consistently associated with what he understood whiteness to be. To Miller, whiteness is associated with positive ideals. Miller is also obsessed with mobsters and organized crime and the idea that there is no rule of law apart from "might makes right." It all has to do with power for Stephen Miller.

Stephen Miller's obsession with organized crime figures suggests that he is a fragile and weak man who suffered some type of trauma or other harm to his sense of manhood. He is a remarkably dangerous but cartoon-like figure, an adult man who dresses up like a mafioso from the movies.

I spoke at length to one of his longest and closest friends who told me about how, as a child and then well into his 30s, Stephen Miller was obsessed with mobsters. One of his favorite movies was "Casino" with Robert De Niro.

Stephen Miller would go so far as dress up as De Niro's mobster character. Miller would actually go to Las Vegas dressed that way to celebrate his birthday and on vacations with friends and family. Dressing up like a mobster was not something he just did as a child. Stephen Miller actually incorporates the facial tics and hand gestures of the mafia figures he admires.

When Miller was in high school, he disavowed one of his closest friends because he was Hispanic. That signals to the type of man that he would later become.....

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re DN increase white women votes?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/what-trumps-voter-turnout-reveals-about-america

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/citi-report-sees-16-tn-drag-on-us-economy-from-racism/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/experts-lawsuit-heading-to-supreme-court-would-lead-to-massive-transfer-of-wealth-from-middle-class-to-richest-americans/

Republican lawsuit that seeks to strike down the Affordable Care Act would save the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans an average of $198,000 per year,according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The case, which was initiated by 18 state attorneys general and backed by the Trump administration, is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court a week after the November election. A Texas judge ruled in 2018 that the entire Obamacare law was unconstitutional, after the Republican-led Congress eliminated the individual mandate penalty in its 2017 tax bill and an appeals court then sent the case back for the judge to decide whether the entire law needed to be struck down.

Legal experts have called the idea that the individual mandate rendered the entire law unconstitutional “ridiculous” and a “mockery of the rule of law.” But conservatives currently hold a 5-3 majority on the Supreme Court, which could soon swell to a 6-3 majority if President Trump successfully replaces the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, putting the fate of the law and health coverage and protections for tens of millions of Americans in doubt.

Repealing Obamacare would be a boon for the richest Americans, however, because of the taxes imposed by the law. Obamacare imposed a 0.9% tax on earnings over $200,000 for individualsand $250,000 for couples, along with an additional 3.8% tax on unearned income like capital gains and royalties. The analysis also includes other Obamacare revenue streams, like a$2.8 billion annual fee on pharmaceutical companiesand the law’s employer mandate. These taxes were used to cover the cost of the Medicaid expansion and subsidies for those buying health care on the exchanges created by the law.

The top 0.1% of earners, who make more than $3 million per year, would see a tax savings of about $198,000 per year, according to the CBPP analysis. Households earning more than $1 million per year would get tax cuts of about $42,000 per year.

Households in the bottom 80% would see average tax cuts of less than $80 a year. The top 0.1% would receive 42% of the tax benefits from the law’s repeal.

Tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 per year would cost the government about $30 billion per year, enough to cover the cost of the Medicaid expansion for more than 4 million people, according to the analysis.

“In effect, the Administration and the state attorneys general are seeking a massive transfer of resources from low- and moderate-income people to those at the top of the income scale,” the CBPP researchers wrote. “The lawsuit would also widen racial gaps, with Black and Hispanic people disproportionately likely to lose health coverage and the overwhelming share of the tax cuts flowing to white people.”

Based on estimates from the Urban Institute, the analysis found that nearly10% of non-elderly Black people and 10% of Hispanic people would lose health coverage if the law were repealed. About one of every 16 white people would also lose coverage.

“Meanwhile, the tax cuts that would result from striking down the law would flow disproportionately to white households, which are three times likelier than Black or Hispanic households to be in the top 1 percent of the income scale,” the researchers wrote.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/they-just-want-to-watch-the-world-burn-psychological-analysis-reveals-the-14-key-traits-that-explain-trump-supporters/

as he himself said even before he won the presidential election in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not, at least for the majority of his supporters, and that is something that should disturb us. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paperpublished in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016 by myself, a cognitive neuroscience and psychology researcher, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

this list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump’s intransigent support, and as the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

The psychological phenomena described below mostly pertain to those supporters who would follow Trump off a cliff. These are the people who will stand by his side no matter what scandals come to light, or what sort of evidence for immoral and illegal behavior surfaces.

  1. Practicality Trumps Morality

For some wealthy people, it’s simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not matter if he’s a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent. It is unknown whether these people are eternally bound to Trump in the way others are, but we may soon find out if the Mueller investigation is allowed to come to completion.

  1. The Brain’s Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump

According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session. This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn’t necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple language clearly resonate with some at a visceral level.

  1. America’s Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV. To some, it doesn’t matter what Trump actually says because he’s so amusing to watch. With the Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

  1. “Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”

Some intelligent people who know better are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and democrats like Hillary Clinton that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people do not have their priorities straight, and perhaps have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others, or a deranged obsession with schadenfreude.

  1. The Fear-Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala — a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you’ve found your protector, you become less concerned with offensive and divisive remarks.

  1. The Power of Mortality Reminders and Perceived Existential Threat

A well-supported theory from social psychology, known as Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump’s fear mongering is doubly effective. The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitably of one’s death creates existential terror and anxietythat is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have confirmed this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they influence actual voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forcesthat could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives, which can likely be attributed to their heightened fear response.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. Liberals and Independents who have been puzzled over why Trump hasn’t lost supporters after such highly offensive comments need look no further than Terror Management Theory.

  1. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Humans Often Overestimate Their Political Expertise

Some support Donald Trump do so out of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crimeis skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.” These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are the ones who should be reaching others.

  1. Relative Deprivation — A Misguided Sense of Entitlement

Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

Common explanations for Trump’s popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to.

  1. Lack of Exposure to Dissimilar Others

Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border. These racial biases might be more implicit than explicit, the latter which is addressed in #14.

  1. Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Target the Mentally Vulnerable

While the conspiracy theory crowd — who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy QAnon — may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, the truth is that many of them suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are at least vulnerable to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy theories is well-established, and a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDs epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of “odd beliefs and magical thinking.” One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.

Donald Trump and his media allies target these people directly. All one has to do is visit alt-right websites and discussion boards to see the evidence for such manipulation.

  1. Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one’s national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the ‘true identity’ of a nation — the ‘ingroup,’ in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them ‘unrightfully.’ This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

  1. Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one’s national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the ‘true identity’ of a nation — the ‘ingroup,’ in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them ‘unrightfully.’ This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

Donald Trump exacerbates collective narcissism with his anti-immigrant, anti-elitist, and strongly nationalistic rhetoric. By referring to his supporters, an overwhelmingly white group, as being “true patriots” or “real Americans,” he promotes a brand of populism that is the epitome of “identity politics,” a term that is usually associated with the political left. Left-wing identity politics, as misguided as they may sometimes be, are generally aimed at achieving equality, while the right-wing brand is based on a belief that one nationality and race is superior or entitled to success and wealth for no other reason than identity.

  1. The Desire to Want to Dominate Others

Social dominance orientation (SDO) — which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome (#13) — refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities). A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.

  1. Authoritarian Personality Syndrome

Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome —  a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition — is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wingaround the world.President Trump’s speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those with the syndrome.

While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise

  1. Racism and Bigotry

It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that many do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles” — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump’s signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian. 

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Aha: this is an extension of pinko prof brainwashing and campus conserv student silencing b/c of PC cancel culture; gin up hype in front of election (TP kirk bloody revenge coming for your kids?! also reaction to BLM for end of systemic racism.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/loving-your-country-is-not-the-same-as-loving-trump-how-the-right-makes-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism

on September 17, in a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum, President Trump announced he was signing an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, aimed at promoting what he called a “patriotic” and “pro-America” education.  The announcement was a direct attack on the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that explores the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Trump, teaching critical race studies is akin to committing child abuse “in the truest sense of those words.”

“Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and souls,” Trump announced. He accused the left of destroying children’s love of their country by teaching the facts of its history — facts, he claimed, wrongly “rewrite” American history as founded on oppression rather than freedom. He’s demanded that schools “teach American exceptionalism” and said that schools are teaching students to “hate their own country.”

This was just the latest show of Trump’s blatant conflation of racism with patriotismand it served as yet another example of how Trump has turned patriotism into a self-serving performance free of any connection to facts. From the start, Trump has attempted to define patriotism not as loving the country, but rather as loving Trump. All we need to do is remember that the same man who dodged military service spent over $2.5 million on a Fourth of July military parade designed to be primarily a celebration of himself.

Before analyzing the damage Trump has done to U.S. patriotism, let me be blunt: “loving” your country is stupid. Patriotism, when it is nothing more than blind adoration of a country, is idiotic at best and fascist at worst. Countries don’t need to be loved; they need to be built, critiqued, developed and improved. They need to be held to the highest ideals and they need to face their shortcomings so that they can strive to be better. The relationship citizens have to their nations may always include some affect, but real support for a nation thrives when citizens emote less and reflect and engage more. So, when patriotism is synonymous with loving your country, it is always, already a bad idea. but setting aside the question of whether it even makes sense to debate who does or doesn’t love their country, there seems little doubt that the time has come to push back on the way that the right has conflated loving the United States with loving Trump....

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https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/18/headlines/trump_patriotic_education_plan_to_counter_left_wing_indoctrination_in_schools

zinn makes kids ashamed /child abuse

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-why-trump-and-his-supporters-are-so-threatened-by-critical-race-theory/

For the last couple of months, Donald Trump has been promising to restore patriotic education in our schools. He mentioned it during his speech at the Republican Convention, during a press conference, and at his campaign rally in Nevada this week. In the midst of his attacks on the 1619 Project—a series published by the New York Times documenting the impact of slavery on our country’s history—it hasn’t been difficult to guess what the president means by that promise, even though his references have been fairly cryptic.

But during a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, the president clarified his intentions. He directly attacked the 1619 Project by calling it “ideological poison” that would “dissolve the civic bonds” in America. In addition, he claimed that critical race theory is “toxic propaganda,” suggesting that it is an effort to impose tyranny and a “new segregation.” He even went so far as to claim that it was abuse to teach it to children.

That is the context in which Trump proposes to restore patriotic education. He announced the formation of a “1776 Commission” (a direct hit on the 1619 Project) to promote the effort. But as is often the case with the president, his remarks were long on attacks and short on his proposed alternatives, although he did say that, “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” The crux of the matter for him is to ensure that school curriculums are stripped of the perspective of people of color and that American history is viewed as white history.

It is important to keep in mind what Trump is referring to when he talks about critical race theory. According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs, it was developed by legal scholars in order to provide an analysis of race and racism from a legal perspective.

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CRT recognizes that racism is ingrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures.

In other words, it is a theory that examines the role of systemic racism, which has been embedded in institutions and affects people of color in almost every aspect of their lives—including housing, employment, education, health, and wealth—regardless of the racist attitudes of individuals.

Trump presented a straw man when he suggested that teaching critical race theory to children was akin to child abuse. No one is suggesting that we immerse six-year-olds in all of that any more than we would expect them to be able to handle a course in macroeconomics. Instead, CRT informs how we teach children in a way that “perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

That is precisely what threatens both Trump and his supporters. To confront the role that racism plays in our society is a two-step process. First of all, we must recognize that, since our founding, U.S. institutions have been grounded in white supremacy. Secondly, in order to ensure that our principles of equality and justice apply to everyone, those institutions have to change.

That first step presents an obstacle for people like Trump, who view any admission of error as a sign of weakness. During his speech on Thursday, the president said that the narratives being pushed by the left resemble the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries, concluding that “both groups want to see America weakened, derided and totally diminished.”

But Trump’s approach is the one that broadcasts weakness. It takes strength to examine ourselves, identify shortcomings, and correct them to the best of our ability. It is at moments when we’ve been able to do that as a country that we have demonstrated our exceptionalism. As Barack Obama said during his speech at the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, that is what it means to be patriotic.

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?…

For we were born of change.  We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.  We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people.  That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction — because we know our efforts matter.  We know America is what we make of it.

In many ways, what is on the ballot in November are these two views of what it means to be an American. Are we a country that is too afraid to even admit our shortcomings, or are we strong enough to be self-critical and seize our power to continue the process of aligning the country with our highest ideals?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-many-police-are-barely-distinguishable-from-racist-vigilantes/

Police in America, whose mottos claim to “protect and serve” us, have been openly declaring allegiance with the forces of white supremacy. It is no coincidence that this has become a hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old white suspect in the shooting deaths of two activists in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the days following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. Implying that the suspected shooter was acting in self-defense against Black Lives Matter protesters, Trump said, “He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like… He probably would have been killed.” Later, in a Fox News interview, he defended police in a similar manner, saying they were “under siege” and using a golf analogy to explain why they routinely kill unarmed people: “just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.”

Across social media, those claiming to “Back the Blue,” and that “Blue Lives Matter,” have taken their cues from the president and declared Rittenhouse a hero. The 17-year-old idolized police. And they clearly felt comforted by the presence of his armed group.

In avideo capturing their close collaboration, Kenosha police officers were seen going out of their way to ensure that Rittenhouse and the vigilantes that had gathered in their city had plenty of water. At the same time, they were enforcing the city’s curfew against someone else, announcing aggressively over a bullhorn, “You are a civilian. This area is closed to all. You are trespassing. Leave. Leave now.” Seconds later, the same officer is heard saying to Rittenhouse and his colleagues, “We appreciate you guys—we really do.” If ever there was doubt that police and armed white vigilantes see themselves as part of the same club, this interaction dispelled it.

Later, when the teenager walked toward police with his hands up soon after he allegedly shot protesters, officers ignored him, seeing him as no threat. Many have rightly questioned if law enforcement would have simply ignored a similarly clad Black teenager carrying a rifle that he was clearly too young to legally own.

right-wing extremist armed vigilantes and police officers are cut from the same ideological cloth of American society that feels entitled to patrol the collective behavior of nonwhites, women, etc.While not entirely white and male, both police and armed vigilantes are largely white men. In urban areas in particular, research shows that law enforcement officers are far less racially diverse than the communities they police and are overwhelmingly male. They epitomize the white male authority that armed vigilante groups aspire to. When armed groups show up to protests, police embrace their presence and see them as allies.

A new report published by the Brennan Center for Justice explores the overlap between these two groups at length. Written by former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Michael German, it traces the history of American police, which is more relevant than ever today. “Slave patrols were among the first public policing organizations formed in the American colonies,” writes German. He adds, “Put simply, white supremacy was the law these earliest public officials were sworn to enforce.” Judging by police actions, especially over the last several months, this historical framework of policing appears to be intact hundreds of years later. Even the FBI has warned that “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence,” and German points out that in internal documents, the Bureau warns of the “active links” between extremist groups and law enforcement officials.

Trump is hardly responsible for creating the mess we find ourselves in. But he has ended the very modest police reforms that were put into place under Obama, and law enforcement has in turn signaled that it appreciates Trump. In fact, the National Association of Police Organizations, which had previously endorsed Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden in 2008 and 2012, has now switched its support to Trump.

What’s worse is that there are few elected officials offering us protection from racist police violence, let alone armed white vigilantes. It is no coincidence that so many fatal incidents at the hands of police have taken place in liberal, Democrat-run cities where politicians pay lip service to safety but give a free pass to police. Even in liberal California, the Democrat-dominated state legislature could not bring itself to strip officers of their badges when they commit crimes.

Within such a context, the disproportionate killing of Black Americans by police is rightly condemned as the ugly hallmark of a violently racist society. When Trump supporters claim that Black people are only killed because they resist instead of acquiescing to brutality, they conveniently overlook the fact that police manage to preserve the lives of white people who fight back when arrested.

From California to New York and everywhere in between, police treat Black and Brown people like target practice at best, and animals at worse. A Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy-turned-whistleblower has detailed the existence of a violent gang within the department called the Executioners, which he said requires aspiring members to kill someone or commit other violent acts as an initiation rite. Two sheriff’s deputies implicated in the shooting death of an 18-year-old Latino man named Andres Guardado were apparently prospective members of the gang. Guardado was shot five times in the back. In New York, a video emerged recently of Rochester police covering the head of a Black man named Daniel Prude with a hood and suffocating him to death. Prude was naked and defenseless in the middle of the street when he was killed like an animal.

These are only two examples out of countless violent incidents where police have claimed the lives of people of color. And such incidents are precisely why white conservatives support and defend police. They see law enforcement as keeping Black and Brown masses in check. They see their own armed groups as supplementary paramilitary forces to bolster law enforcement. And they see Trump, their president, supporting these cozy ties and close collaboration.

Against a well-armed police force linked to white supremacists, what chance do communities of color have at leading dignified lives free of police harassment, targeting, and killing? According to German, “the Justice Department has no national strategy designed to identify white supremacist police officers or to protect the safety and civil rights of the communities they patrol.” And this is precisely how Trump likes it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-trumps-denials-of-his-contempt-for-the-military-are-likely-just-more-lies-and-why-it-matters/

Donald Trump is likely lying, of course, in denying a new report by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that accuses the president of calling the fallen American soldiers of World War I “suckers” and “losers.”

We know this because of Trump’s pathological pattern of telling lies, first of all. But also because in his tweeted denials, Trump now claims he never called the Sen. John McCain a “loser” for being captured during the Vietnam War, even though there’s a recording of him doing so, in the same rant during which he declared, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump was so proud of this smear of the late Arizona Republican that he tweeted it out at the time.

Beyond his implausible but vehement denials, Trump’s other tell is that he falsely accuses others of doing what he himself has done. In this case, Trump has spent years bashing athletes who kneel during the national anthem, falsely accusing them of dishonoring veterans and war dead. In truth, the tradition — started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick — was formed with input from a former Green Beretas a way to speak out against racism and police brutality while still honoring the troops.

This is the same guy who found out that Russians were offering bounties to Afghan fighters who killed American soldiers and shrugged it off. Hetold a grieving widow of a U.S. Army sergeant that “he knew what he signed up for”, and then accused her of lying when she spoke out about it. He smeared the family of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq, when Khan’s parentsspoke at the Democratic National Convention. In between Trump’s badly acted efforts at pretending to care about the troops, his actual contempt has often shown itself.

all of this is why it would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for this story to put a dent in that stubborn 41 to 43% approval rating, below which Trump has rarely dipped throughout his entire presidency. Nor will Trump’s voters be fussed about the Washington Post adding to Goldberg’s reporting with a story sourced to a “former senior administration official” that Trump had “told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got.”

The Trump base, which is stable enough to keep Trump within stealing range of the 2020 election,loves to talk about how patriotic they are and to make a big show out of how much they supposedly love the troops. As this unquestioning loyalty to Trump makes clear, it’s all nonsense. Given a choice between white supremacy and support for the men and women of the military, Trump voters will pick racism every single time.

As with Trump, much of the flag-hugging and declarations of love for “our troops” is just an act for the conservative base. As with the showy piety of the Christian right and the outrage over imaginary pedophilia play-acted by QAnon adherents, the ostentatious “honoring” of troops is just another performance meant to put a moralistic gloss on the deeply immoral ideology of the right.

This was blatant in the way Trump and his supporters weaponized their phony love of the troops to bash Black Lives Matter protesters in pro sports.

The real reason conservatives are angry at Kaepernick, or other athletes who kneel during the national anthem — who are predominantly but not exclusively Black — is plain old racism. Conservatives are loath to admit out loud that it bugs them to see athletes show support for racial equality, since admitting that comes uncomfortably close to admitting to racist beliefs. Instead, they pretend to be outraged about the supposed insult to “the troops,” even though there has never been an insult to the troops embedded in this somber and respectful form of protest.

The very notion that there’s anything disrespectful to the troops about demanding racial equality also overlooks the long history of how people of color have served with honor in the military, while continuing to face discrimination and abuse at home. A number of civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s were World War II veterans motivated by anger over how much they had sacrificed for America, only to return home to be treated, as activist Hosea Williams once said, “like a common dog.” The Tuskegee Airmen, a predominantly Black group of fighter and bomber pilots in World War II, were as famous for the work they did to desegregate the military and fight for civil rights in civilian lifeas they were for their feats of bravery during the war.

Currently, 43% of active duty military arepeople of color. There is no conflict between the fight for racial equality and supporting the troops. Indeed, doing the latter requires the former.

Right-wing pieties about flag, troops and country have often been a bunch of hot air meant to disguise what is really forceful opposition to what are supposed to be shared American values of freedom, justice and equality. Consider how many people on the right love the Confederate battle flag, valorizing an act of rebellion in the name of racism and chattel slavery that led to the bloodiest conflict in American history. In his typical ham-fisted fashion, Donald Trump simply lays bare how much of right-wing patriotism is pageantry designed to wrap racist impulses in the flag.

As I wrote on Thursday, polling data shows that the majority of Republicans have turned their backs on American values, the ones our troops take an oath to protect, such as freedom, equality and the rule of law. If protecting white supremacy requires abandoning bedrock American values, such as the universal right to vote, so-called conservatives seem distressingly eager to do so.

There’s literally nothing Trump can say or do to insult the troops, even those who have died in service to the nation, that would cause his supporters to turn away him. What’s become clear is that they never really believed that stuff in the first place. This is and always was about their commitment to racism, a commitment they believe — reasonably enough — that Trump shares. As long as he keeps delivering on that toxic current in American history and American life, his supporters will forgive him for everything else.

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920

no lnx twt

thehill

Trump on Sunday threatened to withhold funding from California schools incorporating The New York Times’ 1619 Project in their classrooms.

"Department of Education is looking at this," Trump tweeted in response to an anonymous post claiming the Times’ series had been “implemented… into the public schools” in California.

"If so, they will not be funded!" he added.

The president’s allies have frequently targeted the Pulitzer-winning Times series, which emphasizes the legacy of slavery in American history.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July introduced legislation that would make any schools using 1619 Project materials ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Cotton called the series “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union.”

Pelosi: Trump 'engaged in fright and fear' in efforts to 'discredit'...

DeWine: Trump 'extremely respectful' of military, says report has...

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week ordered federal agencies to end workplace sensitivity training that teaches the U.S. “is an inherently racist or evil country” or "that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."

It is unclear to what extent, if at all, such programs are in place at the agencies, with the OMB citing “press reports.”

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one upon a time, LBJ was able to harness the pressure of CRM, and maybe 60's ctr-culture, and perhaps the martyrdom of JFK, MLK and RFK to jam thru civil rights and voter rights acts, as well the the Great Society,oft wrongly seen as a failure; it did affirmative/ active programs that gave poor ppl money, education, job training...[RR cut housing 80? rick p WITH pod 920)

Later affirm action lost in ct? Bakke? UC? 187? RR attack mythical welfare queen, so direct assistance became taboo [BC did welfare reform, 3 strikes superpredators?]

But must at least be seen to do something for inner city POC, so we get opportunity/empowerment zone, tax breaks for real estate dev in crappy parts of town;

so not giving cash to poor ppl, but only a tax/break incentive to competent rich white guys, then the benefits will tricke down on poor ppl.  // urban renewal?  gentrification?  sports stadiums?

NOW 920 Wheeler needs cover because the massive EPA rollback on regs clearly hurt POC, especially kids, so extends paul driessen  Green blk death energy poverty BS  or maybe more generally and slightly less cynically, cut red tape will allow economy to thrive, blk ppl will get some of that $, and can then afford to move away from toxins?

...“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by expertsas a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice....

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an 920

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/to-simply-let-the-hate-trump-has-unleashed-go-back-into-hiding-would-be-a-grave-mistake/

cop beth...

Reacting to five Black teenagers who had been caught shoplifting, Beth pontificates that we need to lock this generation up and throw away the key before they start reproducing. Oliver is right to compare that to 1940s Germany.

But at the end of that clip, Beth suggests that he’s “not saying anything different than most people in society are thinking, but they’re afraid to say it.” That is what conservatives are talking about when they refer to “political correctness” or “cancel culture.” I am reminded of what the blogger Nezua wrote at The Unapologetic Mexican in response to a comment from Glenn Greenwald about “speech rules,"

In this analysis (or this part of his post at least) the problem is the various unwritten speech rules. But guess what? There really aren’t any. There are just poor attitudes we keep about people who look different. Or who we’ve been taught to think of differently. And there is a “White” attitude of deciding for everyone else how they should live, be, self-identify, and do many other things. There are old slurs and old tropes that hurt people. These are the things that are flushed out when people speak: attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, manners of speaking that hint at lurking attitudes.

People avoid talking about race because they are scared of exposing their thoughts and views on race…They are not afraid of “unwritten speech rules.” They are afraid that what they really think and feel will cause them to be ridiculed or ostracized in public, or that they may see a part of themselves they have to feel bad about. So they keep the potential to themselves.

But if we keep the focus on Speech Rules, we miss the opportunity to change ourselves.

Donald Trump has lead by example in chucking “speech rules.” Christopher Orr talked about that as the reason the president is so beloved by his most ardent supporters. Here is what Orr suggests is happening when they complain about the way Trump speaks and tweets:

It is almost always interpreted–and is clearly meant to be interpreted–as “I’d never speak/tweet that way because THOSE ARE BAD THINGS TO SAY, AND I DISAPPROVE OF THEM.”

But what if the unspoken 2nd half is often or even usually something closer to “I’d never speak/tweet that way, BUT BOY WOULD I LOVE TO IF I COULD GET AWAY WITH IT.”

As Orr suggests, David Frum made a similar point in writing about Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention.

Mid-speech, Trump expatiated on the greatness of the American past. “Our American ancestors sailed across the perilous ocean to build a new life on a new continent,” he began. Almost any other candidate, even any other Republican, would feel some need to acknowledge the experience of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, to place a question mark over the concept of wild frontier and open range—the literal phrases in his text. But Trump knows that millions of his fellow Americans are sick and tired of having to pretend to care about Black and Indigenous people. He wants them to know that he doesn’t care either. That’s what they love about him.

That is exactly what Biden was talking about when he said that, “If I’ve learned anything during the time of Donald Trump being president it’s this—hate never goes away, it just hides. And when leaders give it oxygen, as Trump has done, it comes roaring back.”

If it is true that hate never goes away, it raises the question of whether it is better to air it out in the open or send it back into hiding. Here’s what Ibram Kendi wrote about that:

[Trump] held up a mirror to American society, and it has reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump…

Trump’s racism—and that of his allies and enablers—has been too blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. And just as the 1850s paved the way for the revolution against slavery, Trump’s presidency has paved the way for a revolution against racism.

Personally, I’m not as optimistic as Kendi when it comes to the possibility of a “revolution against racism.” I suspect that once Trump is finally out of office, we’ll revel in the return of normalcy.

The good thing about hate going back into hiding is that it happens because, as a culture, we agree that racism is wrong.  People hide it because they recognize that racism is taboo. The bad part is that, as Nezua wrote, focusing on speech rules stops us from changing. Eventually, someone like Donald Trump comes along to exploit the hate.

I am reminded of how former Attorney General Eric Holder was pilloried on the right for suggesting that we are a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race. He was basically suggesting that we do away with political correctness.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race…We know, by “American instinct” and by learned behavior, that certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s character.

The whole point of Holder’s speech was to suggest that “if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

Trump has no interest in a frank conversation about racial matters. But to simply allow the hatred that has been exposed to slide back into hiding would be a grave mistake.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/what-the-kenosha-shooter-tells-us-about-donald-trumps-america

C d V

Events this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are no surprise. They follow an all-too familiar social script in America.

On Wednesday, a 17-year-old  named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin from his home in Antioch, Illinois, not far away. Rittenhouse did this in response toonline appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives in Kenosha from “rioters.” In reality, the protests in Kenosha over the last week have come in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who was unarmed and shot seven times in front of his children. Blake is reportedly now paralyzed and handcuffed to a hospital bed. There are credible reports that at least some of the violence in Kenosha has been committed by white supremacists or other right-wing agitators who are trying to discredit and undermine peaceful protests against police brutality and other forms of social injustice.

Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle. Under the laws of Illinois, where he lives, Rittenhouse is too young to own such a weapon. He also violated the law by traveling across state lines with a firearm.

As shown by his Facebook page and other social media, Rittenhouse was obsessed with guns and the police. He also supports the Blue Lives Matter movement — an implicitly racist response to the human and civil rights campaign Black Lives Matter.

rittenhouse is also an ardent Trump supporter. There is evidence that he was in the front row at a Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

Vice interviewed several former high school classmates of Rittenhouse and they describe a young person indoctrinated by the right-wing media machine:

Kyle Rittenhouse loved cops, guns, President Trump, and “triggering the libs,” according to some of his former classmates at Lakes Community High School in Lake County, Illinois. His clothes were often branded with pro-police slogans, and he carried a Blue Lives Matter phone case, one student said.

Some of his classmates joked that he’d be a mass shooter one day. “I personally believe he went to Wisconsin with the intent to kill,” said one former classmate, who asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety….

Rittenhouse was also known as a “ride or die” Trump supporter. “If you said anything bad about Trump, he’d threaten you,” Joe said. In January, Rittenhouse even traveled to Iowa, where he had front row seats at a Trump rally, Buzzfeed reported. “Kyle was the type of kid to wear a MAGA hat or other apparel just for attention, or to “trigger” people,” Joe added.

Another one of Rittenhouse’s classmates said he used to refer to the school, located in a Chicago suburb, as “libtard af.”

“Kyle was kind of shy from what I remember, but he was definitely in your face and pushed his views hella,” they said. “Like one of those kids that liked ‘triggering libtards.'”

In Kenosha, Rittenhouse wandered through the crowds of protesters and sought to ingratiate himself with local police officers and other law enforcement. They appeared to be receptive to Rittenhouse’s overtures. As police have consistently done when white right-wing militias and other white right-wing extremists have appeared at protests against police brutality or the Trump regime, local cops evidently viewed Kyle Rittenhouse as one of the “good guys.”

Later in the evening, Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two protesters, and injured another, in a series of confrontations whose precise details remain unclear. It appears from video collected by the New York Times that the second and third shootings occurred as people tried to detain him for having initially shot a man in the head, killing him.

After these shootings, Rittenhouse ran away and apparently trying to surrender to police, who ignored him. He then escaped to his mother’s home in Illinois, where he was arrested on Thursday by local law enforcement.

Rittenhouse’s right-wing defenders are predictably claiming that his actions were all in “self-defense.” As legal experts have pointed out, Rittenhouse acted in a premeditated manner by going to Kenosha with a high-powered rifle and looking for trouble. Any such claim of self-defense is highly dubious.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were Black or brown or Muslim? Again, the script is well-worn and obvious, but its truth must still be highlighted because of what it says about the color line and justice in America. In that scenario, the mainstream media, (white) politicians and others would of course be summoning a great moral panic about “bad culture” and “terrorism” and “social pathologies.”

With Kyle Rittenhouse there will be no such breathless news coverage with its questions such as:

  1. Who, how and what is radicalizing white men to commit such acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings?
  2. What is Donald Trump’s role in encouraging political and other violence by white men and boys? What of Fox News and the broader right-wing echo chamber?
  3. Is something wrong with the white family? Why are their sons and men so violent?
  4. What should law enforcement and white politicians do about white crime?
  5. Where are the white fathers in the white home?
  6. When will white leadership step up and stop white right-wing domestic terrorism?
  7. Is white American culture pathological? Why are white people so violent?

There are other parts of this cultural script as well.

When innocent Black and brown people are killed by police or white vigilantes, every part of their lives is publicly scrutinized in order to make them, the victims, responsible for their own murders.

Kyle Rittenhouse will be humanized and depicted as a tragic soul. Perhaps as a cherubic innocent or a “good kid” who somehow went wrong despite his parents’ best efforts. There will be calls for empathy and sympathy because Rittenhouse is “just a child” and we should respect his and the family’s privacy during this horrible time.

Trayvon Martin was 17 years old, the same age as Rittenhouse is now, when he was killed. Tamir Rice was only 12. Black children and other young people are seen, in the white gaze, as somehow always being “adults.”

The “adultification” of Black children and the infantilizing of white men — Donald Trump’s adult sons are frequently described by the news media as “kids” or “boys” — is one of the most obvious and insidious ways through which white privilege works in America for the purposes of legitimizing police and other violence against innocent people.

As I wrote here at Salon in 2015:

When a white person commits an act of mass violence he or she is “a lone gunman,” “mentally ill” or “disturbed.” White men commit a disproportionate percentage of the mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the United States. Yet their actions are never taken to be reflective of white men as a group. The mere suggestion of this basic fact is met with outrage by Republicans and the right-wing news entertainment complex. However, when an “Arab” or a “Muslim” commits a crime, said event is processed by the White Gaze as an indictment of an entire population and to summon the bogeyman of “Muslim terrorism.”In all, whiteness is freedom from collective responsibility and indictment; to be the Other is an a priori assumption where the actions of one non-white person means that all members of the group should be punished and made suspect.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s apparent vigilantism and political violence are the logical and predictable result of the energies summoned up by Donald Trump and his agents.

Trump, his regime and their compliant news media have repeatedly depicted nonwhite people, Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black Lives Matter supporters, anti-fascists and the majority of Americans who oppose him as un-American “terrorists” who should be destroyed.

Trump, the Republican Party, and their media use “stochastic terrorism” to encourage such violence while denying responsibility for what follows.

The shootings in Kenosha occurred simultaneously with this week’s ghoulish, racist, lie-filled, death-cult celebration at the Republican National Convention, which should be no surprise. Kyle Rittenhouse may have imagined himself to be a great soldier in Trump’s personal army as he waded through a sea of “evildoers.”

New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz describes this dangerous situation:

Before Trump’s emergence, some of the most powerful interest groups within the GOP coalition already viewed the Democratic Party as a threat so catastrophic the imperative of keeping it away from power would justify most any means of resistance.

Trump has certainly cultivated his party’s authoritarian elements more energetically — and delegitimized his opposition more shamelessly — than any other 2016 presidential candidate was liable to do. But regardless, thebasic fact remains that the GOP is — and has been — dominated by a movement that sees the Democratic Party as an internal enemy of the United States and any election that a Democratic president wins as illegitimate by definition

In sum, Kyle Rittenhouse channeled the juvenile, lethal, immature and simple-minded masculine fantasies of fascism — and he represents a broader cultural and political crisis in America in other ways as well.

Rittenhouse’s apparent shooting spree in Kenosha exemplifies the way that Donald Trump has served as a type of permission function for the darkest forces in American society by continually encouraging violent and other anti-social behavior by his followers. It would seem that Kyle Rittenhouse was listening closely.

As the United States further succumbs to Trump’s neofascist authoritarian movement, historian Timothy Snyder’s warnings about paramilitaries and police become even more ominous. He wrote this in his recent book “On Tyranny”:

Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Kyle Rittenhouse is only 17, but that too is instructive. He is an example of how the average age of right-wing extremists is decreasing. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that recent incidents of far-right violence have involved perpetrators with an average age of about 26, “markedly younger than white supremacist killers who came before them.” As with radical Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, social media and other online technologies are being used to radicalize (white) right-wing extremists in the Age of Trump.

Christian Picciolini, a former extremist and the founder of the global disengagement network called the Free Radicals Project, explained this process of radicalization to Salon via email:

The pressure cooker America is dealing with today is the culmination of 400 years of human rights violations by white supremacists against marginalized and disenfranchised American people being swept under the rug. To top it off, for the last four years we have an administration that is working against any progress that has been made toward equity and a dialogue of progress, in many cases putting forth outright white nationalist policies in the face of that progress. Now, we’re facing a dire multi-layered situation with protests against those racist policies and the killing of unarmed black Americans, a heated election coming up, mass job loss and economic hardship, and a pandemic with no real end in sight.

All this uncertainty and raw emotion and fear, not to mention the plethora of guns and vigilantism occurring on the streets, plus the propaganda, fake news, and misinformation radicalizing people who are spending most of their time online these days, I fear we are in a critical juncture for the future of our nation.

As Election Day 2020 approaches, there will be more political violence by right-wing extremists. Such violence will be committed by random individuals, as well as coordinated by militias and other paramilitary groups. The goal will be to create widespread mayhem and upheaval in order to keep Donald Trump’s white supremacist, authoritarian regime in power indefinitely.

Even if Trump is defeated on Election Day and leaves office peacefully in January, his foot soldiers and other fanatics will not go away. They will fight a rearguard action against Joe Biden’s administration and the multiracial democracy it represents.Kyle Rittenhouse’s alleged actions are another warning of what awaits us in the months and years ahead, a reality for which most Americans are not prepared. Whether Donald Trump wins or loses in November, his most extreme loyalists will still be with us, seeking to exact revenge and make Trump’s nightmarish vision of America into reality.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh

no lnx twt many

It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”

Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.

Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.

The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.” In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.

A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.

Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH. This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.

The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.

That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”

Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.

Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.

[twt]

When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”

“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”

Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”

Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.

Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.

As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.

Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.

Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh. In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.

On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.

Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”

This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.

Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.

When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.

Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%. To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.

One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.

Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.

When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings. However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”

This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.

Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.

Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

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in theory stepian is adult vet pol-op? trotting out willie horton?

trump campaign’s new racist attack on Joe Biden

Roger Sollenberger / SalonAugust 14, 2020

Donald Trump’s campaign has been tweetingmugshots of Black people out on bailin an effort to instill fear in voters about a future Joe Biden presidency. The tweets featured the…

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/first-sessions-now-kobach-america-first-candidates-are-flopping-at-the-voting-booth/

Far-right a​nti-immigra​tion​ hardliner ​Kris Kobach lost the Kansas Republican Senate primary to ​Rep. Roger Marshall by more than 50,000 votes, marking the latest defeat for far-right “America First” candidates at the ballot box.

In 2020, several high-profile Republican candidates championed by far-right and white nationalist political activists have been rejected by their constituencies. Right Wing Watch reported in January that white nationalists were excited by the prospect of Kobach​, the former secretary of state of Kansas, serving in the Senate. White nationalist podcaster James Allsup told listeners at the time that “having somebody like Kobach in the upper house, in a position of power, as an anti-immigration, as an immigration restrictionist leader, that would be immensely powerful going forward​.”

On Tuesday night the race was called, and the far-right activists who had supported Kobach’s bid mourned his electoral loss online. Many “America First” white nationalist movement figures blamed the GOP for Kobach’s defeat.

“Back to the hills. Of course, we’ve been there before,” Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant​, ​white nationalist publication VDARE, said. He added that it was “annoying” that far-right commentator Ann Coulter was right about President Donald Trump. Coulter, once an avid supporter of Trump, has attacked the president in recent years and called Trump the “most disloyal actual retard” after he endorsed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Republican primary opponent Tommy Tuberville ​in Alabama.

“Fuck the weak Kansas Republicans who are looking at this primary as a ‘victory.’  No matter what you’re electing a member of the monoparty in November who hates you and will continue to sell you out to our globalist elites,” far-right Kansas State student Jaden McNeil said. “Enjoy your state’s continued degradation.”

Scott Greer, a former editor at The Daily Caller who was revealed to be writing alt-right columns under a pseudonym, only offered one comment on Kobach’s loss: “Damn.”

White nationalist and alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer theorized that Kobach’s loss reflected the unpopularity of “conservative nationalism.” Spencer has been vocal in his disdain for the elements of the far-right that overtook him in popularity and the flaws he sees in those ranks.

“Steve King . . . Jeff Sessions . . . Kris Kobach . . . then Donald Trump in November . . . The’America First’ conservatives and supposed ‘immigration hawks’ are falling like dominos,” Spencer tweeted. He later added, “You can blame Trump’s tactical failures—and there are many—you can blame Jared and Ivanka, etc. At some point you must conclude that conservative nationalism isn’t going anywhere, and it’s simply not very popular.” ​

Joshua Foxworth, a Republican “America First” candidate in Texas who was trumped by incumbent Rep. Randy Weber in  a blow-out loss in March, blamed Kobach’s loss on the media.

“The loss of Kobach in Kansas is upsetting but not surprising,” Foxworth said. “Almost no one can overcome a media that constantly promotes or opposes a candidate. Deplatforming of supporters doesn’t help. The GOP is in danger of becoming a party without core issues and without a base.”

But Kobach’s loss does not exist in a vacuum. Other far-right supported candidates, like Sessions, Iowa Rep. Steve King, and Arizona former sheriff Joe Arpaio have seen their hopes for high office dashed.

Sessions’ campaign attempted to earn the support of far-right and anti-immigration​ voters, going so far as to tap far-right columnist Michelle Malkin to author a fundraising letter in May. Malkin made the play obvious, opening the letter by calling Sessions “an old friend of the America First movement.” But President Donald Trump, nursing a grudge against Sessions for recusing himself from the probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election, urged Republican voters to reject Sessions. Last month, Sessions lost Alabama’s Republican runoff election to Tuberville by more than 100,000 votes.

King, who has a sordid history of racist remarks during his nine terms serving in the U.S. House, lost the Iowa Republican primary to Randy Feenstra by nearly 10 percentage points.

An​d in Arizona, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing a close contest against challenger Jerry Sheridan in a race to get his old job back after receiving a pardon from Trump in 2017​. (Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in going after undocumented immigrants.) With 90 of 99 vote centers counted at the time of publication, Sheridan is shown slightly ahead. Arpaio has not yet conceded the race.

William Gheen, president of the anti-immigrant Americans for Legal Immigration PAC mourned the loss of Sessions, Arpaio, Kobach, and King.

“All four of America’s top illegal immigration fighters have fallen.  Farewell Joe Arpaio, Kris Kobach, Jeff Sessions, and Rep. Steve King,” Gheen said. “ Who would have ever guessed after four years of Trump our top voices against illegal immigration would [be] gone.”

“America First is inevitable,” white nationalist and anti-Semitic podcaster Nick Fuentes declared on July 7.

​It would seem that it’s actually anything but.

​However, these far-right losses at the ballot box are not indicators that extremism in the Republican Party is retreating, rather the opposite appears to be true. For certain far-right causes​—like the “America First” movement—the defeats may prompt an exploration of options beyond electoral politics. ​And while extremists gaining legislative power can have disastrous consequences for a democracy, history has​ shown that extremists seeking solutions outside of the political system can alsoprove to be dangerous.​

Tags: Jeff Sessions Joe Arpaio Kris Kobach Nick Fuentes Peter Brimelow Scott Greer Steve King Alt-Right anti-immigrant white nationalism VDARE

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aha 6/11/20 // merriam-webster def changed to reflect systemic not just personal/indiv conscious bigotry

libtard does not want to pay for birth control b/c not woman (and unlikely to get laid] so // reparation: white refuse to PAY for a sin they did not commit?  ignore fact wealth came from subsidized mortgage blacks denied.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-justice-department-finds-yet-another-way-to-oppress-minorities/

david cay j: not enforce lend laws

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Nastiness has become the essence of Republicanism

History News Network June 11, 2020

Characterizing entire groups of people is the basis of prejudice. Sweeping generalizations are the foundation of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and every form of discriminatory ideology. Offensive stereotypes appear often in…

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an 620

trump can’t bail himself out by stoking white people’s fear of rioting ‘thugs’

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no lnx

ref

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/04/17/hate-groups-and-racist-pundits-spew-covid-19-misinformation-social-media-despite-companies

Hate groups and racist pundits have pushed misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout the crisis, despite companies pledging to fight fake news about the virus.

Among some of the false claims propagated on social media include the notion – based on unproven race science – that persons of East Asian descent were predisposed to suffer from COVID-19, erroneous assertions that the virus was originally designed to be a bioweapon and arguments supporting the idea that racism can protect against global pandemics.

Hatewatch has chosen to repeat some of these posts in full to demonstrate the nature of the problem.

This deluge of COVID-19-related misinformation cuts against a pledge made by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in February 2020, when representatives from some of the world’s largest tech companies convened with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss tampering the spread of false information related to the virus. The group was gathered, in part, in response to what a representative from the WHO dubbed an “infodemic” in an interview with CNBC – the new wave of false information on major social media platforms.

Groups such as Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have pushed to bridge this gap. Change the Terms advocates for social media companies to adopt a reasonable standard of care regarding regulation, which aims to constrain hate activity without stifling communities arbitrarily. But there is work yet to be done. Companies, as the 2019 “Year in Hate” report found, still struggle “to prioritize public safety over the freedom of their users to post extremist content.” The moderation of hate groups across all platforms is often inconsistent as well. Some groups, such as white nationalist publication American Renaissance, have been banned from Twitter and Facebook for hate speech for years, but have nevertheless continued to operate on YouTube.

As Hatewatch found in a survey of numerous hate groups tracked by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project across three major social media platforms – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – racism and disinformation has continued to fester. In addition to spreading racist memes and fake news about Asian Americans and other minority groups, hate groups have used all three platforms to boost a slew of conspiracy theories, fake cures (including one that has resulted in a death in Arizona) and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

When considering the real-world threat posed by social media companies’ inability to enforce their own guidelines on misinformation and fake news, Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD, told Hatewatch that “three main risks came to mind.” These included the risks posed not only to public health by the proliferation of fake cures, but also to institutions as a result of a preponderance of conspiracy theories. She also cited the danger of “target attacks” against minority groups and others.

“None of which are new,” she added. “They fit the patterns of platforms’ inability to deal with [these] specific kinds of attack and disinformation content.”

Most, if not all, of the groups spreading this content have been given a pass to do so under existing social media policies.

“Obviously, the historical reticence of these companies to promote evidence-based or expert information above other kinds of information has come back to bite [them] now, as we’ve seen,” Colliver continued. “The platforms themselves acknowledged that their policies aren’t up to scratch in a crisis like this.”

Facebook

VDARE, a white nationalist site that has had a promotional page on Facebook since 2012, has seized upon this climate of instability to push its racist agenda. More than 50 posts on its promotional page referred to the epidemic in some capacity.

“There is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to [COVID-19] than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons,” one post from March 5 said. It included a link to an article from pseudonymous New York-based contributor “Lance Welton,” titled “Chinese Scientists Find MORE Evidence That Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) Discriminates By Race.”

“I’m sure the health authorities do have this information,” VDARE editor Peter Brimelow contended in an article posted to the site on March 12 as a follow up to “Welton’s” piece. Using debunked race science, Brimelow posited that COVID-19, as well as its predecessor, SARS, were “Oriental-specific.”

“Are some racial groups more prone to catching the Chinese pathogen – and are some races more severely affected when they do?” asked another Facebook post from March 31 – the same day officials announced that deaths in the United States had officially surpassed those of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The same post included a link to an article featuring a section titled “Coronovirus [sic] and the Mexican Race.”

VDARE, which has often referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan flu” (or “Wuflu”), defended Trump’s own use of the term on March 17 as well, arguing in a March 17 post that any opposition to such nomenclature was born out of a world where “white people are blamed for all . . . problems.”

Fake cures, not to mention misinformation regarding the source of the virus and government efforts to contain it, have been featured on a number of pages belonging to hate groups and extremist groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

WorldNetDaily (WND), a conspiracy-minded outlet and active antigovernment extremist group with over 840,000 likes on Facebook, has boosted a number of articles featuring antisemitic dog whistles, fake cures and other disinformation. Recent WND headlines include: “Coronavirus is being weaponized by Soros, others behind anti-Trump ads”; “Clyburn: Democrats must use Chinese virus to restructure America ‘to fit our vision’”; and “Newt Gingrich’s question for Biden exposes Obama’s undeniable role in N95 mask shortage.” Another proclaimed that a three-drug cocktail promoted by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko had a “100% success” rate in treating 350 patients with COVID-19. The article, which was shared to WND’s Facebook on March 24, includes an embedded video from Dr. Zelenko himself, which has since been removed by YouTube for violating community guidelines.

Though the particular combination of drugs – which includes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment – has been used by some doctors, the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the drugs’ use has raised some concern, especially for patients who may attempt to administer them themselves.

On March 31, WND published an article titled “‘Cover-up’: Chinese researched bat virus near Wuhan market,” which posited that the virus may have originated in a research lab near Wuhan.

Several antigovernment groups, including militias, peppered their pages with misinformation implying that the virus would result in a communist takeover of essential industries and/or attacks on the Second Amendment. These fears are central to the antigovernment movement’s opposition to the “New World Order.” This far-reaching conspiracy theory, which features prominently in antigovernment and other far-right circles, posits that a small, secretive cadre of elites are behind a rising totalitarian, one-world government.

“We’re not going down the road that leads to tyranny, and that’s what this whole crisis is about,” James Stachowiak, otherwise known as “Johnny Infidel,” said on a video on Facebook that sought to inspire “lone wolves” to take action.

“KLAYMAN: LEFT USING COVID-19 TO INSTALL GOV’T DICTATORSHIP!,” screamed a post on Freedom Watch’s page – a group run by far-right extremist Larry Klayman – in a post from March 25.

Still others encouraged users to view the virus as a vast “globalist” conspiracy. This antisemitic euphemism is frequently used by groups such as WND and Infowars, and has its roots in the centuries-old antisemitic image of Jews as “puppeteers” in complete control of society. One post from anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively, published on March 22, claimed that the coronavirus outbreak had been “orchestrated” by the elites. Their goal, he contended, was to target “small business because it is a cornerstone of American self-sufficiency and serves as a barrier to the complete Marxist takeover of our society.”

Twitter

“Now think of a country the size of China . . . and think of its multi-thousand-year habit of eating some very strange creatures – basically a zoo is a menu in China, it seems. What are the odds that coronavirus just happened to emerge within a stone’s throw – in a giant country – of its only level four bioweapons lab?” asked white nationalist YouTuber and self-proclaimed philosopher Stefan Molyneux in a video clip posted to his Twitter on March 30.

“The odds, of course, are virtually zero,” he said. He claimed the virus appeared to be “engineered,” possibly for “transmission and lethality.”

Molyneux – who runs a verified account on Twitter with over 450,000 followers – has spread racist or pseudoscientific disinformation about COVID-19 for weeks.

“Open borders guy reaps fruit of open borders,” he tweeted on March 7, after the head of Italy’s Democratic Party tested positive for the virus.

Then, on March 25, Molyneux released a video accusing the media of turning “attention away from the mass infiltration of academia, of media, of Hollywood, [and] of real estate [by] Chinese citizens, often with illicit money from the criminal actions of the Chinese government.”

Finally, when asked by a follower why German hospitals weren’t “overwhelmed,” Molyneux encouraged followers on March 26 to “go look up average IQ by country.”

Molyneux, a well-known proponent of scientific racism, has as recently as Oct. 7, 2019, stated that the “average IQ in Syria is 83. Turkey is 90. They will never ever be like the West.” In 2018, he also cited “racial IQ differences” as a method to “push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.”

Molyneux has made his affinity for a white “monoculture,” to borrow his term, widely known. In late 2018, Molyneux said he had endeared himself to white nationalist beliefs after visiting Poland, which he referred to as “an all-white country,” according to a Right Wing Watch report from Dec. 21, 2018.

Other prominent far-right accounts have sought to downplay the threat posed to Americans by the virus in various ways.

Far-right social media personality and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe produced a series of videos featuring him driving to different COVID-19 testing sites and hospitals in the New York City metro area on March 27. The videos, which were published on both O’Keefe’s personal Twitter with over 710,000 followers, as well as Project Veritas’s verified account with some 460,000 followers, include O’Keefe pressing a national guardsman to call the media coverage of the crisis “overblown.”

Though one of the videos was removed from O’Keefe’s Facebook on April 1, they remain on Twitter.

VDARE, which has evaded waves of Twitter bans targeting white nationalists, advertised on April 3 that they had created a “special archive” for posts related to COVID-19 and race. According to the white nationalist site, the “race-denying ruling class” – as one author called them in a March 28 article quoted on Twitter on April 1 – has supposedly denied the role of pseudoscientific racial differences in the spread of the disease.

“Ruling Class concedes it’s ok to Notice that Coronavirus discriminates by gender, but NOT that it discriminates by race. Why?” the account tweeted on Feb. 21.

VDARE also pushed the same anti-Asian rhetoric that has led to a wave of hate crimes across the country. “575,000+ Chinese call NYC home,” it posted on March 22, along with a link to an article titled “Is NYC Coronavirus Ground Zero Because Massive ‘Be Strong Wuhan’ Feb 9th Chinese New Year’s Parade Helped Spread the Chinese Virus?”

Twitter has, at times, cracked down on disinformation on the platform. On March 25, Twitter removed a post from the far-right site the Federalist, which advocated for spreading the virus through “chickenpox parties.” A March 27 tweet from Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, which echoed the president’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, has since been removed from the platform for a terms of service violation. Two tweets from the far-right populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, were removed on March 30 for spreading misinformation.

YouTube

“We actually have sound, instinctive reasons to be xenophobes,” American Renaissance head Jared Taylor told viewers in a YouTube video posted on March 12. He continued:

Everyone knows about the body’s immune system, which fights disease. We also have a behavioral immune system. All people everywhere instinctively avoid certain things that could make us sick. Piles of feces. Rotting flesh. People with running sores. Part of this behavioral immune system is an instinctive fear that people who act or look strange could be carrying disease.

“Xenophobia,” Taylor concluded, “can save your life.”

Taylor followed up on March 27, noting in a video titled “What the Virus Means for Us” that “everything teaches ‘identitarian’ lessons, including the coronavirus.”

“Professor Giorgio Palu, former president of the European Society of Virology, says that early on there was a proposal to isolate people coming from China, but they didn’t do that because people would’ve said that was ‘racist.’ Professor Polu believes that a large level of the devastation [in Italy] was caused by that: fear of being called racist,” Taylor said later in the same video.

Though Palu did acknowledge that a proposal to “isolate people coming from China” was shot down in a statement to CNN on March 18, he also explained that the breadth of Italy’s outbreak arose from the government lagging on both testing and enforcing lockdowns.

Despite being banned from Twitter since 2018, American Renaissance’s YouTube channel and its 126,000 subscribers have remained.

Jason Köhne, a white nationalist podcaster and vlogger known online as “No White Guilt,” blamed “anti-whiteism” not only for coronavirus spreading throughout the United States, but also for ensuring that many medicines and medical products were produced abroad.

“This is an anti-white issue,” he said in a video posted on March 24. “You can say there’s an economic component to it, but the bottom line is that the . . . incentivization structures have been put in place to capitalize on the harm inflicted on Western kind.”

Molyneux, meanwhile, used his channel to flesh out the idea, also propagated on his Twitter, that the virus was a “bioweapon.”

“[COVID-19] is kind of like the perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, it’s not like people in China started eating bats last October,” he said in a podcast from Jan. 25.

In a live stream aired March 27, Molyneux, along with his guest, Dr. Paul Cottrell, who received his Ph.D. in finance from the online, for-profit school, Walden University, discussed whether “the Wuhan virus is the bioweapon” that Cottrell contended had leaked out of a lab near Wuhan in 2015. Molyneux later pondered whether the virus’s spread throughout the world ought to be considered an act of “manslaughter” or even “homicide,” presumably on China’s part.

A day later, in a now-unlisted YouTube video linked to on Molyneux’s Twitter he declared a sort of victory for the racist, anti-immigrant right.

“All the people who were called ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ for wanting to talk about immigration – who said that it was possible to stop it relatively easily – they’ve all been proven right,” he said in the March 28 video.

“Now the walls go up because it affects those in power,” he said

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tucker-carlson-is-crafting-a-dangerous-and-preposterous-conspiracy-theory-to-prop-up-trump/

no lnx

How Tucker Carlson is crafting a dangerous and preposterous conspiracy theory to prop up Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 23, 2020

During the months when Donald Trump thought he could somehow defeat the novel coronavirus by lying, minimizing it and calling concerns about the coming pandemic a “hoax,” most Fox News hosts were right there with him.  The one major exception, however, was popular prime time host Tucker Carlson. While Sean Hannity kept calling the coronavirus crisis a “hoax” and Laura Ingraham described people concerned about it as “panic pushers,” Carlson actually criticized Trump and his Fox colleagues for “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” arguing that the virus was “a major event” that “will affect your life.” The fact Trump made a reluctant pivot and began to admit that the coronavirus was a real threat — even though he’s still trying to cover up the spread of the disease — is likely due to Carlson’s pressure.

In fact, the difference between Carlson’s approach and that of his fellow Fox News hosts, especially Hannity, was so pronounced that it likely altered the course of the disease. A new study shows that communities that favored Hannity’s show over Carlson’s show had more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. The reason is simple: Because Hannity downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, his viewers were less likely to follow stay-at-home recommendations and therefore more likely spread the disease.

Don’t get too soft on Tucker, however. He wasn’t motivated by a real concern about the safety of his audience, much less about Americans at large. He simply took a more opportunistic attitude, viewing the inevitable panic and instability that would result from thepandemic as a chance to push his white nationalist views by blaming immigrants. He encouraged people to embrace racist frames that implied people of color were dirtier than white people, and encouraged Trump to use the pandemic as an excuse to shut down immigration. Trump has taken that advice, although his ban — which only affects people seeking green cards, not those seeking temporary work visas — has already been criticized by Carlson, who thinks it doesn’t go far enough.

But now even Carlson’s racism-inflected willingness to take the coronavirus seriously has abruptly ended. Starting at the beginning of April, even after his Fox News colleagues had begun to take the virus more seriously,Carlson switched gears and moved toward a denialist viewpoint. He started attacking public health officials for the stay-at-home orders and saying the economic results of the lockdown were worse than the disease.

(This argument, it should be noted, is entirely false. The notion that the economy would be doing fine with a highly contagious and often deadly disease ripping through the population is asinine. Evidence shows that the economy will not rebound, even if politicians remove the lockdown orders. And, as I’ve repeatedly argued, workers who stay home because they’re sick aren’t any more productive than workers who stay home because they’re under lockdown.)

As happened with his emerging white nationalism, Carlson’s denialist stance towards the coronavirus has only grown more extreme in the past few weeks. Last week, he praised the astroturfed protesters who swarmed state capitals, armed with rifles and Confederate flags, to portray the lockdowns as an elite conspiracy to destroy Trump.

On Wednesday night, Carlson stopped playing footsie with the conspiracy theorists and went full science denial.

“Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives, but that’s a lie,” he said, bizarrely suggesting that quarantines have “never been done” and saying that we “have spent trillions of dollars and crushed millions of people, purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus.”

Carlson is lying, which should be obvious without even doing a moment’s worth of historical research. If quarantines are a brand new thing that no one has ever considered before, why do we have a word for the practice? How is it that the word for this novel, unheard-of practice is so common that everyone knows what it means? How many other words does the English language have for things that don’t exist and no one has ever heard of?

Humans figured out quarantines worked before they even knew why they worked. The CDC website I found after a Google search for “history of quarantine” explains that the “practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics,” by holding ships at anchor for 40 days before docking. The website for PBS’ “Nova” dates the practice back to 549 A.D. Boston first instituted maritime quarantines in 1647. Federal management of quarantine orders dates back to the 19th century.

Famous works of literature — including the Bible, with its references to leper colonies — have references to the practice. “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the most famous literary works of the Renaissance, is about people telling stories to pass the time as they shelter in place to avoid the bubonic plague. “The Plague” by Albert Camus tells the story of a plague and quarantine measures in a 1940s setting. Why do Romeo and Juliet die in the famous Shakespearean play? Because a messenger with a letter outlining the plan for their survival is waylaid by a quarantine. (Those of us still awaiting Amazon packages can relate.)

Tucker claims he’s the protector of the great traditions of “Western civilization,” mind you, but when it comes to actual history, he’s decided to play ignoramus.

Of course, it’s hardly news that Carlson thinks his audience consists of illiterate morons who don’t know any history prior to 1982, but even for him this is a stretch. People know how disease spreads and why reducing exposure works. Polling shows that not only are Americans broadly supportive of the shelter-in-place orders, but that even a majority of Republicans aren’t keen on ignoring well-established germ theory just because Fox News tells them to.

Still, Carlson is doing this for a reason: He needs to give his audience some excuse to claim that none of this is Trump’s fault. (Narrator: It is Trump’s fault.) He’s offering them a conspiracy theory that these lockdowns aren’t an authentic attempt to slow the spread of a deadly disease, but an invented crisis aimed at bringing down Trump. It’s true that Carlson hasn’t come out and said that, but it’s the only real conclusion one can draw from his accusation that thousands of public health experts, bureaucrats and elected officials are working together (and none are blowing the whistle!) to crash the economy in order to grab “godlike power” for themselves.

There is no small amount of projection in his rant, in which he complains that “mediocre people” are trying to control “when people can get married, which medical procedures you are allowed to have.” The people who are actually interested in doing that are, of course, Republicans who would like to ban same-sex marriage and abortion. But of course, accusing your opponents of doing what you are actually doing is exactly what right-wing conspiracy theorists do.

Carlson’s full-blown Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories aren’t just a threat to our democracy. They’re a threat to the health of his viewers. As the study mentioned earlier in this piece has shown, many Fox News viewers are willing to break the stay-at-home orders to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump and faith in Fox News. Some have already died because of this. Tucker Carlson clearly doesn’t care how many of his own viewers get sick and die. He has a larger agenda: Create some explanation, no matter how preposterous, that deflects the blame for this national catastrophe away from Donald Trump.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/no-the-coronavirus-is-not-an-equalizer-black-people-are-being-infected-and-dying-at-higher-rates/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-birth-tourist-became-trumps-latest-bogeyman/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/top-us-marine-corps-commander-orders-removal-of-all-confederate-paraphernalia-from-installations-around-the-world/

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an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/do-cop-shows-like-chicago-p-d-reinforce-misperceptions-about-race-and-criminal-justice-a-new-study-says-yes/

Do cop shows like ‘Chicago P.D.’ reinforce misperceptions about race and criminal justice? A new study says yes

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mj thompson

rww 220

...When Barack Obama was president, Thompson spun into meltdown after meltdown, repeatedly railing what he called “Black-Run America” and claiming that electing an African American president had solidified “the United States’ permanent decline.” That kind of repulsion for black people carries into Thompson’s vision of the United States.

In one article Thompson​, writing as Kersey, co-authored with Taylor for American Renaissance, ​the pair argued ​that the anniversary of the United States Naturalization Law of March 26, 1790, which limited the acceptance of immigrants to the United States to free white people, should be recognized as American Independence Day, rather than July 4. Thompson has also denounced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with racial quotas for immigration​.

Thompson has repeatedly promoted the white supremacist “Great Replacement” myth—the notion that the white populations of various countries are being “replaced” by black- and brown-skinned immigrants. He’s currently writing a book under the Kersey byline ​called “The Great Replacement in the USA,” according to a recent Kersey blog post. Since the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre on March 15, 2019—where a white supremacist uploaded a manifesto crediting the myth as his reason for killing 51 Muslim worshipers in two mosques—Thompson has promoted the “great replacement” myth in at least twelve Kersey blog posts.

“The Great Replacement is not only real, but leveling the civilization our ancestors built in the United States and slowly – but surely – erasing the rights we were granted. Sadly, we are learning they are not inalienable, but easily defeated simply because demography is destiny. And democracy is nothing more than a racial headcount,” Thompson wrote in November.

“Kersey” has published a volume of columns and books that rivals some of the country’s most prolific white supremacist propagandists. He has appeared on podcasts alongside well-documented white nationalists, including Spencer and Greg Johnson, and regularly co-hosts the American Renaissance podcast with Taylor...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-racists-cynically-market-hate-by-hijacking-mainstream-symbolism/

no lnx

How racists cynically market hate by hijacking mainstream symbolism

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos January 14, 2020

The gun that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, showed off on Instagram this week was intended to grab people’s attention: An AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adorned with dubious Christian “Crusader” decorations, sold by a Florida gunmaker who assures buyers that they are “inspired by some of the most fierce warriors who fought in nearly 200 years of epic conflicts known as the Crusades.”

In addition to the pseudo-medieval decorations, the gun (called “The Crusader”) featured a magazine decorated with a caricature image of Hillary Clinton behind bars.

A Trump Jr. spokesperson told The Hill: “The Instagram post was strictly about him using a famous meme to mock Hillary Clinton, as he and many others have done on numerous occasions and will surely do again in the future, so long as it continues triggering humorless liberals.”

However, the gun itself and its decorations were what caught a lot of people’s attention, since the Crusades and medieval mythology are yet another field of mainstream culture that has been appropriated by the racist alt-right in recent years. The way alt-right activists deploy such symbology—ironically, with full awareness of its mainstream meaning, behind which the people wielding them cynically hide by claiming that the people offended or disturbed by their use are simply oversensitive liberals—is similar to the alt-right’s similar appropriation of such mainstream symbols as the “OK” hand signal, or the cartoon Pepe the Frog and its permutations.

As with all these ploys, it’s frequently difficult to discern the user’s motives. Is it an innocent display intended to invoke its established mainstream meaning? Or is it a surreptitious (and cynical) expression of affiliation with racist ideology?

The ensuing confusion has a twin effect: It simultaneously creates chaos within the realm of mainstream discourse, while it provides cover for the spread of that racist ideology and its organizing.

“The adoption of these symbols is meant largely as a way ofsignaling anti-Muslim sentiment in particular, but also this notion that Christianity needs to retake western civilization,” Howard Graves, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told CNN.

Trump’s spokesman told CNN there was no connection, saying that “Symbols on firearms depicting various historical warriors are extremely common within the 2nd Amendment community.”

The gunmaker, Rare Breed Firearms, responded angrily: “It’s objectively silly and dishonest for leftwing groups, like the SPLC, to claim that this symbol on our Crusader model has anything to do with hate or an extremist ideology,” said CEO Cole Lelux. “In other words, these people have no idea what they’re talking about and should apologize for their outrageous smears.”

When Rare Breed first began making the gun, it explained the religious connotations of its decorations to the Orlando Sentinel in xenophobic terms: “They believe America and much of the world is threatened by Islamic terrorism and the Crusader is a symbol of shared Christian values and the right to defend themselves, he said. The safety selector that controls the Crusader’s trigger has three settings: Peace, War and God Wills It.”

Trump’s gun featured an etching of a Bible verse as well as the Latin phrase “Deus Vult,” another medieval term meaning “God wills it”—a phrase with an ominous quality, since the alt-right ideologues latching onto Crusader mythology have adopted it as their personal battle cry. It appeared on the streets ofCharlottesville in 2017, and still crops up regularly in far-right demonstrations involving such hate groups as the Proud Boys.

It turned up recently at the scene of the attempted firebombing of a Planned Parenthood women’s health clinic in Newark, Delaware. An 18-year-old man named Samuel Gulick spray-painted “Deus Vult” on an exterior wall before he threw a lit incendiary device into the building, police said.

Police investigators were able to identify Gulick through a combination of video evidence and his social media posts, in which he frequently used “Deus Vult” and ranted against abortion. More broadly,Gulick eagerly participated in alt-right ideology, using a Pepe-esque “Groyper” cartoon as his online avatar and posting viciously anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT sentiments.

One post featured a link to an article about transgender girl, on which he commented: “Hans, get the flamethrower.”

“The Nazis said killing millions of Jews was a national health issue. Democrats are using the same excuse to kill American children,” Gulick wrote in another post. “When will we start shooting? Its about time we kill these genocidal demons.”

His social media posts were filled with references to the Crusaders, as were those of another teenager charged last August in a strikingly similar case. Justin Olsen, an 18-year-old Ohio man, was charged with threatening federal officers for posts fantasizing about the murders of FBI agents after the 1993 tragedy involving the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. Olsen operated an iFunny page titled “Army of Christ” adorned with images of Christian Crusade knights.

White nationalist fanboys’ love affair with the Crusades dates primarily back to 2011, when Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik published a manifesto titled “2083—A European Declaration of Independence,” adorned with Crusader imagery and demanding a “Second Crusade” in which Muslims would be driven out of European nations—just before setting off a truck bomb in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, and then murdering 69 teenage campers at a socialist youth camp.

At his trial, it emerged that Breivik claimed to be a member of a modern-day group of “Knights Templar,” the 12th-century military order. According to Breivik, an April 2002 meeting of the “Knights” in London featured pseudonyms for the participants such as “Richard the Lionheart” and “Sigurd the Crusader.”

More recently, the Christchurch shooter claimed a similar kind of affiliation in his manifesto, and the weapons he used to murder 51 people in March 2019 were scrawled with references to crusading knights. Fittingly, he also notoriously flashed the “OK” white-power symbol with his hands.

The Crusades have also been adopted by a broad range of alt-right activists, notably at neo-Nazi websites such as The Daily Stormer, where pro-Trump memes featuring Crusade imagery have been common. The debate has even made its way into academia. As Joseph Livingstone explained in The New Republic, all of these reinterpretations are travesties of history—and the internet has played a critical role in producing them.

Hijacking vaguely understood religious belief systems for their own ends is nothing new for the American radical right. In the early 1980s, a number of neo-Nazis—choosing to reject the racist “Christian Identity” movement popular among their ranks at the time, on the grounds that Jesus was Jewish and therefore tainted—instead decided to adopt certain ancient Nordic religions as their “true faith,” most notably the Odinist religion Asatru.

That trend has intensified in recent years, thanks in no small part to the increasing reach of far-right ideologies on the Internet. It’s also spread globally, and racists deploy it as a kind of cynical shield in much the same way as other appropriations from the mainstream.

Asatru recently turned up in news stories about a couple of Army National Guardsmen in Georgia who were given the boot after their activities as neo-Nazis were uncovered. Active in a local chapter of Asatru Folk Assembly, described by the SPLC as “perhaps this country’s largest neo-Völkisch hate group,” the men complained that they were being persecuted for their faith.

Ex-Guardsman Trent East told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he is not a racist—rather, he’s simply interested in his ancestry and worshiping as his forebears did.

“The whole race thing started with me finding Asatru or Odinism or whatever you want to call it and seeing that as a better option than Christianity as a spirituality,” he said. “I’ve just never been a fan of Christianity, and so seeing a faith that was about my ethnic roots was something I could get into a little more.”

However, as the AJC noted, East’s social media profile—much of it deleted after he was exposed—told a very different story. It included “numerous memes and slogans popular among white supremacists, and his contacts include neo-Nazis and other extremists. After his doxxing, East opened an account on VK.com, a Russian social media platform popular among the racist far right.” He also attended a speech by alt-right godfather Richard Spencer in 2017, toting a sign bearing white nationalist slogans.

For white nationalists, disguising the vile bigotry inherent in their ideology is critical to their ongoing project to normalize their belief systems within the mainstream of society—which is why so many of them go to such lengths to deny their involvement or the existence of the innate racism in their movement.

As social media’s wide-open global distribution of ideas has taken hold, the work of camouflaging their beliefs has become increasingly sophisticated—particularly the way it hijacks popular internet behaviors such as trolling and the use of ironic language as both vehicles for ideas as well as means of intimidating and threatening their critics. This is central to the alt-right’s appeal to its targeted core demographic—namely, young white males between the ages of 12 and 30.

Talia Lavin at GQ acutely observes that Donald Trump Jr.’s exercise in indulging this mindset on his Instagram account—intentional, accidental, or otherwise—fits in neatly with the White House’s current push to war in the Middle East, one in which the underlying premise is that “war is holy”: “It’s a Knight Templar with an AR-15; it’s Arabic script as a signal of enmity. That’s the signal Donald Trump Jr. was sending, with his snug Crusader gun-helmet. And it may be ensconced even deeper in the halls of power, with those formally entrusted with our nation’s security under the Trump regime.”

The machinery of hate thus encompasses both the individual nebbishes—hiding in the dark corners of the Internet, ever-fearful about revealing themselves as the face of hate even as they revel in it as trolls—and their willing, if not always conscious, enablers who walk the world’s halls of power, as well as everyone in between. Mainstream observers, particularly those working in media, often feel confused by the resulting crossfire—unsure about the meanings of the wielded symbology, most likely feeling “left out”—and so dismiss the talk as functionally meaningless.

It’s not, particularly for the racist ideologues who organize and spread their hatefulness behind the resulting fog and smoke they throw up for the rest of us. Donald Trump Jr. may not have intended to send an encouraging, approving signal to white nationalists—it’s likely it never crossed his less-than-a-steel-trap mind—but intentions matter little in this arena.

That’s not how things work in the world of white nationalists. Just as with his father, these kinds of signals are received rapturously as proof that the Trumps are on their side, and that their values are shared by people at the very apex of the social ladder: thus, they feel deeply empowered. Any later denials are laughed at and excused as “what he has to do.”

The key to the game, no matter who’s playing, is plausible deniability for everybody involved. The alt-right has mastered its use as a way to market and spread the movement’s hate.

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120 an

far-right Mississippi governor predicts ‘1000 years of darkness’ if state elects first black senator in over 139 years

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-unleashes-his-twisted-2020-strategy-of-grievance-and-racism/

no lnx

Trump unleashes his twisted 2020 strategy of grievance and racism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

36

Having only lost Minnesota by 1.5 percentage points in 2016, the Trump campaign has made it clear that they think they can win the state in 2020. That’s what Thursday night’s rally in Minneapolis was all about. Peter Nichols wrote about the strategy.

One Republican operative close to the White House, speaking anonymously to discuss campaign strategy, told me that Trump is convinced of the old political adage “Therace will hinge on turnout.” If he can mobilize and excite his base voters, they’ll show up in force, much as they did in 2016, impeachment be damned…

“His message is so edgy, and his core support is so intense and enthusiastic, and the rallies are so unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” the strategist told me. “Arithmetically speaking, this election is about jacking up turnout of your own supporters on the theory that no one on their side of the ball excites them the way Trump excites us,” he said, referring to the Democrats.

If that’s the plan, then we can look at Thursday night’s speech to see how Trump plans to excite his supporters in order to get them to show up in force.

As Nichols pointed out, the first half of Trump’s speech was all about his personal grievances. He mocked FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, said that Joe Biden was “only considered a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass,” calledIlhan Omar an “American-hating socialist,” and referred to congressional Democrats as “sick” for pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Then Trump engaged in his second strategy for exciting his voters: racism. Because Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, they became his target.

Same old playbook: racism https://t.co/4OuUA1Hvya

— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) October 11, 2019

He then went on to say that “we will always protect American families first” and that hadn’t happened in Minnesota. He said that he would not “allow a violent ideology to take root in our country on our shores” like had happened in Europe. Equating the Somali community in Minnesota with a “violent ideology” is not only a racist lie, it is the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the gunman in El Paso.

This is, however, merely a repeat of what Trump did in 2016 when he visited Minnesota two days before the election and told the crowd that they had “suffered enough” as a result of “filthy refugee vetting” that had allowed an influx of Somalis into the state.

When it comes to this part of Trump’s strategy, Elad Nehorai, who describes himself as a “proud progressive Orthodox Jew,” put it best. He wrote that “This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries. We Jews have seen this before, as have countless other minorities. This is the powerful hurting the vulnerable to empower themselves.” Senator Amy Klobuchar echoed that statement.

The President just attacked Somali Americans in his rally in Minnesota. Immigrants and refugees have helped make our state a wonderful place to live and work — which is far more than this President has done. Stop using immigrants and refugees as political pawns!

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) October 11, 2019

I have often been proud to point out that, when it comes to the economy, my home state of Minnesota consistently performs better than the national average. One of the reasons why is because of the very immigrant community the president attacked. Here is the data from the Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis.

With high levels of labor force participation and employment, African immigrants brought in $2.5 billion in earnings during 2015. These households paid $419 million in federal taxes and $222 million in state and local taxes, leaving African immigrants an estimated $1.8 billion in spending power. Despite its relatively small size, the African immigrant population makes significant contributions to the Minnesota economy.

At the end of his speech on Thursday night, Trump threw out a couple of lines about health care and a promise to end childhood cancer. But as Nichols wrote, “he read those parts without any particular vocal affect, perhaps because he doesn’t truly believe they’re the way to win.” It could also be because he doesn’t really give a shit about things like health care. In the end, the plan is to excite his base of supporters with a combination of grievance and racism, because that is exactly what excites him. But the truth is, that’s all he’s got.

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in what is democ doc ppl blamed immigrants for all

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/this-law-professors-research-maps-out-how-to-defeat-dog-whistle-politics-win-elections-and-build-a-progressive-majority

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reductionism

https://theconversation.com/evolution-doesnt-proceed-in-a-straight-line-so-why-draw-it-that-way-109401

...Having been around nearly 2,000 years, the idea of the scala naturae did not disappear during Darwin’s time. It might actually have been reinforced by something so unexpected as a cartoon. Illustrator Edward Linley :{Sambourne’s immensely popular caricature of evolution “Man Is But a Worm,” published in Punch’s Almanack for 1882, combined two concepts that were never linked in Darwin’s mind: gradualism and linearity.}:

:{:{}:

}:

Given centuries of religious belief in a “great chain of being,” the idea of linearity was an easy sell. The iconic version of this concept is, of course, the depiction of a supposed ape-to-human “progression.” Variations of all kinds have been made of this depiction, some with a humorous spirit, but most to ridicule the monkey-to-man theory.

A linear depiction of evolution may, consciously or not, confirm false preconceptions about evolution, such as intelligent design – the idea that life has an intelligent creator behind it. Historians can work to unravel how such a simple caricature could have helped distort Darwin’s theory. Meanwhile, science writers and educators face the challenge of explaining the gradual branching processes that explain the diversity of life.

...

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public charge scam part of network of efforts, racist at bottom

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/its-an-attempt-to-impose-a-white-nationalist-vision-of-what-america-is/

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post 3x shooters

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/everyone-knows-trump-is-a-racist-so-why-cant-the-media-say-it/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-deeper-meaning-and-history-behind-trumps-racist-lie-that-the-squad-hates-america/

rush l bk

no lnx many

The deeper meaning and history behind Trump’s racist lie that The Squad ‘hates America’

[pix: President Donald J.Trump and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh walk together Friday, April 19, 2019, following their round of golfat the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)]

Written by Ian Reifowitz / Daily Kos July 28, 2019

“How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump? Why have white anxiety, fear, and anger aimed at non-whites and about demographic change become far more strongly correlated with support for the Republican Party in recent decades, and in particular between 2008 and 2016? And since that time, how have we become, according to a new poll from CBS News/YouGov, a country where a strong majority of Republicans believe that Democrats try to “put the interests of racial minorities over whites,” while an even stronger majority of Democrats believe Trump and his party aim to do the opposite, to put white interests above those of non-whites?

The simplest answer is: President Trump. He not only has heightened racial division, but also connected it to partisanship by making it central to his politics. Trump labeled Mexican immigrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “drug dealers”; also said there were “very fine people” among a bunch of neo-Nazis; and most recently told four congresswomen of color (aka The Squad) that they should “go back” to the countries they came from (all but one were born here) because, he claims, they “hate our country,” and, even worse, are not even “capable of loving our Country.”

Trump’s baldly racist sentiments and policies have clearly played a major role in convincing Democrats that his party favors whites. As for the belief expressed by Republicans in the CBS poll, Trump has also has an impact, as he has repeatedly accused Democrats of favoring Americans of color.

Let’s look at just a few examples. During the 2016 campaign, Trump often pitted racial groups against each other in a zero-sum game. He repeated on multiple occasions the falsehood that “illegal immigrants are treated better in America than many of our vets,” and likewise charged that Obama and Hillary Clinton showed more concern for the former than the latter. Trump also falsely stated that “illegal immigrant households receive far more in welfare benefits,” and declared that “immigrants are taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us.” Such statements—which are clearly meant to evoke images of non-white immigrants—appear to have had an electoral impact, as the data shows that, in both the 2016 Republican primary and general election, “racialized perceptions of economic deservingness were … strongly related to support for Donald Trump.”

However, Trump is far from the first Republican to adopt this tactic. Others—namely the right-wing media—have been spewing this kind of bile for many years. Leading the way has been the person who has maintained the largest audience of any radio host for going on three decades: Rush Limbaugh.

In researching my new book, I examined eight years of Limbaugh show transcripts and documented how Limbaugh painted Obama and his party as favoring minorities over whites, echoing the beliefs exhibited in the CBS poll. More broadly, while Obama was president Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited.

Limbaugh aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of his presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task. Limbaugh’s efforts helped lay the groundwork for the election in 2016 of a man who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency.

The reach of Limbaugh’s message, both during the Obama presidency and for the three decades prior, has made him the single most potent media voice worsening the tribalization of our politics. He has done this by strengthening the connection between white racial resentment and support for Republican candidates and causes. He was alt-right before the term even existed.

Racial fear stands at the core of Limbaugh’s telling of the story of the Obama administration—and white conservatives have been listening. According to Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler, “even after controlling for economic conservatism, moral traditionalism, religious beliefs and activity, and military support, racial attitudes became significantly stronger predictors of white partisanship in the Age of Obama … the effect of racial attitudes on party identification increased relative to nonracial predispositions.” In sum, Tesler found that the data “suggest that Democrats and Republicans had increasingly separate realities about race in the Age of Obama—a logical upshot of the spillover of racialization into mass politics.”

Presaging Trump’s slandering of The Squad, Limbaugh over and over again falsely charged Obama with hating America—and the whites whom Limbaugh feels truly represent our country. What was the basis of this charge? Obama had the temerity to cite real problems we face and propose practical solutions.

In summary, Limbaugh branded President Obama as anti-American, by claiming that he hated America largely because of its racism; “not American,” by questioning his American birthplace (something Trump did even more vociferiously); and anti-white, by accusing him of wanting to redistribute resources from whites to minorities, most specifically to African Americans, in order to right historical wrongs. According to Limbaugh, Obama was essentially Santa Claus for (only) black people because he gave them welfare and free Obamaphones. Finally, the host scared whites by stoking fears that they would face race-based retributive violence since a black man was president.

It is worth noting that Trump has also criticized America—he referred to “American carnage” in our streets, rejected American exceptionalism (something Limbaugh falsely claimed Obama did many times), called America a “laughingstock,” and defended Putin’s murders by saying: “What, you think our country is so innocent?”

Yet Limbaugh never denounced Trump as an America-hater. The host did, however, say that Obama was “our first anti-American president,” that he “hates America,” “doesn’t like much of what’s American,” sees “this country as a great Satan,” and believes “by virtue of its character, America was evil.” And that’s just from one particularly bile-filled 11-week stretch in 2010.

In order to further establish Obama’s supposed anti-Americanism, Limbaugh said that the president rejected the original principles of our country, as well as the Constitution itself, and the [white] men who crafted it. “Obama talks about ‘remaking’ America [which] means destroying these traditions, institutions that have defined America and its greatness since the founding,” the host stated on July 3, 2009. He added on December 15, 2009, that the president was not proud of our country: “America as talked about by Barack Obama—is an America of guilt … guilty of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, discrimination, imperialism, colonialism.” Two years to the day later, Limbaugh asserted that Obama believed America was “criminal.” The host also said on December 30, 2011,  that the president considered America to be “exceptionally evil.” For good measure, he included

Michelle Obama as well, citing her “bilious disgust with America” on October 31, 2011.

Perhaps most explosively, Limbaugh asked in March 2011 if the military had a “contingency plan for—I don’t want to say an anti-American president, ‘cause that’s gonna cloud my real intent here.” After being criticized for appearing to call for a military coup, the host fell back on his usual shtick, that this “was a media tweak … That’s what’s called stirring the excrement.”

Even when discussing proposals that did not obviously relate to race, Limbaugh repeatedly characterized Obama and Democrats as favoring Americans of color over whites. For example, on February 22, 2009, just before Obamacare passed, he characterized it as “a civil rights bill. This is reparations.” On July 20, 2010, Limbaugh warned that, under Obamacare, “minorities” in “the federal bureaucracy” serving a black president could decide whether “the rest of us” live or die. Expanding his policy horizons, on July 22, 2009, the host declared: “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations!”

The language Limbaugh used when the topic was Black Lives Matter or immigration was just as racist. On the latter, more than a week of attacks on Obama over the violent death of Kathryn Steinle culminated in a diatribe on July 15, 2015, in which Limbaugh juxtaposed Obama not reaching out to her family while instead having written to four dozen felons he had set free by commuting their sentences, and connecting with Michael Brown’s family in Ferguson, Missouri. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Latino people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally.

As America moved into the party conventions in the summer of 2016, Limbaugh declared on July 12 that Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama all believed “there’s nothing redeemable about that America. It has to be ‘transformed,’ I think is the word Obama uses.” Later in that same broadcast, he stated that, “Obama stands with people he thinks have been given the shaft ever since this country was founded. I think his objective is to even the playing field, as he defines it. And the way he does it is to transfer discrimination from one group to the next, rather than end it. His prescription is payback.” This is how you convince Republicans that the Democratic Party has it in for whites.

On July 28, after Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention—a speech that soared with positive language about our country, including the words “America is already great”—Limbaugh dismissed those words as insincere: “That’s not Barack Obama. That’s not what he believes. That’s not who he is … Obama is the guy who thinks America’s founding was unjust and immoral. He doesn’t relish it. He doesn’t cherish it.”

Hearing this for eight years certainly helped convince Republicans that Democrats prioritize the interests of minorities over whites and, by extension, that only Republicans would protect white interests. By further defining America as essentially equivalent to white America, Limbaugh made clear that anyone who “hates America” hates whites.

This context is vital to understanding why Trump lied about The Squad supposedly hating America. In this, as in his broader rhetoric on immigration and, in fact, in the way he defines Americanness, Trump is following the trail blazed by right-wing media figures, and none more so than Rush Limbaugh.

Since the day he descended on that escalator at Trump Tower, the racist-in-chief has been speaking the language of racially resentful and alienated whites, language Limbaugh broadcasted to millions of Americans five days a week after Barack Obama became president in 2009. Trump presented himself as the champion of those white people in the struggle against their enemies, people like President Obama and other liberals, as well as those whom liberals championed—particularly Americans of color and immigrants.

Trump’s road to the White House was significantly smoother than it would otherwise have been because Limbaugh had already paved the way for him. Going forward, the clash between the Obama and Limbaugh/Trump definitions of Americanness—exemplified by President Individual 1’s most recent attacks on Ilhan Omar and the rest of The Squad—will remain central to our public discourse for the foreseeable future.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas). Some of the material in this post is excerpted (in some cases with slight alterations) from the book, with full permission.

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mma 719

Inspired by a Fox & Friends segment attacking Baltimore congressional Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and likening conditions in the city to the southern border, President Trump lashed out on Saturday, calling Baltimore a "rodent infested mess." On Sunday, Fox rushed to defend Trump. This racist mess followed Fox News inspiring (and then defending) Trump's racist statements towards Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar.

Shortly after Trump's twitter rant, CNN host Victor Blackwell gave an emotional response on air, pointing out that Trump only used this type of "infestation" language when attacking minorities. The Baltimore Sunpublished a powerful editorial titled "Better to have a few rats than to be one."

There is one thing that the media must cover in relation to Trump's twitter rant. Jared Kushner operates as a slumlord in Baltimore. As ProPublica has reported: "Tenants in more than a dozen Baltimore-area rental complexes complain about a property owner who they say leaves their homes in disrepair, humiliates late-paying renters and often sues them when they try to move out. Few of them know that their landlord is the president’s son-in-law"

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trumps-racist-and-nativist-attacks-made-him-more-popular-among-republicans/

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marcotte

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fox-news-has-gone-so-deep-into-white-nationalism-that-donald-trump-now-believes-its-how-hell-win-in-2020/

Trump thinks white nationalism is going to win him the 2020 election. This much is clear. Trump’s racist Twitter rant on Sunday — in which he suggested that four nonwhite congresswomen, three of whom were born in the United States, are “originally” from somewhere else and should therefore “go back” — might have seemed at first like a spontaneous eruption of racist rage from the simmering bigot in the White House.

Soon, however, it became clear that this was strategic. Trump thinks it’s a winning move to echo the claims of David Duke and other white nationalists who believe the United States is for white people. He justified his racism by saying that “many people agree with me,” and by continuing to rave on Twitter about how the real purveyors of “racist hatred” are those who look askance at his embracing the rhetoric of Stormfront and the KKK.

As Heather Digby Parton argued for Salon, this is more than an explosion of racist anger. Trump “believes that most Americans are as racist as he is and that he will be rewarded for this indecency with a second term.”

There’s good reason to think Trump and his boosters are wrong about this. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Twitter, “Trump’s popularity has taken its sharpest dips whenever he goes full racist,” and that even that seemingly rock-solid level of support that sits right around 42% in opinion polls has dipped into the 30s when Trump openly aligns himself with white nationalist views. Thanks largely to his racism (as well as his stunning lack of competence), Trump has spent his entire term in office with lower overall approval ratings than any president in more than 60 years.

So where does Trump getting this idea that ever more extreme racism is the way to win over voters? One major source is likely his favorite TV network and the only source of information he tends to take seriously: Fox News.

For years now, Fox News has been mainstreaming arguments that used to be the province of  fringe websites run by neo-Nazis and other groups who believe the U.S. is meant to be a country of white people and for white people — perhaps with others permitted in small numbers of they stay quiet and keep to themselves. Trump was a major factor in the early rumblings of white nationalism on the network, which gave him considerable airtime during his reality TV days to air conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Such “birther” theories rested fairly obviously, in the first place, on the belief that black people cannot be “real” Americans.

Since Trump was elected, the Fox News programming that promotes white nationalist ideas has slowly grown both in airtime and in severity. At Salon, we sounded the alarm in the early months of Trump’s presidency, when prime-time Fox News host Tucker Carlson began to experiment with segments that used euphemisms like “Western civilization” to package the idea that white people are inherently more civilized while people of color are a threat to national stability.

Since then, Carlson and many of other Fox News pundits have only grown bolder. “Replacement theory” — the white nationalist idea that has spurred multiple terrorist attacks, holding that white people will somehow be removed and “replaced” by people of color — used to be confined to fringe neo-Nazi websites with atrocious early-2000s design aesthetics. Now that’s become a regular feature of slick Fox News segments, which suggest that immigrants of color are “invading the country” and can never be “fully American,” and that demographic changes from immigration are “more change than human beings are designed to digest” and inherently a threat to “your neighborhood.”

The network also hypes the idea that nonwhite immigrants are dirty and diseased, as well as inherently criminal. (For about the 400th time: Immigrants, documented or otherwise, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. There is no serious dispute about this.) Furthermore, because many immigrants speak languages other than English and may eat unfamiliar food or bring cultural practices that appear foreign to some, American society will soon be “tipping over a cliff.” is is the same kind of rhetoric that was used to demonize the Irish and Italian immigrants of the past, who were seen as threats to American culture due to scary foreign practices like putting garlic in food and praying with the Rosary. One hardly needs to mention the bigotry and discrimination directed at Jewish immigrants, who were barred from certain neighborhoods and many commercial establishments well into the 20th century. Unfortunately, most of the Fox News audience for this rhetoric, the president included,  doesn’t know anything about that history, or care to learn.

It’s true that Fox News ratings are high, and that is incredibly meaningful to Trump, who has a long-standing obsession with TV ratings dating back to his days as host of “The Apprentice.” More important still, Trump tends to view TV ratings as the single  most meaningful metric of public opinion, one that far outweighs more statistically significant measures like political polling.

In looking over Trump’s Twitter obsession with TV ratings, it’s clear that he believes — or at least pretends to believe — that ratings are tied tightly to alliance with his racist agenda. It’s not just that he routinely mocks CNN and MSNBC for supposedly having poor ratings. Any TV product that deviates too far from a racist agenda, he believes, takes a ratings hit for it. When NFL players were protesting racism, Trump gleefully declared it was hurting TV ratings. When the Oscars tried to improve racial diversity and attendees decried Trump’s bigotry, he gloated that it was the “Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY”. He even repeatedly (and falsely) tried to argue that his inauguration ratings exceeded Barack Obama’s.

The pattern is clear: Trump believes racism is more popular than anti-racism, because, he believes, racism gets TV viewers and anti-racism doesn’t. And getting TV viewers is the only measurement he takes seriously.

By any measure of cable viewership, there is no denying that Fox News has disturbingly high ratings. Its daytime audience is 1.3 million viewers on average and the prime time shows pull 2.4 million people. That doesn’t just outdo other cable news networks, but mainstays like TNT and HGTV. Carlson gets nearly 3 million viewers a night, numbers that far exceed his rabid fan base of open white nationalists. Racism does sell, and the audience for white nationalist rhetoric is not small. Nearly 129 million Americans voted in 2016, meaning that only about 2% of the electorate is tuning into Carlson’s show on any given night. By contrast, the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” has nearly 19 million viewers. Racism sells, sure — but exponentially less well than unfunny sitcoms with aggressive laugh tracks.

Trump’s racism is wildly popular with his base, in other words, but a large majority of Americans find it repulsive. No amount of the president’s obsessive dissection of cable ratings will change that. That’s not to say Trump’s opponents should become complacent or assume that his unpopularity will automatically translate into a 2020 defeat.Unfortunately, racists are dramatically overrepresented in politics, due to the outdated mechanism of the Electoral College, which is how Trump won the 2016 election while getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He could certainly pull it off again.

Still, Trump’s apparently adamant belief that white nationalism will pay off in electoral terms doesn’t reflect any reputable political polling. It appears instead to be an artifact of his obsession with TV and with Fox News in particular. It’s a closed loop of awfulness: The more Trump pushes his racist agenda, the more the network amplifies his message, and the more he believes his bigotry is massively popular. Unless and until Trump takes a decisive L in 2020, he’s going to keep believing the majority of Americans are secretly on his side.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-the-race-baiting-invective-of-rush-limbaugh-on-the-obama-presidency-led-to-trump/

see rhet for highlighted version

no lnx

How the race-baiting invective of Rush Limbaugh on the Obama presidency led to Trump

Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh

written by Robin Lindley / History News Network July 8, 2019

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Ultimately, the right wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.

Ian Reifowitz, The Tribalization of Politics

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—the first African American to attain this exalted office. Hundreds of thousands crowded the National Mall during the ceremony to wish the new president well.

However, rather than offering the president words of encouragement and congratulations, voices from the far right almost immediately expressed the hope that President Obama would fail and serve no more than one term. He had inherited a faltering economy, a war, a country still divided by race and other vexing issues, while the right-wing media labeled him as anti-American and unpatriotic, as a black president who would please his constituents of color to the detriment of white citizens.

Popular far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was one of the most vociferous voices, and was the one with the largest audience. He uttered unceasing, racially-charged attacks on President Obama virtually every day of his two terms in office.

Historian Ian Reifowitz examines Limbaugh’s hateful invective and American political polarization in his new book, The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Ig Publishing)....

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining your process. Do you see Limbaugh as an ally of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazis?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: His show helps push sanitized versions of some of their ideas into the mainstream. The views he expresses are not the same as the views of the KKK or American Nazis, but he taps into some of the same hate and fear that they do. I don’t think that makes him an ally, but more like an enabler.

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh view Senator Obama before he was elected in 2008?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I didn’t look at the pre-inauguration rhetoric in a comprehensive way, but from what I saw nothing changed on Election Day.

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh usually describe President Obama?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: You want the whole book in a nutshell? Here’s a brief summary from the book:

“While Obama was president, Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited. The host aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist, black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of Limbaugh’s presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task, a task reflected in the title of this book. The tribalization of politics is exactly what Limbaugh set out to achieve.”

I’ll add: “[Limbaugh] portrayed him in a way designed to exacerbate white racial anxiety about a black president, or depicted him as a foreign “other,” outside the bounds of traditional Americanness.”

Robin Lindley: How did Limbaugh exploit Islamophobia and the fear of immigrants to attack President Obama?

Professor Ian Reifowitz:  He repeatedly sought to portray Obama as some kind of “secret Muslim” or somehow more sympathetic to Muslims—even terrorists—than to Christians and/or the interests of the United States. On immigrants, I’ll give you the following example:

“On July 1, 2015, two weeks after Trump’s infamous comments [made during his announcement that he was running for president] about Mexican immigrants being rapists and bringing drugs into the United States, a woman named Kathryn Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by Jose Inez Garcia Zarate [an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record].

“. . . On the campaign trail, Trump pounced, and Limbaugh followed suit a few days later. On July 7, in comments designed to inflame white racial resentment, the host claimed that Steinle’s name would “never be as well-known as Trayvon Martin,” and that the president would not deliver the eulogy at her funeral, even though Obama had not delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Martin or any other citizen killed by police. Obama did, however, speak at the memorial service for the five Dallas police officers murdered a year later….Limbaugh speculated that the president did not care about Steinle’s murder, and blamed it on the administration’s immigration policies, which were “coming home to roost”—this was a phrase uttered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright that was discussed so often on Limbaugh’s show. The host again talked about Obama hating America and wanting to alter its “composition” in order to change “the face of the country.”

Limbaugh attacked the president over Steinle on three more shows over the next week. On July 15, 2015, the host contrasted Obama not having contacted the Steinle family to his having written letters to forty-six felons whose sentences he commuted, and to his outreach to the family of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Limbaugh’s point was to remind his listeners that Obama cared more about prisoners (read: black and Hispanic people) and black people killed by cops than a white woman who was murdered by someone here illegally. If there’s one segment that both encapsulates Limbaugh’s tribalizing history of the Obama presidency, and shows how his race-baiting rhetoric set the way for the rise of Trump, this was it.

Robin Lindley: How did President Obama respond to Limbaugh’s attacks, particularly in terms of dealing with claims that he was pro-Muslim, anti-police, and anti-white?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: He basically ignored them, but I did not examine Obama’s responses comprehensively.

Robin Lindley: Limbaugh attacked President Obama almost daily during his eight years in office. For Limbaugh, it seems that the ideals of equality, tolerance, democracy, community, and serving the common good are anathema and, indeed, anti-American. What is your sense of Limbaugh’s view of these ideals?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: He would pay lip service to most of those ideals in the abstract, while attacking Obama and other liberals for seeking to change the traditional definition of them to something involving retribution and reparations that would take from whites and give to non-whites. He would turn any criticism of racial inequality in America back around and argue that the problem of racism in America stemmed from people overexaggerating it. [// chemo-PHOBIA]

For example, on July 25, 2013, Limbaugh “accused “the left” of wanting “race problems” to remain unsolved, and in fact wanting to make them worse. Why? Because “too many people make money off of racial strife, and therefore they’re always going to promote it.” [whereas trump GOP wants to run on immigration in 2020]Here’s a quote from May 26, 2010, about Obama and liberals in general: “everything’s about race. Everything is about skin color to these people, or however they classify people, however they seek to group them, whatever, they’re victims.” This is how he viewed racism in America.

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Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ve stayed away from Limbaugh to some degree, just to give myself a break. But he’s still a huge media figure. He’s done exactly what I expected, which is the same thing he did once Trump became the presumptive nominee. He’s been a huge Trump backer and has continued to use rhetoric aimed at ginning up white anxiety, to make sure those anxious whites keep on remembering who their (false) champion is. I did check to see what Limbaugh said about Tiger Woods recently, now that Trump has embraced him, and in fact Limbaugh has done a 180, offering nothing but praise for how been Tiger has been a friend to Trump. However, while discussing Tiger and Trump, Limbaugh made sure to remind his audience that Obama is still the one to blame for exacerbating racial tensions in America. He certainly doesn’t blame Trump—or himself, for that matter. None of those things qualify as a surprise.

Robin Lindley: What are some good ways to counter the hateful and inaccurate rhetoric of Limbaugh and his fellow extremists in the right-wing media?

Professor Ian Reifowitz: I’ll leave folks with the concluding paragraphs of the book, which are as close as I get to offering a prescription going forward regarding how to counter the Limbaugh/Trump vision of America:

“White racial identity has been the foundation of the single most destructive form of identity politics over the course of American history. In colonial times, slave-owners raised the status of white indentured servants—many of whom had developed close relationships with the enslaved African Americans alongside whom they worked—transforming these “plain white folks” into equal citizens and telling them that they were superior to blacks, who were thus undeserving of freedom. Why did they do this? Because the slave-owning elites had one fear above all: a white-black coalition of the masses that would unite to overthrow them. Similarly, after emancipation, the Southern economic elites made sure to bind poor whites to them through the race-based advantages conferred by Jim Crow, all in the name of thwarting that same white-black, class-based political partnership.

“In this century, some working- and even middle-class whites, especially those without a college degree, have been drowning economically in a way they have not since the Great Depression. For many, whatever privilege comes with being white is not enough to keep them afloat. They are angry, afraid, and looking for a scapegoat. Limbaugh has been only too happy to oblige. He has absolutely no interest in helping the country figure out how to deal in a productive way with the white anxiety that arises from demographic change. He is interested in one thing, and one thing only: exacerbating this phenomenon in order to keep separate whites and Americans of color who do share common economic interests. That is how Republicans win elections.[recall he was nearly RNC chair]

Limbaugh’s divisive approach, in that specific regard, is a carbon copy of the approach taken by the nineteenth century Southern white elites. The more he can get working, and middle-class whites to identify with their racial identity—their tribe—above their economic interests, the better he will be able to prevent the multiracial, progressive coalition assembled by President Obama from growing strong enough to defeat Limbaugh/Trump-style conservatism once and for all. Ultimately, the right-wing needs white racial anxiety. In fact, it cannot survive without it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/race-against-time-how-white-fear-of-genetic-annihilation-fuels-abortion-bans/

no lnx

Race against time: How white fear of genetic annihilation fuels abortion bans

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1152002639 WILKES-BARRE, PA - AUGUST 2, 2018: A group of Trump supporters display their "Women Q "save the children" For Trump" and "Keep America Great" signs during the "Make America Great Again" rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena.]

written by Carla Bell / YES! Magazine July 5, 2019

Last year, White people constituted 60% of the U.S. population, down from about 90% in 1950. It’s projected that by 2050, they will be the new minority and people of color will be the majority—a nightmarish prediction to some White people.

Sen. Lindsey Graham voiced his concern of a demographic dilution at the 2012 Republican convention, when he said, “The demographics race we’re losing badly … [Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Graham’s comments relay what social scientists and antiracism activists call “White Extinction Anxiety,” or “Fear of White Genetic Annihilation.”

The idea that White people could “go the way of the dinosaur” has been dismissed by some as simple pity of personal circumstance or conspiracy theory, but the convergent effects of new laws banning abortion together with old laws promoting mass incarceration of Black and Brown people suggest that this White fear is not just an idea, but the catalyst for public policy.

There indeed appears to be a strong correlation between demographic projections, the fear of White genetic annihilation, and the recent wave of abortion bills.

Antiracism activist and diversity trainer Jane Elliott described it as a fear so great that White people, including political leaders, “will do anything to see that doesn’t happen.”

Hyper-punitive abortion legislation recently passed in Alabama bans the procedure outright except in cases of risk to a woman’s health, and in Georgia a woman who obtains an abortion will spend the rest of her life in prison. Of 212 lawmakers in Alabama and Georgia whose votes ushered in the most restrictive abortion laws we’ve seen yet, 211 are White.

What drives all of this is nothing as philosophical as religion. It’s not faith. It’s not principle. It’s the fear of genetic dominance of Black and Brown people.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-our-public-schools-are-still-separate-and-unequal/

Desegregated busing still exists—only the children have changed. This transferring of children outside their local districts has grown even stronger. Instead of Black children being bused in, there’s an increase of White children being bused out in order to attend schools in less-diverse areas.

As we approach the 65th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—where the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” and therefore is unconstitutional—we are now more than ever dealing with the repercussions of separating children by race.

Decades later, this continued practice proves the lengths people will go to separate their children.

I work in a public middle school that is over 90% students of color. It’s located in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and yet many of the people living here choose to send their children to schools outside of the neighborhood. Ours is a reputable school, with a competitive arts program, regents’ classes, and children who get into specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant. Yet the parents would rather take buses, scooters, or SUVs instead of having their children attend their zoned school.

I can’t help but think that if our population were 90% White, parents would be scrambling to get their children in, maybe even bribing their way in.

Meanwhile, a mere zip code away, hundreds of parents are fighting for coveted seats to higher-achieving schools. Many of those families are relocating, thus forcing rents to increase to exorbitant prices—thereby taking away homes and spots of deserving families who can no longer afford to live there.

Not only do these schools have students entering their system with higher test scores, but having wealthier parents allows them to raise hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars to pay for special programs and materials that schools in lower economical standing cannot afford to do.

Hence, separate and unequal.

Furthering this already yawning gap between schools is the influx of charter schools. Some sing their praises without considering their effects, claiming they give underserved communities the chance for a better education. Charter schools are not only cherry-picking top students, but they are also siphoning off the money that had once been traditional public school funds. In addition, they make it so that local children and active parents have to move to other locations—further depriving local districts.

Public schools need strong parental involvement to succeed. We need families that live in the community to go to schools in the community. And we need the funds that have been siphoned off for charters to be redirected back to public schools.

Otherwise, these schools cannot remain equal.

The biggest target for inequality is the middle schools. Next year begins a new initiativeto integrate middle schools in two popular regions in New York City. Instead of this opportunity being embraced to finally balance the schools, the result for many is more busing—more distance. I’ve met a number of families who have left the city altogether in fear that their children won’t get into a “good” school. Believe it or not, some have even left the country. A privilege many don’t have.

People walk around wearing T-shirts and paraphernalia espousing their pride in Brooklyn, but few are willing to allow their children to experience the learning that comes from mixing races and backgrounds. One experience I believe to be the best part of city life.

While there may have been small gains in access to education for some students of color, it hasn’t been enough to rid us of the separate and unequal status in our public schools.

If we truly want that change to happen, we all must take part in the process. Parents have to stop taking their kids away from the communities they live in and instead see what they can do to make them better.

We need to carefully review leadership and integrate our schools from the top down. We need to bring back the premise behind public education, that all children are entitled to a free and fair education.

Separate but equal has no place in our public school system. We need to put an end to transporting students away from their zoned schools and start working together as communities to make them better—for all students.

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omfg

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/china-created-a-racist-artificial-intelligence-to-track-muslims

The  Chinese government is using facial-recognition software to “track and control” a predominantly Muslim minority group, according to a disturbing new report from The New York Times. The Chinese government has reportedly integrated artificial intelligence into its security cameras to identify the Uighurs and appears to be using the information to monitor the persecuted group. The report, based on the accounts of whistleblowers familiar with the systems and a review of databases used by the government and law enforcement, suggests the authoritarian country has opened up a new frontier in the use of A.I. for racist social control—and raises the discomfiting possibility that other governments could adopt similar practices.

Two people familiar with the matter told the Times that police in the Chinese city of Sanmenxia screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times in a single month. Documents provided to the paper reportedly show demand for the technology is ballooning: more than 20 departments in 16 provinces sought access to the camera system, in one case writing that it “should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.” This, experts say, is more than enough to raise red flags. “I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times. “Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

Racial profiling has long been a concern in the use of artificial intelligence. But in the United States and other Western countries, much of that scrutiny has centered on biases built into A.I. systems. Computer scientist Aylin Caliskan put the matter succinctly in a 2017 interview with Vox: “Many people think machines are not biased. But machines are trained on human data. And humans are biased.” Already, studies have shown this to be the case. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that machine-learning software rated black people at higher risk of committing another crime after an initial arrest. (The software’s conclusions were based on current incarceration rates.) American lawmakers have highlighted these concerns as the A.I. race heats up. “Algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to basic human assumptions,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at an event in January. “They’re just automated assumptions. And if you don’t fix the bias, then you are just automating the bias.”

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https://theintercept.com/2019/04/03/facebook-ad-algorithm-race-gender/

HOW EXACTLY FACEBOOK decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience.

There are two basic steps to advertising on Facebook. The first is taken by advertisers when they choose certain segments of the Facebook population to target: Canadian women who enjoy badminton and Weezer, lacrosse dads over 40 with an interest in white genocide, and so forth. The second is taken by Facebook, when it makes an ad show up on certain peoples’ screens, reconciling the advertiser’s targeting preferences with the flow of people through Facebook’s apps and webpages in a given period of time. Advertisers can see which audiences ended up viewing the ad, but are never permitted to know the underlying logic of how those precise audiences were selected.

The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, the process of ad delivery, rather than on ad targeting.Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing:

Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive.

Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.

For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.”Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.

Although Facebook doesn’t permit advertisers to view the racial composition of an ad’s viewers, the researchers said they were able to confidently infer these numbers by cross-referencing the indicators Facebook does provide, particularly regions where users live, which in some states can be cross-referenced with race data held in voter registration records.

In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.”

Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.

The report comes at an inconvenient time for Facebook, now facing charges from the Department of Housing and Urban Development over its potential to enable advertisers to illegally exclude certain groups. And although the study is careful to note that “our results only speak to how our particular ads are delivered (i.e., we cannot say how housing or employment ads in general are delivered),” it still concludes that “the significant skew we observe even on a small set of ads suggests that real-world housing and employment ads are likely to experience the same fate.” In other words, even in the absence of bigoted landlords, the advertising platform itself appears inherently prejudiced.

A Facebook spokesperson provided the following comment:

We stand against discrimination in any form. We’ve made important changes to our ad targeting tools and know that this is only a first step. We’ve been looking at our ad delivery system and have engaged industry leaders, academics, and civil rights experts on this very topic – and we’re exploring more changes.

It’s a familiar refrain at this point, and one that will likely do little to reassure those who just want to know that they’ll be provided with the same opportunities as everyone else, even in the context of ubiquitous advertising. The old apologia for targeted advertising is generally that it’s a favor to the consumer, sparing them “irrelevant” ads and instead providing them with opportunities to browse goods and services that are “pertinent” to them. What this shallow reasoning misses is that decisions about pertinence can become self-reinforcing; it’s foolish at best to think that women are more interested in secretarial work because they keep clicking the secretary ads, rather than that they click secretarial ads because it’s all Facebook will show them.

==

==

Calls for Probe Into White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism After Arrest for Arson Attacks on Black Churches

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/calls-probe-white-supremacy-and-domestic-terrorism-after-arrest-arson-attacks-black

Civil rights advocates on Thursday called for a serious examination of racist hate crimes and domestic terrorism in the wake of arson attacks on three black churches in Louisiana.

Authorities announced that they had arrested Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old suspect accused of setting fire to three historically black churches in southern Louisiana over the course of 10 days. Matthews, who is white and the son of the deputy sheriff of St. Landry Parish, was charged with three counts of arson.

The NAACP argued that the church burnings, which are reminiscent of several similar incidents which took place throughout the South in the civil rights era, should be investigated as a racist hate crime.

"This is the same domestic terrorism that has been the hammer and chisel used to chip away at the humanity of Black Americans and the suppression of our political power," the group said in a statement.

The group noted that crimes linked to white supremacy have been on the rise since President Donald Trump took office and called on the federal government to lead in the fight against domestic terror attacks:

Since Trump has taken office, we've seen a rise in white supremacy and hate crimes—so much so that we issued letters to push both the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees of the House of Representatives to hold hearings for the resurgence of hate and raced based crimes that are overcoming the nation. Change must come from the top and we will continue to push Congress for additional hearings and concrete next steps to thwart acts of terrorism against communities of color.

Local officials in Louisiana noted publicly that Matthews had beeninterested in "black metal" music, which has beenlinked to white supremacist groups which burned churches in Norway in the 1990s. As Daily Beast reported:

A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black metal pages, and that he commented on two memes about far-right former neo-Nazi metal musician Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fellow metal musician and burning churches in Norway.

Some on social media cautioned the news media not to suggest that the suspect was simply influenced by an anti-religion philosophy, noting that a potential connection to racism should be investigated seriously.

...twts

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/03/12/video-years-laura-ingraham-s-anti-immigrant-commentary/223057

In the fall of 2017, Fox News announced it was giving its prime-time 10 p.m. slot to longtime conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who has a history of vile, racist, and anti-immigrant commentary. The choice has proven costly for Fox; Ingraham’s time slot was reportedly “down at least $16 million in ad revenue in 2018.”

Ingraham has spent years demonizing and mocking immigrants. In an August rant that directly echoed white supremacist talking points, Ingraham warned, “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and, in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.” She dismissed asylum claims from Hondurans fleeing violence because, according to her, “it’s not our problem.” She referred to detention centers for migrant children as “essentially summer camps.” She defended then-candidate Donald Trump’s claim that Mexico is sending rapists to the United States and argued that Mexicans “have come here to murder and rape our people.” She claimed that a lot of immigrants “have wreaked havoc upon communities.”

And there’s so much more.

Video]

see also tucker carlson

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https://theslot.jezebel.com/covington-catholic-student-hired-pr-firm-co-founded-by-1831948833

On Saturday, students from Covington Catholic were widely criticized after video was posted that showed them in MAGA hats mocking and harassing Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder. By Monday, news outlets and public figures were stumbling over themselves to claim that the initial videos were taken out of context (despite the fact that newer, longer videos showed the same thing) and that what happened with the Covington students was being misrepresented.

If this sounds like a public relations miracle, it’s because the family of Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann hired a Louisville-based public relations firm, RunSwitch PR, to help them handle the crisis, according to reporting by the Courier-Journal. Sandmann was the student in the original video of the incident that showed him standing and smirking in the face of Phillips. He released a statement on Sunday night, trying to spin the incident, claiming that he was actually the victim in the situation.

RunSwitch is run by three partners, Scott Jennings, Steve Bryant, and Gary Gerdemann. According to his bio, Jennings has served in senior positions in Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaigns, as well as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He also worked for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign and as special assistant to former president George W. Bush.

In a statement to the Courier-Journal, RunSwitch said that the firm “has been retained by the Sandmann family to offer professional counsel with what has become a national media story. We are working with the family to ensure an accurate recounting of events which occurred this past weekend.”

That RunSwitch picked up Sandmann as a client is not particularly surprising. But it does make clear one thing—these students are the future of the Republican Party.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/white-victimology-white-privilege-and-the-covington-catholic-rules-of-race/

There are rules of race and the color line in post-civil rights American and the age of Donald Trump. Learn them. These rules were almost instantly deployed in defense of the dozens of white MAGA hat-wearing teenagers from Covington Catholic High School who, in a widely viewed video, harassed and mocked a Native American elder last Friday at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

These rules include the following.

The mere accusation of racism against a white person is worse than the impact of racism on the safety, security, lives and literal existence of nonwhites.

White people are the “real” “victims” of “racism” in America. Donald Trump, with the help of Vladimir Putin and Russia, rode this lie to the White House.

White people are somehow “oppressed” by nonwhites, “political correctness”, and “civil rights.”

Whiteness is benign. White people, regardless of the evidence of their bad behavior or ill intent, are always entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

White racial innocence and white racial fragility must always be honored. As such, no amount of evidence is sufficient to prove conclusively that racism exists and that a given individual or group of white people have acted in the service of racial animus and racial inequality.

When white people are accused of racist behavior, they are allowed to decide what evidence is acceptable, credible and true.

Intentions, feelings, and the unanswerable question “What is in their heart?” trumps all empirical evidence and facts about the consequences of racist behavior and the context in which it occurred.

Stand your ground. In his interview with NBC’s “Today” on Tuesday,Nick Sandmann — the Covington teen seen face to face with Nathan Phillips in that widely-viewed video — used that language: “As far as standing there, I had every right to do so.” His words were in all likelihood very carefully chosen by the public relations firm hired by his parents — a PR firm with right-wing connections.

In America only white people are allowed to “stand their ground.” It is expected that nonwhites, especially black people, will always be deferential and submissive to white people. This is true of black people walking down the street and being stalked by white street vigilantes, black people living their daily lives and being harassed by white people who have decided that they get to police public spaces, and black people who are harassed and threatened by out of control law enforcement agents.

“Personal responsibility” does not apply to white conservatives. Contra Martin Luther King Jr., the long arc of history does not necessarily bend towards justice. In the age of Trump it is stuck on white victimology. For example: the white teen MAGA mob is somehow held to be not responsible for their foul behavior toward Native American elder Nathan Phillips because a small group of “Black Israelites” (essentially racial chauvinist black Power Ranger cosplay clowns) said mean things to them.

This is the very definition of racism and white supremacy: the white teenage mob decided that black and Native American people are somehow interchangeable; anger at the Black Israelites can then be reasonably transferred to Nathan Phillips; racist taunts and harassment against Nathan Phillips are therefore justified.

In an essay published Tuesday in the National Review, David French signals to another very old and important rule of race that still operates in today’s America: Empathy and sympathy are demarcated by White America (especially white conservatives) along and against the color line:

In the [Brett] Kavanaugh case, conservative men and women looked at decades-old, uncorroborated allegations, the unquestioning acceptance of those claims, and the furious effort to destroy a man’s reputation and career – even by passing along the wildest and most implausible claims – and thought, “That could be me’ or ‘that could be my husband.’

Now, these same people look at the reaction to the Covington Catholic kids and think, “That could be my son.”

You can hold that fear in your heart without excusing or condoning sexual assault in any way. You can hold that fear in your heart without excusing or condoning racism or even thoughtless taunts. Because you’ll know that for all too many people, the truth doesn’t really matter. You’re a symbol, not a person. When angry people cook that social-justice omelet, they break eggs not with regret but with angry glee. …

That’s the message that sent a shudder up the spine of husbands and wives during the Kavanaugh hearings. That’s the message that sends a shudder up the spine of moms and dads as we watch men and women try to ruin the Covington Catholic kids. This isn’t just a media scandal. When we see the hate, some of us see our sons, and we know that in America today, their futures, their reputations, and – given the prevalence of death threats – perhaps even their very lives are in the hands of an angry mob.

Donald Trump’s mouthpiece, Sarah Sanders, channeled this rule of race even more directly on Fox News:

The idea anybody could take joy in the destruction of young kids is absolutely outrageous to me. That’s exactly what we saw members of the media and other leaders do. These are kids ― let’s not forget ― these are 15- and 16-year-old kids who were put in a very tough position and actually handled it very well.

Sanders sought to link the Lincoln Memorial episode to BuzzFeed’s publication of an uncorroborated story that Trump had told Michael Cohen to lie to Congress:

I think what happened with BuzzFeed is a great lesson for the media. Quit trying to be first and start trying to be right. We have seen time and time again where they run out here with outrageous, ridiculous stories. One person reports it to begin with and they all jump on it. We saw it again with the Covington students. I’ve never seen people so happy to destroy a kid’s life.

On Twitter and elsewhere, Donald Trump, his son Donald Jr. and other spokespeople have said that the Covington Catholic MAGA mob are somehow the “real victims.” It is worth noting that Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, is an alumnus Pat Cipollone is an alumnus of Covington Catholic.

Unlike Nick Sandmann and his compatriots from Covington Catholic, the families and survivors of hate crimes inspired by Donald Trump and his movement have not been invited to the White House.

Those who defend and protect the white teens from Covington feel no compassion for the thousands of brown and black migrant and refugee children who have been put in concentration camps by the Trump administration and “disappeared” into a system that has no intention of reuniting them with their families.

Families and other members of communities where innocent black people have been brutalized and killed by America’s police have not been invited to the White House by Donald Trump. Trump did not host Tamir Rice’s family. Or Trayvon Martin’s family. Or Rekia Boyd’s family. Or Philando Castile’s family.

By contrast, black and brown Americans are not allowed to make such public demonstrations of sympathy and empathy with one another.

When President Barack Obama made the basic observation that “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon [Martin],” Republicans and other members of the white right nearly combusted in an apoplectic fit. For Obama to say such a thing was “racist” and “beneath the presidency.” His real crime, of course, lay in daring to remind White America that he was actually a black person who happened to be president of the United States. To the white gaze, Obama’s blackness was by definition in poor taste, something to be ignored or overlooked. Black humanity is a revolutionary act and a threat to many white folks. It is offensive.

Some have described the video of the Trump teen MAGA mob as being like “Rashomon” or a new Zapruder film — everyone sees it differently. Alternatively, the video has been called a Rorschach test for America: a reflection of our inner thoughts, biases, preconceptions and ideas. But matters are really not that complicated.

A group of white teenage boys donned their MAGA hats — which are overt and intentional symbols of bigotry, racism and ignorance — attended a right-wing Christian rally aimed at denying women their reproductive rights, then happened upon a group of “Black Israelite” cartoon bigots, and in retaliation decided to harass and insult a Native American. They did so because white privilege had trained them from birth that they would likely be able to act in such a way without consequences.

Claims that the boys from Covington Catholic are innocent victims are undercut by evidence that this behavior is part of a larger pattern. Other video footage from that same day appears to show the Covington boys harassing teenage girls and making comments such as, “It’s not rape if you enjoy it.”

The New York Post has also shared an image of white boys from Covington Catholic wearing blackface as they mocked an African-American player at a 2012 basketball game.

What W.E.B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wages of whiteness” can take many forms. One of them is the ability of those deemed to be “white” to bend reality and distort plain and obvious facts in the service of white supremacy. Defending the behavior of the white teens of Covington Catholic is a prime example of an old and dangerous American problem.

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==

AN 1/18

Even though historical revisionists still try to convince us otherwise, the United States fought a Civil War to end slavery. However, we all know that wasn’t enough to guarantee equal rights for African Americans. Taking a step in that direction was the aim of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, which resulted in legislation that protected voting rights and made it illegal to discriminate.

We’ve already seen the Supreme Court roll back a major section of the Voting Rights Act, but the Trump administration is also working on neutering the protections against discrimination that have been in place for over 50 years.

The Trump administration is considering a far-reaching rollback of civil rights law that would dilute federal rules against discrimination in education, housing and other aspects of American life, people familiar with the discussions said.

A recent internal Justice Department memo directed senior civil rights officials to examine how decades-old “disparate impact” regulationsmight be changed or removed in their areas of expertise, and what the impact might be, according to people familiar with the matter. Similar action is being considered at the Education Department and is underway at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Under the concept of disparate impact, actions can amount to discrimination if they have an uneven effect even if that was not the intent, and rolling back this approach has been a longtime goal of conservative legal thinkers. Past Republican administrations have done little to erode the concept’s application, partly out of concerns that the Supreme Court might disagree, or that such changes would be unpopular and viewed as racist.

According to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it is illegal to discriminate against women and people of color in areas like employment, housing and education. But for plaintiffs to charge discrimination, the concept of “disparate impact” means that they don’t have to prove that the offender intended to discriminate, but that the impact of their policies disproportionately affected women and/or people of color. That is the standard that the Trump administration is attempting to roll back.

When it comes to school discipline policies that result in the suspension and expulsion of students of color, disparate impact would take note of the fact that black students are three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. But the Department of Education has already rescinded the guidelines established by the Obama administration that relied on data like that.

The administration rescinded six documents related to the guidance. The Education Department’s civil rights office issued a question-and-answer document explaining how it will approach discipline investigations. It said schools have an obligation not to treat students differently based on race. In assessing whether discrimination is at work, the office said it would rely on “direct evidence of racial motive or animus,” such as racially biased statements by decision-makers.

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of how radical these moves by the Trump administration will be. If African American students have to produce proof of racially-biased statements made by the vice-principle who handles school discipline in order to have a complaint about discrimination heard, it is likely that no cases will ever be brought forward.

If the administration eliminates the standard of disparate impact in other areas, the same will hold true for cases involving employment and housing as well. In other words, we’ll be headed back to the 1950’s when it comes to civil rights, with racists given free rein to discriminate as long as they don’t make racially-biased statements about it in public.

As the article above suggests, previous Republican administrations have not gone this far because of concerns about appearing racist. But the man who stepped onto the national political scene by questioning the citizenship of this country’s first African American president doesn’t feel any need to dog whistle his racism. As a matter of fact, he’s made it the central issue of his presidency.

The other reason Republican administrations haven’t taken this step is because of a concern that their efforts will be overturned by the Supreme Court. It is important to note that one of Chief Justice John Robert’s longstanding goals has been to overturn the standard of disparate impact. In 2015, he had an opportunity to do so in a case from Texas on housing discrimination. But Justice Kennedy sided with the four liberals on the court and upheld the standard. Of course, Kennedy has now been replaced on the court by Brett Kavanaugh, so it is doubtful the current court would do the same.

At this point, the Department of Justice is examining how references to disparate impact can be removed from most federal departments.

Much — but not all — of the disparate-impact law could be changed by the administration because the concept was incorporated through regulations, which administrations are free to change by following a formal process. A broad-based rewrite of regulations could affect areas such as transportation and environmental law, as well as education and housing. But it would be harder to make changes to voting and employment law, experts say, because the concept of disparate impact is overtly written into the underlying statute, not just the regulations.

Ever since Trump adopted the phrase, “Make America Great Again,” it has been clear that his aim is to take this country back to the 1950s—that includes an attempt to erase all of the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement.

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/worst-attorney-general-modern-history-jeff-sessions-last-act-doj-solidified-his

no lnx

"He was a racist when appointed, a racist while serving, and a racist to the very end."

By Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams November 9, 2018, 10:12 AM GMT

In his last "evil" act as head of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions reminded "everyone yet again why he's been the worst attorney general in modern history" and drastically limited the ability of federal officials to use court-enforced deals to require reforms at police departments that are found systematically violating people's civil rights.

Trevor Timm

?

@trevortimm

Sessions, on his way out the door, reminds everyone yet again why he’s been the worst attorney general in modern history.

Jason Leopold

?

@JasonLeopold

Sessions, in Last-Minute Act, Sharply Limits Use of Consent Decrees to Curb Police Abuses https://nyti.ms/2yYKGvI

92

7:31 PM - Nov 8, 2018

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Shortly before Trump forced Sessions to resign on Wednesday—and appointed a temporary replacement who is hostile toward Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation—Sessions signed a memorandum (pdf), as the New York Times reports, "sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions," by imposing "three stringent requirements for the agreements."

The decrees were, as the Times noted, "used aggressively by Obama-era Justice Department officials to fight police abuses," but soon after Sessions took office, he had signaled he would scale back their use and "ordered a review of the existing agreements, including with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Mo., enacted amid a national outcry over the deaths of black men at the hands of officers."

Sessions' last-minute final act was met with widespread outrage, but not surprise—rather, as many critics quickly pointed out, it fit with the patterns of Sessions' moves throughout his tenure as attorney general.

"From day one, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed open and naked hostility to the use of consent decrees, especially in the civil rights context," said Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "This action by Sessions, on his way out the door, seals his legacy as an obstructionist when it comes to advancing justice and protecting rights in our country."

...

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https://www.alternet.org/political-science-professor-explains-why-cheap-talk-race-and-xenophobia-keeps-americans-confronting

...Lynne P: Thomas Ferguson, Ben Page, and their colleagues have just published a studyfor the Institute for New Economic Thinking revealing the intertwining social and economic factors that drove Trump voters in the Rust Belt, including those who switched from Obama to Trump. They find that long-term anguish over trends like globalization, imports, and slow growth were strong motivating factors that Trump was able to exploit by drumming up, for example, fear of immigrants. Yet many seem unwilling to confront this complexity. Why is that?

AR: My concern, and I’ve gotten more emphatic about it over time, is that if this argument is fundamentally an argument about the strategic direction that progressives and/or the Democratic Party should follow, then it’s really a debate about whether we try to mobilize around a politics that challenges the economic inequalities that are reproduced and intensified under capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, or we pursue a response that accepts the logic of those inequalities and seeks to mobilize around a notion of fairness within that regime of fundamental inequality.

From that perspective, the notion that the fault line in left-of-center politics now is between people who take a class perspective and those who take an identity-based perspective miscasts the actual tension. The identity position is itself a class position. It’s just a position of a different class from the working class.

...

=

School districts where White students are more likely to be in an Advanced Placement class or gifted and talented program, compared with Black students.

http://projects.propublica.org/miseducation

==

https://www.alternet.org/cosplay-guys-charlottesville-are-not-real-threat-how-republican-party-white-identity-cult

c de v

Trump was not elected because of "economic anxiety" among white working-class Americans. This is a zombie narrative that the American news media continues to cling to because it doesn't like the truth: Trump's victory was propelled by racism and a white backlash politics where authoritarianism is valued above multiracial democracy.This is a repeated finding by social scientists, pollsters and other researchers. The conclusion is a matter of consensus and known fact.

Racism is Donald Trump's fortress. He hides behind it when under assault. He stands on its battlements while throwing down chaos, confusion and destruction.

Donald Trump is a political necromancer who uses racism to control the millions of white Americans who subscribe to his political cult. The Republican Party generally shares Donald Trump's racism and bigotry against nonwhites and Muslims, whatever its leading figures may protest.

How is this moment of white backlash both simultaneously new and also an old story in American life? Are white supremacists and other racists "winning" in Trump's America? Should racists and other bigots be publicly shamed and outed? What is "white identity politics"? Why is it dangerous? How will Donald Trump further embrace white racism in the guise of the so-called "culture war" in response to the Russia Scandal and Special Investigator Robert Mueller?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Tim Wise. He is one the nation's leading anti-racism activists and a frequent guest on MSNBC and other news outlets. Wise is the author of numerous books, including “Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority,” as well as “Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What were your immediate thoughts when you heard Donald Trump channeling white nationalist talking points about "white genocide" and white farmers in South Africa last week?

I thought that it was probably either Stephen Miller's influence or, even more frighteningly, that Donald Trump really does just sit around watching Fox and then pulls out his phone and starts Twitter-thumbing whatever Fox News people such as Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson are saying at a given moment. At least if it's Stephen Miller, we have some sense of the directionality of it where, OK, the call is coming from inside the house, right? As opposed to if it's Tucker Carlson, and these guys on TV can just sit around and be like, “What do we want Trump to do tonight? Let's do this.”

The second thought was that I could just envision the white supremacist leader David Duke, who I've been fighting against for 30-plus years sitting there reading that Twitter feed and popping open a Champagne bottle, whether literally or figuratively. Now, we have the president of the United States tweeting out stuff that could have and would have appeared in David Duke’s newsletters 10 or 15 years ago.

The Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington was routed: Two dozen or so attendees outnumbered by several thousand counter-protesters. There was much celebration by liberal, progressives and other people of conscience. I think this is misplaced. With Donald Trump and the Republican Party mainstreaming white supremacy, their movement is winning in America. Am I being too cynical?

They’ve certainly won a lot. Obviously, the game is never over until the whistle blows and there's a lot of time left. We certainly have the right and the ability to push back. I don't want to throw in the towel for sure, but I would certainly say that the rumors about the deaths of the "alt-right" white nationalist movement have been greatly exaggerated. The fact that the more cartoonish edge of the movement has been discredited pretty strongly since Charlottesville, that is a good thing, but then again, OK, so you beat the cosplay guys. It's like you beat Mighty Mouse.

Basically, you defeated a Reddit thread in real time. That's nice, but at the end of the day Stephen Miller isn’t on Reddit. Steve Bannon is not on 4chan and 8chan. Those guys don't have any time for this cartoonish "Let's dress up with Viking runes and swastikas and shields and helmets, and go into the street like we're at some Renaissance festival and beat people up." They don't have time for that nonsense.

I like the fact that those folks are on the run, metaphorically. But it's very clear that at the public policy level, with the family separations at the border -- David Duke didn't do that, but he’s certainly happy with it. The inequities that continue to plague black America with regards to police misconduct, that stuff hasn't changed. That's not neo-Nazis and that's not Richard Spencer. The wealth gap is still 15 to 1 between white families and black families on average. None of that has changed. All those disparities and inequities and many others are still there.

Meanwhile, this administration continues to go after the voting rights and the ability of black and brown folks to cast ballots. They are continuing to try and roll back civil rights protections that have existed for years within the Fair Housing Act and within public housing programs. All that stuff is continuing, and it seems to me that we are barking up the wrong tree when we focus on the extremes and we ignore mainstream white nationalism, which, as you said, is essentially in control of one of the two major political parties.

It is not a fringe movement, it is the Republican Party. As you have long said about the Republican Party, it is a white identity organization. I would even go so far as to say the Republican Party is a white identity cult at this point, with just a few people hanging on, trying to steer the ship back in what they consider to be a less offensive direction. But I’ve got news for them: They're going to get thrown overboard, their day is done. There is no future for a Republican Party that is not a white nationalist party at this point.

Language is very important in these discussions. What is "white identity politics"? Why does it matter?

White identity politics, unlike its black or brown equivalent, is very much about attempting to hoard the advantages and the hegemonic dominance that whites, as a group, have generally had for 400 years in what we now call the United States. That is very different from black and brown "identity politics." Black folks and other people of color organizing on the basis of their racial and ethnic identity, to try to get a better deal politically or economically, is like trying to get a seat at the table at the fancy banquet. When white folks organize collectively for "our interests” -- putting aside what these individuals actually think those are -- it's not trying to get a seat at the table, it's about keeping the entire meal to ourselves. It's about saying that we will have all the seats or very nearly all the seats. If you all get any, it'll be at our discretion.

It's fundamentally about a politics of hoarding and not opportunity. It's about hoarding domination. It is about saying that we want to maintain dominance of the culture. The only people who are honest about that are, in fact, the Nazis. They will tell you that directly. Jared Taylor, one of the more prominent white nationalists, says, “Why wouldn't I want white people to maintain power? Why wouldn't any group want to maintain power if they'd had power?” That's something that at least they're honest about, and I respect their honesty as opposed to those who say, “No, we believe in pluralism,” but then they actually support policies and procedures that maintain white domination.

White identity politics is hoarding and hegemonic dominance. It's organizing on the basis of that dominance. Whiteness has really never meant very much except for domination of those who did not qualify for the designation. Whiteness is to be proud of an identity that doesn't have any inherent cultural meaning.

Whereas when any black person talks about being a proud black person, they're talking about something very different. They're talking about pride in the fact that their people have survived and thrived, in spite of the obstacles and barriers that have been put in their path. It's the ability to persevere. It's the ability to excel in spite of the challenges. That's actually about internal fortitude as opposed to being proud of whiteness, which is about a designation you were given that elevated you above people. White identity politics is saying, “Hurray for our status,” even though that status came at the direct expense of other people's lives and liberties. White pride is a fundamentally different and more obnoxious thing than any other form of pride that one can think of in this country.

The rise of Trump and his version of racial authoritarianism feels like something new, but also something that has been in America since before the Founding. The color line has been described as a "changing same." How do you reconcile this tension?

It is like an intermission or a commercial break. That's not to say that we haven't had better and worse moments in American history. It's not to say that it's been an unbroken string of awfulness. But it is to say that the things that Trumpism has tapped into have been there from the beginning. They are not a breaking with form. They are not a deviation from a norm. They are perhaps a more extreme iteration of a norm, but they are, in fact, something that is akin to a virus that's been in your body for a very long time.

When Trump refers to these "white genocide" memes or parrots other white supremacist talking points -- either overtly or in the form of "dog whistles" -- why do you think that resonates with many white voters?

It resonates today in a way that it maybe wouldn't have even 20 years ago, let alone 50 or 100 years ago. Two things: One is that the fear of blackness and the fear of payback for the history of slavery and white supremacy has a long history. As I mentioned on Joy Reid's [MSNBC] show, this goes all the way back to at least the Haitian Revolution in the 1800s, if not earlier in America and the West. It goes back to the fear of slave rebellions. It goes back to the fear of black folks rising up and violently responding to what had been done to them.

At some level, I think it's always been there. But the reason it is amplified today is that in the recent past the cultural norm of the country was still dominantly white. It didn't make sense to be paranoid about "the blacks are coming "or "the brown folks are coming." Before 1965, when immigration reform is passed, the numbers in the country are approximately 85 percent non-Hispanic white and about 10 percent African-American at that point, and then the other 5 percent are Latinos, Asian-Americans and indigenous people.

At that time, there were still white folks paranoid about losing power and believing in narratives about "reverse discrimination," but it was almost quaint and ridiculous. It didn't really catch fire in the same way, because whiteness was just still this uninterrogated norm. Even as recently as the early to mid-‘90s this was largely true. In many ways being white still meant never having to think about it.

That was true for most of American history. That is part of the core meaning of white privilege. But now in the last 20 years, white folks have had to think about it. In part, they've had to think about it because those of us doing anti-racism work have forced the issue, which we needed to do. We've raised these issues. They've gained some more prominence.

It's also been something we've had to think about because of demographic changes. It's something we've had to think about because of cultural changes. As I talk about in my book, "Dear White America," you had all this stuff happening at once. You had Barack Obama becoming president in 2008. Here's a man of color with a “exotic name” and an “exotic background” even if you accept that he's only from Hawaii. For most white people, that’s still really exotic, right? Maybe not Kenya, but it's still a vacation destination.

You have the economy melting down, confronting white folks with a level of insecurity that we hadn't seen in three generations. There were changes at the level of national and global entertainment and popular culture. The importance of that cannot be overstated. And now there is a global economy where you have to compete with nonwhites.

What are your thoughts about these efforts to publicly shame white racists who are caught in public, often on video, calling people racial slurs? I worry that this may all backfire.

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https://www.alternet.org/racist-stain-donald-trumps-presidency

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apartheid reboot:

https://www.alternet.org/trumps-embrace-new-white-supremacist-conspiracy-theory-hits-dangerous-low-his-authoritarian-ranting

marcotte

Wednesday, Donald Trump briefly interrupted his ongoing Twitter tirades denouncing various investigations into his shady behavior with a bizarre tweet about "the large scale killing of farmers" and "land and farm seizures and expropriations" in South Africa. It didn't take long for journalists to figure out what Trump was talking about. He was referencing a racist (and false) conspiracy theory that floats around white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites and had been elevated by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who has grown increasingly bold about mainstreaming ideas picked up from the white supremacist fringe.

That Trump often expresses racist views is neither new nor surprising information, so while news sites dutifully published pieces debunking this conspiracy theory — which implies that the South Africa government is working with vigilantes to steal land from white farmers through violence — it seems likely that both the media and the public will rapidly move on, especially since there are so many other big stories vying for attention.

But this strange interlude deserves more consideration, even amid the constant drumbeat of Trump-is-a-racist stories. By embracing this particular false narrative, the president of the United States has moved beyond garden-variety racism and is now openly pushing a white nationalist myth that has been used for decades to justify a violent ideology, one that occasionally leads to terrorism.

“'White genocide' is probably the most popular theme in the white supremacist world," Heidi Beirich, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Salon. The South African narrative Trump referenced "is a subset of that,” she said.

"White genocide" -- the thesis that there is a grand conspiracy to wipe out as many white people as possible, and/or to destroy their collective power -- is an idea that's been kicking around white nationalist circles for decades now, Beirich explained. Its purpose, she said, is "to strike fear in the hearts of white people in countries that are diversifying."

Racist beliefs or impulses are sadly common, and arguably drive most of the support for Trump. But the concept of "white genocide" takes racism to another level, because it's used to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda. By floating this conspiracy theory, which white nationalists use as "evidence" that black and brown people are trying to wipe out white people, Trump and Carlson are attempting to turn ordinary bigots into paranoid white nationalists, people who believe, as Beirich explained, that "we can’t share politics and political spaces with people of other races, because their goal is to exterminate us."

Derek Black, the son of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Stormfront founder Don Black, told Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow in 2016 how white nationalists have long sought to push movement conservatives past their occasional use of racist stereotypes and into overt paranoia about the supposed danger black and brown people pose to the very survival of whites.

“If we say it a thousand times — ‘White genocide! We are losing control of our country!’ — politicians are going to start saying it, too," said Derek Black, who "rejected the white nationalist cause" several years ago, in his words, and has been speaking out against his father's movement since then.

What white nationalists believe, and with some reason, is that ordinary white conservatives may hold racist beliefs, but don't generally possess a concrete ideology to frame it. They may crack racist jokes or make personal choices — such as where they choose to live or whom they vote for — that reinforce racial inequality. But most of them will draw the line at openly supporting explicitly racist policies, like legal segregation or bans on interracial marriage.

So white nationalists crafted this "white genocide" line, Beirich says, to radicalize those people into supporting the concept of a "white ethno-state" by convincing them that their very survival depends on it.

Obviously, the real-world evidence that white people are in danger of being wiped out by genocide is nonexistent. So white nationalists rely on conspiracy theories, such as the one about South African farmers, to scare people. They also lean heavily on fiction, Beirich notes, especially science fiction, to create this fear that "the white apocalypse is coming."

Last month, playwright Ian Allen an article piece for the New York Times examining the small but robust world of "white genocide" dystopian sci-fi, books that "act as a kind of binding agent, a Bible-like codification of basic principles that underpin the various denominations" of white nationalism.

Allen writes about a number of these books, but the two most important are likely "The Turner Diaries" and "The Camp of the Saints." The former, written by the late white-supremacist leader William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), tells the story of Earl Turner, a fictional hero who wages an insurgent war against the government -- which is presented as a tool of Jews and black people -- and becomes a martyr in the process of creating a worldwide, all-white fascist regime. Thelatter is a 1973 novel by French author and explorer Jean Raspail,recounting the future history of Europe being overrun by Arabs, Africans and other dark-skinned people, who are characterized as violent, filthy and parasitic.

"The Turner Diaries," in particular, has been implicated in a great deal of violent crime, influencing a number of white supremacist and right-wing terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. "The Camp of the Saints," a marginally more respectable literary work, is a favorite not just of professed white nationalists and hardcore immigration foes, but also of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

All this paranoia about "white genocide" is perhaps best understood as an extreme form of projection, a way of taking the murderous history of European colonialism and reversing the roles of oppressors and victims. The obsession with South Africa's land policy — which is meant to reverse the damage caused by the widespread white dispossession of African land, and the denial of both economic justice and civil rights under apartheid — illustrates this clearly.

While racism continues to be a major problem in the United States, this notion of "white genocide" has mostly lingered on the fringes of American culture. But by actively championing this South African conspiracy theory and other white nationalist beliefs on his prime-time Fox News show, Carlson is clearly betting that many more conservatives can be radicalized in that direction. By tweeting his support Wednesday, Trump is directly helping to normalize these views.

That's dangerous. If millions of Americans start to believe that white people are literally under threat of genocide, that belief can be used to justify all sorts of atrocious policy and disgraceful or violent behavior. The Trump administration's family separation policy offers a good example of how ugly things can get if frightened people become convinced that brutal human rights violations are necessary for their own survival. In the worst case, that may be just the beginning.

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Trump tweeted on Wednesday night that the South African government was "seizing land" from white farmers, who he claimed to be the subject of large-scale killings.

This claim is false — there is no evidence of large-scale targeted killings of white farmers anywhere in South Africa.

The Anti-Defamation League released a blistering statement about Trump's comments, which he appears to have tweeted after watching a conspiratorial Fox News segment.

"It is extremely disturbing that the President of the United States echoed a longstanding and false white supremacist claim that South Africa’s white farmers are targets of large-scale, racially-motivated killings by South Africa’s black majority," the group said.

The ADL explained how Trump's claims are actually part of a long-standing effort by white supremacists to falsely paint white people as victims of genocide.

White supremacists in the United States have made such claims for years.  In early 2012, ADL’s Center on Extremism documented how white supremacists in the United States were gearing up for protests as part of something they termed the “South Africa Project (SAP).” The goal of the organizers, which included representatives from major neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, "traditional white supremacist," Christian Identity groups, as well as racist prison gangs, was to stop the alleged ‘genocide of Whites’ in South Africa. The protests originated in 2011 at the hands of Monica Stone, a long-time member of the Louisiana-based white supremacist Christian Defense League and immigrant from South Africa.

Prominent American white supremacist Richard Spencer has used the South Africa talking point as recently as this March.

The ADL ended with a damning indictment of Trump's racist remarks.

"We would hope that the President would try to understand the facts and realities of the situation in South Africa, rather than repeat disturbing, racially divisive talking points used most frequently by white supremacists," the ADL concluded.

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rww

818

an apparent response to a report by Right Wing Watch, Jim Hoft, founder of the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit, publicly announced this weekend that the site’s former White House reporter, Lucian Wintrich, had quietly left the site “several weeks ago.”

Last week, Right Wing Watch reported that Wintrich told us he was on paid leave from Gateway Pundit when we noted him engaging in a conversation promoting scientific racism with white nationalist podcast host Nicholas Fuentes. Although Hoft claims that Wintrich had left the site weeks ago, during the podcast, which first aired on August 7, Wintrich still claimed he was employed at the site and was introduced as “New York City bureau chief from the Gateway Pundit.” Hoft never responded to our emails.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gateway-pundits-lucian-wintrich-says-hes-on-sabbatical-appears-on-white-nationalists-podcast/

Lucian Wintrich was, at least at one point, the Gateway Pundit’s man in the White House press room, but lately, his byline has been noticeably absent from the site. He tells us he is “on sabbatical” from Gatway Pundit while he is “attempting a book and a few other things.”

Among those “few other things” was anappearance by Wintrich on a podcast hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, who was documented making anti-Semitic remarks and who said “it might be descriptive”to call him a white nationalist. Naturally, we had some questions for the outlet about that media booking and the fact Fuentes introduced Wintrich as the “New York City bureau chief from the Gateway Pundit.”

Wintrich’s paid time off appears to have begun on May 30, as he has not been seen on Gateway Pundit since then, with the exception of a video interview he did with Fox News channel host Jeanine Pirro and a clickbait video of eccentric liberal “reporter” Louise Mensch. Despite this, Wintrich’s profile on Twitter still boasts the Gateway Pundit name.

“I think on both sides, we’re going to take a little heat for this show,” Fuentes said at the start of the podcast.

Fuentes and Wintrich have been chummy for some time now, which Fuentes alluded to himself, calling Wintrich “pretty famous and a good friend of mine.” Their relationship was made clear earlier this year when we spotted their interactions at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Although Wintrich rejects Fuentes’ calls to cease immigration from non-white countries, he did join Fuentes in entertaining the premise of scientific racism, which is the age-old practice of misapplying scientific research to justify white supremacist ideology, one pillar of which relies on a supposed difference in intelligence quotient (IQ) among the races. On the podcast, Fuentes argued that the migration of people from places like Mexico and the Middle East was tainting his vision of a “high IQ” America with no immigration, while Wintrich argued instead that some immigration of “low IQ” people is good because it provides “shitty people” to work low-skill labor that “high IQ” people don’t want to do.

Wintrich also started to discuss what he believes to be a genetic difference between races and when he mentioned that “IQ exists,” Fuentes grinned and excitedly nodded his head, before Wintrich walked back his argument somewhat by supposing that a Pakistani child raised in a Chinese household might achieve more than peers raised in Pakistani homes.

Later in the show, Wintrich said that “the very last thing we should be doing” in America “is allowing hordes of new immigrants to come in. Not only hordes of new immigrants, but specifically saying we want the shittiest immigrants in the entire world to flood our country.” Wintrich later told Fuentes that current immigration policies reminded him of his life experience.

Wintrich said that after a life of attending private schools that were mostly white, that going to public schools that had buses that service low-income minority neighborhoods provided his first encounters with people he described as “real shit human beings” that have “no sense of social interaction” and who would call white people “honky.” Wintrich compared that moment in his life to the current immigration policies in America, which seemed to resonate with Fuentes, who added, “All immigrants are not equal—because they’re not the same.”

Wintrich and Fuentes also complained about “anti-white” racism being allowed on Twitter and contrasted it with social media companies who have decided to boot Infowars and Alex Jones from their platforms.

Wintrich told Right Wing Watch that Gateway Pundit does not approve his media appearances and that the site’s owner Jim Hoft does not ban him from engaging with controversial outlets.

“Not sure why you’re under the impression Jim bans us from debating people,” Wintrich said. “I’ve historically always said ‘yes’ to any show invite that isn’t before 10 a.m.”

Wintrich, it should be noted, was not really “debating” Fuentes on this program, as the two seemed to be largely in agreement on the issues they discussed.

Hoft did not respond to our request for comment.

Tags: Jim HoftLucian WintrichNick FuentesRacismwhite nationalismGateway Pundit

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transition:

AN 818

With the rise of President Donald Trump, Fox News has drifted toward advocating even more explicitly for a white supremacist ideology. In her latest tirade against immigration Wednesday night, host Laura Ingraham delivered one of the most patently anti-immigrant and racist screeds from the network yet.

"It does seem like the America we know and love doesn't exist anymore," she said. "Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people. And they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and legal immigration, that of course progressives love."

While it's true that the size of the immigrant population in the United States has grown in recent decades, there's simply no evidence that it's causing the kinds of problems Republicans like to imagine and stir up outage about with their fear-mongering. And a large immigrant population is nothing new in American history — the country had similar levels of immigration in the late 19th century.  And despite Ingraham's claims to the contrary, most Americans have no problem with the level of immigration in the country. According to Pew Research Center, 38 percent of Americans want to see immigration continue at present levels, while 32 percent actually want to see immigration increased.

Only 24 percent of Americans desire less immigration to the U.S. — down from 53 percent in 2001.

Of course, that's not what Ingraham and her ilk would like you to think. They'd like you to think everyone is as terrified of immigrants as they are.

And despite what you hear from politicians like Trump, unauthorized entry into the country is not a growing problem. There are fewer undocumented immigrants in the United States now than there were in 2009, and the rate of net illegal immigration has been about zero for a decade.

"Fox used to just be sort of the country club style of racism, which is extremely awful....but they've crossed the threshold now. Just straight up white nationalism every single night," tweeted Andrew Lawrence, a senior researcher for Media Matters who first discovered the clip.

Watch the clip below:

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