Oy vey…
OMG. Joe Arpaio will keep the birther bullshit going until Obama leaves office pic.twitter.com/6Aj4ffBEWl
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) December 14, 2016
by Adam L Silverman| 103 Comments
This post is in: America, An Unexamined Scandal, Because of wow., Domestic Politics, Election 2008, Election 2012, Events, Open Threads, Politics, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, General Stupidity, OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUDS, Our Awesome Meritocracy, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Outrage
Oy vey…
OMG. Joe Arpaio will keep the birther bullshit going until Obama leaves office pic.twitter.com/6Aj4ffBEWl
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) December 14, 2016
by Betty Cracker| 186 Comments
This post is in: #BLM #M4BL, Election 2016, Politics, General Stupidity
In the morning thread, valued commenter Morzer pointed out an interesting piece over at Vox entitled “A pollster on the racial panic Obama’s presidency triggered — and what Democrats must do now.” I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt, with the Vox interviewer (Desmond-Harris) citing the pollster’s (Belcher) tweet:
Jenée Desmond-Harris: You recently tweeted that “economic power is often perceived through group lenses.” What was that a response to, and how does it tie into the message of the book?
Cornell Belcher: That was a tweet really to the progressive establishment — which means too often white Northeastern liberals — the idea that if we just had a better economic message, these people would all of a sudden go, “Oh, my god, what was I thinking, I should be voting Democrat!” That if we just find the right words to connect with downscale whites, they’ll say, “Oh, you know what, I am voting against my economic interests.”
It’s a disconnect that’s frustrating to me. They’re not voting against their economic interests; they are voting for their higher interests — there’s an idea that your group positioning doesn’t matter economically. The idea that you can disconnect white people from their group position and make pocketbook arguments to them void of the history of their group is folly.
That is not to say don’t target or don’t go after them. That’s absolutely not what I’m saying. What I am saying is just that the answer isn’t simply a pocketbook argument — we do have to inoculate against the increased tribalism and racialism in order to have that conversation. As long as there is a group sense of decline, we do have to calculate for that in our conversation and try to inoculate that as opposed to simply coming up with another argument about why raising the minimum wage is beneficial to you.
The earlier post about the Obamacare enrollees who voted for Trump even though some depend on Obamacare for their very lives lends credence to Belcher’s theory, IMO. Either those voters are irretrievably stupid, or some other, more important factor is driving their votes — like maybe they’re engaged in white identity politics, consciously or not. Or both, in some cases.
Anyhoo, Belcher identifies President Obama’s election as the event that triggered racial panic, eventually prompting many white voters to vote as a white identity group this year. I haven’t read Belcher’s book, but that rings true from my experience living among small town middle-class and downscale white folks.
I’ll take it a step further and observe that while Obama’s election undoubtedly prompted racial panic, that was only the opening salvo, and subsequent events have spread the fear. PBO is incredibly skilled at not offending white people, or he’d never have been elected in the first place. He’s the most squeaky-clean, scandal-free, family-oriented president we’ve had in generations — he had to be.
Of course, behaving as a paragon wasn’t enough: Millions of people completely lost their shit about Obama right off the bat, and the Republicans capitalized on that fear by relentlessly otherizing PBO, openly disrespecting him and abandoning all pretense of good governance to oppose him 100%.
Still, because of his singular character, strengths as a leader and political skills, there were enough white Americans who didn’t succumb to racial panic to enable Obama’s reelection. So how was it possible that a nation that elected a black man president twice could turn around and elect a racist demagogue?
My theory is that the emergence of Black Lives Matter and related resistance to structural racism in the criminal justice system tipped more white folks into racial panic mode, contributing to Trump’s rise. I don’t believe it was just that; there were many other factors.* But it was enough to tip the scale in a tight race. I’ve seen the visceral hatred of BLM and Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem, etc., even among white folks I would not categorize as hardcore racists.
Anyhoo, Belcher contends that the only way to overcome this stalemate where the GOP is increasingly the white identity party is to confront our racist past and come to understand each other. Geez, I hope he’s wrong, because I don’t see us ever doing that.
But I think Belcher’s right about the economics argument. I’m all for making economic appeals to the working class, as long as we don’t downplay our commitment to equality and focus on an extra-special subset thereof. But there’s a shit-ton of evidence — not just from this election — that such appeals will fall on deaf ears.
*Including, but not limited to, Putin / Comey / WikiLeaks, the decades-long wingnut jihad against the Clintons, a lazy, corrupt, fragmented media, etc.
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Post-racial America
Wow. I mean, wow. https://t.co/NN8oM1wNkl
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 10, 2016
Trump thanks blacks for not voting: "The African-American community was great to us…they didn't vote, & that was almost as good for me"
— Niraj Warikoo (@nwarikoo) December 10, 2016
No more pretense, no more dogwhistles, just the bully’s boasts.
The America we'll have left depends on those who will be willing to stand up to the betrayal of our values and looting that's just begun.
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) December 8, 2016
And this has been your daily affirmation.
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) December 8, 2016
Late Night Open Thread: Same As It Ever Was, But LouderPost + Comments (18)
This post is in: Election 2016, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Republican Stupidity
…that many Americans voted for Trump in an effort to create a "sundown" country.
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) December 3, 2016
There’s more and more evidence coming to light that the Asterisk-Elect’s electoral college victory relied on the revanchist fantasies of some of America’s least loveable left-behinds. David Roediger, at Counterpunch:
… Coming myself from a “sundown town”—that is, one which for most of the twentieth century remained whites-only, in part by disallowing even visits by African Americans after nightfall—I had read the work of the sociologist James Loewen on such places with great care. In the massive volume, Sundown Towns, and on the website accompanying and updating it, Loewen paid special attention to Wisconsin. Partly this was because, proportionately, so many of its towns fit into the sundown category and partly because their histories were so typical. Many had an early Black presence that was removed over time or in a hot moment. Some featured billboards warning of their policies. They included small towns, but also growing industrial ones, whose good, sometimes union, jobs became the property of whites.
Did sundown towns elect Trump in Wisconsin? My research assistant, Kathryn Robinson, and I tried to find out. Since it is much easier to get county-level election returns than municipal ones, we concentrated on “sundown counties,” those having a county seat that could be established as a sundown town or likely sundown town in Loewen’s mapping. An incredible 58 of the state’s 72 counties fit into such a category. Of the 58 sundown counties 31 are 1% or less African American (and only eight more than 2%), suggesting that the proxy of the county seat works in identifying sundown areas at the county level.
The simple answer on Trump and sundown towns in Wisconsin is: “Clearly they elected him.” Sundown counties gave Trump almost 935,000 votes to Clinton’s just over 678,000. His margin in the sundown areas exceeded 256,000 votes. That Clinton won the fifteen non-sundown counties by almost 230,000 votes could not make up for Trump’s 58% to 42% margin in the sundown ones. Just short of two/thirds of all Trump voters in Wisconsin came from sundown counties. Only nine sundown counties chose Clinton with 49 for Trump…
Trump overperformed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol & suicide mortality rates. See full brief at https://t.co/z1wUDM99E1 pic.twitter.com/2bAkfgt67Q
— Shannon Monnat (@smonnat) December 5, 2016
Of course, the NYTimes‘ Media Village Idiots are busily attempting to buff away these angry white fingerprints, because calling someone a racist is far more impolite than being a racist…
Not even those most depressed about Donald J. Trump’s election and what it might portend could have envisioned the scene that took place just before Thanksgiving in a meeting room a few blocks from the White House. The white nationalist Richard B. Spencer was rallying about 200 kindred spirits.
“We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace,” he said. “We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet.” When Mr. Spencer shouted, “Hail, Trump! Hail, our people! Hail, victory!” a scattered half-dozen men stood and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.
Mr. Spencer, however you describe him, calls himself a part of the “alt-right” — a new term for an informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals. As such, he poses a complication for the incoming president. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, whom Mr. Trump has picked as his chief White House strategist, told an interviewer in July that he considered Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right.”
Perhaps we should not make too much of this. Mr. Bannon may have meant something quite different by the term. Last summer “alt-right,” though it carried overtones of extremism, was not an outright synonym for ideologies like Mr. Spencer’s. But in late August, Hillary Clinton devoted a speech to the alt-right, calling it simply a new label for an old kind of white supremacy that Mr. Trump was shamelessly exploiting…
The alt-right is not a large movement, but the prominence that it is enjoying in the early days of the Trump era may tell us something about the way the country is changing. At least since the end of the Cold War, and certainly since the election of a black president in 2008, America’s shifting identity — political, cultural and racial — has given rise to many questions about who we are as a nation. But one kind of answer was off the table: the suggestion that America’s multicultural present might, in any way, be a comedown from its past had become a taboo. This year a candidate broke it. He promised to “make America great again.” And he won the presidency…
As someone steeped in the history of the alt-right, some thoughts on this soon-to-be-widely-read NYT essay: https://t.co/M4FOPRovBA /1
— Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) December 4, 2016
It imputes innocence to anyone who is not a member of an explicitly white nationalist organization. /3
— Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) December 4, 2016
It blames liberals for white nat’lsm & the alt-right, arguing it’s a backlash to multiculturalism rather than the bedrock of US politics. /5
— Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) December 4, 2016
@NaraMovak Here you go: https://t.co/1zIk0wZeoN
— Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) December 4, 2016
Read this thread, a demolition of that Alt-right crap in the NYT. I’ll add this: the electoral relationship is lethal for the GOP long term… https://t.co/XXnZYVvCLA
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016
3/…might be dandies, and of course there are plenty of racist young people. But electorally, that wasn’t a dandy electorate backing Trump…
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016
5/…association w an administration pursuing policies mostly of Steve Pence—both, imo, highly unlikely—that’s a bad long term strategy. Of…
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016
7/…doesn’t change laws such that they make it impossible for Dems to win—and they may!—long-term I’d rather be a Dem than a Repub
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016
10/…as effective in curbing the growth of the alt-right as anything overtly political.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016
Early Morning Open Thread: Sundown Voters for A Sundowning Party?Post + Comments (40)
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops, Get Angry
It’s 2016, but it might as well be 1816 in South Carolina if you are an unarmed black man and a white cop wants to kill you:
A judge declared a mistrial Monday afternoon in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man at the hands of a South Carolina former patrolman, after the jury said they could not come to a unanimous verdict.
In a statement read by Circuit Judge Clifton Newman, the jury said “We as the jury regret to inform the court” that they were unable to come “to a unanimous decision in the case of the state versus Michael Slager” on Monday afternoon after a day of questions and deliberation.
“The court therefore must declare a mistrial in this case and I so declare that is case is mistried,” he said after the jury returned to the room and confirmed their decision.
The jury had remained undecided — but not deadlocked — on Monday in the murder trial.
The defense in ex-patrolman Michael Slager’s the five-week trial claimed that he feared for his life when 50-year-old Walter Scott got control of the officer’s stun gun and pointed it at him.
Here’s the video of him chasing Scott, stopping, taking up a shooting stance, and unloading his service weapon into the unarmed man running AWAY from him:
He must have been really “scared.”
It’s now official. You can be executed by the cops, on video, have the cop plant evidence on your still bleeding body, again, on video, have the cop be heard tittering about the adrenaline rush, on audio, and you will not receive justice. But let’s place the blame where it really lies- on Colin Kaepernick for not standing during the National Anthem.
My biggest fear in the next few years with the rise of the neo-nazis and the white supremacists and the normalization of the Trump racist right is that we are going to see this kind of thing, both the shooting and the white holdout on the jury, happening more and more often. Basically, jury nullification in any offense in which the black man is the victim and the aggressor is white. The justice system has never have been equitable for black people in America, but now that it is “acceptable” to be openly racist in public and not only that, get elected President and be appointed to his staff, we are going to see a lot more of this.
In the past, we could rely on the Federal government and the Justice Department to at least make an attempt to address these concerns. But with racist ass Jeff Sessions running the DOJ, it’s going to get worse. Not only will he and the DOJ not pursue these cases, but he will also be gutting the voting rights of minorities so they don’t even have any redress at the ballot box, and on top of that, he is an anti-marijuana zealot and will ramp up on the drug war. You’re all bright people and don’t need a refresher course on the disparate impact of the drug war on people of color.
This is a slowly unfolding disaster. I’m sick. The Klan doesn’t even need to wear robes in public anymore.
by Adam L Silverman| 204 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads, Organizing & Resistance, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security
Several of you have asked in comments or by email if I’d write a little bit (a lot of bit?) about security. Specifically, personal security. I intended to get this up earlier in the week, but things went sideways on Tuesday, then did an inversion on Wednesday, then a triple lindy yesterday, so…
The first thing that I think is important is something I, and several others, have stressed here in posts and comments: freaking out is not a useful activity. I’m not stating that to pooh pooh anyone’s reactions to the elections, whether they be anger, fear, anxiety, stress, depression, or any combination thereof. All of these are normal and understandable responses. And, of course, if you are feeling really overwhelmed and are having trouble finding/regaining your equilibrium please go see a professional counselor or therapist.
The second thing is don’t do this!
CLEVELAND – Police are investigating the theft of seven guns swiped from a Cleveland home sometime early Tuesday morning.
A mom and her two children were asleep upstairs when she said the thief or thieves broke into the home and cleaned out two gun cabinets. “They’re ready for a war, we were ready for a war,” said Teena Brayen
Brayen and her family are doomsday preppers. “We’re preppers, we believe in preparing for what could happen,” said Brayen.
The Brayens are part of the Three Percenters Club, a militia group that ‘exists to… protect and defend the constitution and our way of life’ by helping people ‘execute Military Strategies to defend against foreign and domestic enemies’.
But the items they wanted to use to defend against invasion in Rome made them a target for invasion in Cleveland.
On November 22, burglars – who, Brayen believes, spotted the weapons when she was moving into the home – took seven guns, 12 machetes, body armor, smoke grenades, more than $1,000 in ammo and some of their food.
Two gun cabinets were emptied of their contents: a high-powered, armor-piercing sniper rifle; five shotguns, and a pellet gun.
Leaving aside the Brayens and the Three Percenters Club, which is not the same as the other Three Percenters, what was missing here was a failure to think security.
Thinking security means to proactively consider what the potential threats might be in order to establish effective, reasonable solutions to them. This means to consider what the potential threats and dangers are to oneself, one’s family, and one’s property (home, business, etc) and what reasonable steps should be taken ahead of time to either deter them or, should deterrence fail, respond to them in the most effective and safe manner possible. This is not just for human threats like crime or terrorism, but also for preparing to deal with natural or man made disasters such as a hurricane or blizzard or earthquake or a gas main explosion or a fracking induced sinkhole or earthquake. To do this one needs to consider several questions.
If you live in Florida and you’re largely concerned with hurricane season (and the occasional Floriduh man and woman), the answers are going to focus on how to secure one’s home, business, and/or other property from high winds, driving rains, storm surge, and flooding. Your response is going to focus on ensuring that you and your family have enough supplies – food and water, medications, alternate power sources, other emergency supplies – to either shelter in place and ride the storm out or the resources to evacuate early or to evacuate ahead of the storm to an acceptable shelter. And don’t forget to think about what to do with your pets!
However, if your concern now is a response to the uptick and spike in hate crimes since the election, then your potential responses would be different. And this is where I want to change the tack of the discussion a bit. Personal security that arises from the fear of other people, even when that fear is or may be rational, is not the same thing as just making sure you’ve got a week’s worth of food, water, etc and a generator in case of a bad storm. While the questions above may still be applicable, the consideration of them needs to shift. The first thing that will need to be done is to grapple with whether there is a very real threat that needs to be deterred or that might need to be responded to. There’s no one size fits all solution because there are far too many variables for me or anyone else to just write: if you do X, you’ll be fine.
Keeping this caveat in mind here are a few things you can do to enhance your and your family’s personal security, as well as security at your business, congregation, or any other organization you belong to.
This brings us to the final two things that I think need to be addressed. The first is fear or anxiety or stress. If you are having this type of response and its making you feel vulnerable, and you want to do something to prepare for the worst do not take a self defense course. People that take self defense courses go in scared and able to be hurt or killed. They come out scared and able to hurt or kill. These types of courses are not designed to get at the underlying issues in a systematic way. So if you feel you have to do something, and you’re willing to give it a try, skip right to a martial art taught by a legitimate and experienced instructor. The purpose of this training isn’t just, or isn’t really, the physical components of strike, lock, pin, but rather to use the psycho-motor skills training of learning them to access the internal energy, psychological, emotional, and mental components of those who study these systems and disciplines. It’ll take longer to be physically proficient, but you’ll start to see some of the internal benefits in a few months. Between myself and several of the other martial artists that comment here, we should be able to provide some suggestions in the comments.
The final one is firearms. To me this is an even more intensely personal question or issue. Guns, both handguns and long guns, are tools. In the right hands at the right times in the right places they can be tremendously effective. In other hands at other times and at other places not so much. As I mentioned in the comments to several questions about this, as well as to several emails from commenters/lurkers, I came to the use of firearms very late (I was 37) and for professional reasons (as part of my pre deployment training for Iraq). I had been doing martial arts for 24 years at that point and had some basic familiarity instruction with guns, but not a lot of practice or experience. Now, because I’ve been asked at least once a year for the past four years, if I would be willing to deploy, I go for regular training with a SWAT tactical training instructor to maintain my skills. I’m not recommending anyone get one and I’m not recommending one not getting one. I’m not advocating for anything here, nor should any decision I may or may not make in regard to firearms be an example for anyone else.
That said there are several questions that one needs to answer for themselves when considering getting a firearm, especially if its for self defense purposes
I think that’s enough for now. I’ll be around in comments.
This post is in: Election 2016, Excellent Links, Hail to the Hairpiece, Post-racial America
Question Trump's legitimacy for at least the three year span he questioned Obama's.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) November 25, 2016
Rembert Browne, at NYMag:
… In the numerous civil-rights movements of the 21st century, a degree of savvy about how to deal with racists, or homophobes, or Islamophobes, or sexists in isolation developed. But this expertise, from years (or in some cases, generations) of experience, was typically learned one form of oppression at a time. Progressives talk a lot about intersectionality — meaning, thinking about race and sex and class simultaneously — but Trump won the presidency by making hate intersectional. He encouraged sexists to also be racists and homophobes, while saying disgusting things about immigrants in public and Jews online. Hate, like love, is infectious, and it is contagious. And for so many, the adrenaline felt by blaming one group for one’s personal ills bled into blaming all the others.
The story of America for many is a seemingly never-ending process of playing catch-up. The perspective of those at the back of the line has been a tunnel-vision reality of knowing who is holding you down. Black people focus on white racists, gay people are consumed with protecting themselves from homophobes, women struggle to exist freely in a man’s world, Muslims and Mexican immigrants feel the weight of the world against them from “true” Americans. This created a complicated ecosystem for the historically abused — a shared understanding of what it means to be discriminated against, but also a quiet resentment over who has it worse. Because if you’re the worst off, you’re at the bottom, but you have a reason to scream the loudest, avoiding perhaps the most frustrating status: invisibility.
Now we’re faced with a clear reality: one group that hates us all….
So many men hate the idea of a capable women breaking into all-male spaces, because with her comes instant accountability. It’s harder to talk about grabbing women by the pussy if there’s also a woman in the circle, and that in turn makes it harder to blindly assault. It’s harder to casually say nigger when there’s a black person in the circle, and that makes it harder to beat a black kid senseless without fear of repercussion. It’s harder to say faggot when someone queer is in the room, which lessens the ability to casually bully a gay person to the point where they take their own life. Yes, there’s hate spread throughout this country, but it stems from the sickness that involves stopping at nothing to keep spaces fully white, allowing white people to continue with behavior that is no longer universally accepted in the real world…
You don’t see America, the melting pot of cultures, genders, religions, beliefs, as a good thing if you can’t keep up. You hate it with an aggressive irrationality — typically while being unable to explain why you feel the way you do — if you’ve never met anyone who isn’t just like you. And you resent it when the systems you created to make people become overqualified just to attain near-equality come back to threaten your relevancy, your status, or your power.
All of the groups that felt the wrath of these white people in 2016 have to somehow find a way to fight back, to save America. The reason it’s so hard for the country to actually change is because these white people have so little left, whether it be economic or cultural relevancy. This election was potentially their final hand, and they pushed their chips all in. And wouldn’t you know it, it fucking worked. But know their celebrations aren’t confident ones, filled with true elation. On the contrary, this is a very real sigh of relief, one that you get from a new lease on life, the one that stands between bringing back the archaic ways of old and permanently becoming a fossil.
Excellent Read: “How Trump Made Hate Intersectional”Post + Comments (40)