Geniuses!
This is dead on https://t.co/s47kWp7VCY pic.twitter.com/HCHiFjTgf4
— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) November 11, 2016
by Adam L Silverman| 293 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Media, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Our Failed Media Experiment
Geniuses!
This is dead on https://t.co/s47kWp7VCY pic.twitter.com/HCHiFjTgf4
— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) November 11, 2016
by Adam L Silverman| 172 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, domestic terrorists, Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America
I’m going to start documenting acts of hashtag violence and terrorism around the US in the wake of President Elect Trump’s election on Tuesday. I doubt it will be comprehensive as a lot of the reporting of this stuff is on Facebook and Twitter and I don’t have a presence on or really use either of those platforms other than to check a few, select twitter feeds for specific breaking news and other information. So if you all want to send me links to reports in your local media at my contact info here at Balloon Juice, I’ll incorporate them and the reporting when I do the posts. To contact me go up to the quick links, click on contact a front pager, and then click on Adam L Silverman and you should be good to go.
As a reminder hashtag violence and terrorism are:
Hashtag radicalization refers to the process that leads to terrorism, as well as acts of mass violence, that may not have a specific political objective, undertaken as a result of what is learned through the 24/7 news and social media. In this way it is a variant of G2Geek’s stochastic terrorism:
“… the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
What we need to document and track is threats and actual violence that are, unfortunately, being done either under the mantle of President Elect Trump’s election or in response to it. For instance:
Children are already being harassed in the name of our president-elect https://t.co/dvKJpqiNPw pic.twitter.com/KR0Wy3fTGD
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) November 10, 2016
And this:
Trump Voters Threatened Women, People of Color Yesterday https://t.co/kZsphKQcY2 via @thecut
— Courtney Brooks (@courtneyrbrooks) November 10, 2016
Or this:
White students @ Southern Illinois University (@SIUC) decided to put on blackface and pose in front of a Confederate Flag to celebrate Trump pic.twitter.com/OEP2yEW3So
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016
Or this:
I'm heartbroken that kindergarteners are showing us what they've learned #Racism #Bullying #Divisiveness https://t.co/vRwVBvHodS
— Laurie Sterritt (@LaurieSterritt) November 10, 2016
Or this:
@ShaunKing From Rochester, NY; where everyone was putting "I voted" stickers on Susan B. Anthony's grave: https://t.co/SCCyyIwQpu
— Laura Keeney (@LauraKeeney) November 10, 2016
You all get the idea. And in case anyone asks, I’m not posting the video of the white man being beaten by several African American men and one woman in Chicago, because the Chicago Police Department has indicated that this fight/beating was the result of a vehicular accident, not politics despite what is being put out on the Internet.
While it’s clear the man in the video was assaulted, it seems from initial police reports that the assault stemmed from a traffic incident. Bystanders are heard taunting him for voting for Trump, but it’s not clear from the video itself or the statements from police whether he did in fact say he voted for Trump, and if he did, whether that was the impetus for the attack.
It’s also not clear, as some publications are claiming, that the battery suspects in the video were supporters of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. One woman can be heard off camera asking, “Are you gonna pay for my shit?” which seems to align with the police statement that the fight stemmed from a traffic accident resulting in property damage.
Further, the racial undertones of some of the posts surrounding the video raises the possibility that the incident is being exploited in order to further enflame tensions on the heels of a charged and contentious election.
I also will do these posts a couple of times a week. I don’t think I’m going to want to do them everyday and I don’t think anyone here is going to want me to. But documenting what is happening and the motivations behind it are important.
Today in Hashtag Violence and TerrorismPost + Comments (172)
This post is in: Post-racial America, Women's Rights Are Human Rights, Rare Sincerity
To get things out of the way: the way I feel right now is exactly the sensation — body and mind — I’ve only felt before when I got news that someone close to me died unexpectedly. I’m basically paralyzed, and my brain is moving…not much, and not in any coherent sequence.
That said, I’ve only one thought to add to all those below. I’m completely down with the core themes others have already written here: la lucha continua, the struggle continues, and in days like these the kindness we show each other is paramount. And I agree with the hints at a post-mortem below.
My sole notion is that whatever her formidable strengths and her evident vulnerabilities, Hillary Clinton ran right into an absolutely familiar trap. American politics is hostile to women. We saw it in Massachusetts recently enough. Martha Coakley was all kinds of not-great (read, terrible, especially her first time out) as a candidate for senator and governor. But in both cases she started up with a sixty pound rock on her back male candidates don’t have to carry. Massachusetts had, until Elizabeth Warren came along, never elected a woman to the top offices. (And it’s notable that Warren also seems to face a woman tax as measured in approval ratings, at least as compared with her perfectly solid but unspectacular male colleague, Ed Markey.) Several tried, but it’s clear that while women can aspire to state treasurer or AG or a House seat, gunning for the top slots engaged the fear/loathing-for-powerful-women, leading to the results we see.
That’s true nationwide, I believe. The old line goes white men before everyone else (got the vote in 1783); then other males (black men got the vote in 1665); then women (who got the vote in 1920), with, of course, white women gaining access to power and agency ahead of women of color.
Whatever else we may conclude about the Clinton campaign and this terrible outcome, one thing it reveals is that racism still powerfully motivates the revanchist white right, to a depth I certainly didn’t forsee. It also reminds us that misogyny strikes deep within our body politic. One more thing to deal with, as best we can.
One afterthought. Typing that sentence about racism above, I’m reminded of the ways privilege so subtly seeps into one’s bones. Y’all know my politics, I think, and I’ve come by them through life-long engagement from a childhood in Berkeley in the 60s. But I’m white, male, working in the elite, pretty secure, still pretty damn white-and-male setting that is an R 1 university. I’ve got a good friend , a Latino writer who has some of the same cocoon now, but certainly didn’t come up within those comforts and protections. He’d been freaking out about Trump’s rise, especially after the Comey ratfucking, and I kept reassuring him with the polling internals and the early vote stuff and all that.
I emailed him this morning to tell him the obvious: he’d been right and I wrong. He wrote back saying he’d known that disaster was looming — and that is was time to fight. On that last, of course, he’s right. It was the first half of that response that pulled me up, because I realized in that moment what should have been obvious: a nice liberal white guy like myself, whatever my politics and however deep my convictions doesn’t have the deep knowledge my friend does of just how much pure racial hate and resentment is out there. I can get glimpses, and through my friends can get to empathy (I certainly hope), but the truth remains: I don’t live in daily direct confrontation with that hate. And that, I think, as much as anything else, led me to miss whatever signs there might have been that our disaster was upon us.
As noted, that’s a penetrating glimpse of the obvious, of course. But it’s also key. I have no idea at this moment how to climb out of the deep hole we’re in. I hope its not a grave. But whatever else we do, we have to out work and out number the reserves of awful that have proved so potent this year.
And that’s all I got, rambling away, on this grim morning. To end mindful of Tim F.’s injunction, I’m deeply grateful for all who make Balloon Juice a community, from Blog Leader John (and animals) to all the rest of us. I’m going to try to duck away from the ‘net for a while, just to get my head clear. I’ve already deleted the Twitter app from my phone and iPad, and I’ll be trying not to surf anything more exciting than Sports Illustrated for a while. But I’ll be checking here, even if I don’t plan to post much, if at all (what’s new w. that — ed.). Jackals you/we may be. But we’re our jackals, and I love you all.
Image: John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882.
This post is in: Election 2016, Post-racial America
4,000 people are waiting in line to vote in Cincinnati right now. This is how long the line is. pic.twitter.com/bilpnGsrzl
— Saahil Desai (@Saahil_Desai) November 6, 2016
That’s fucking obscene. And it sucks for right now and this election. But ultimately, this will fail in the long run.
Yes, “moderate” Republican John Kasich (who I still think would have really made this election hell had he won the nomination) may shave off a couple thousand votes with this blatant voter suppression. But in the long run, it will fail.
A lot of this line is from the Ohio “Souls to Polls,” and while the Republican party’s institutional memory is about 6 hours and only if that’s convenient for them, black churches have a long, long memory. In every line, there are younger voters mixed in with grandparents and great-grandparents who were around before the VRA’s and CRA’s of the sixties. Every congregation is filled with people who were beaten, had dogs sicced on them, shot with firehoses, intimidated, and so forth, and that institutional memory is alive and well. They remember Jim Crow, they remember poll taxes, and this is just one more insult and one more assault on the dignity of the African American community, and they will note it.
And they will remember. As will the Latino community, members of which have been under assault since the first day that Trump slowly descended down an escalator and let everyone know that he thought that the path to the White House was through the 1840’s. And tey’ll remember.
So maybe Kasich and others will skim a few votes off here and there, but in the long run, they are losing minority communities for generations. As I said elsewhere, they aren’t eating their seed corn, they’re throwing it on the ground and shitting on it before setting it on fire.
Got here at 8AM. FINALLY got to vote at 2:30PM. 6.5 hrs at the polls-REFUSED to leave. My voice will NOT be silenced. Neither should yours✊? pic.twitter.com/9W4Fpl2pJi
— Cristela Alonzo (@cristela9) November 6, 2016
We have to win in 2016, we have to win in 2018, and we have to win in 2020 to really turn the corner.
And fuck you, John Roberts.
Voter Suppression Will and Must Ultimately FailPost + Comments (236)
This post is in: Election 2016, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Republican Venality
Pretty clear from the year that the GOP's biggest fear is a Supreme Court that will make voting easy and fair.
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) November 2, 2016
… doesn’t want to “cheapen the work of civil rights activists” by permitting automatic voting registration.
No, seriously:
Automatic voter registration has recently emerged a key tool in increasing the United States’ anemic voter turnout. The process is simple: Whenever an eligible citizen interacts with a government agency (typically the DMV), she is registered to vote unless she declines. Although automatic voter registration is a nonpartisan initiative, it tends to be favored by Democrats and opposed by Republicans, who believe they fare better in low-turnout races; two Republican governors have already vetoed Democrat-sponsored automatic voter registration bills in Illinois and New Jersey. Now Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, has joined the opposition. Asked a question about automatic voter registration, Merrill declared that the practice “cheapen[s] the work” of civil rights heroes and that “just because you turned 18 doesn’t give you the right” to vote….
These people fought—some of them were beaten, some of them were killed—because of their desire to ensure that everybody that wanted to had the right to register to vote and participate in the process. I’m not going to cheapen the work that they did. I’m not going to embarrass them by allowing somebody that’s too sorry to get up off of their rear end to go register to vote … because they think they deserve the right because they’ve turned 18.…
But they do have that right, Sec. Merrill — as enshrined in the Constitution, and further specified in its 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments. It’s not your “ball game,” not any more, and you don’t get to decree who’s entitled to “win a trophy”…
Open Thread: Revanchist Hero of the Day, Alabama Sec. of State John MerrillPost + Comments (217)
This post is in: Election 2016, Post-racial America, Assholes
Here's the transcript with the full context pic.twitter.com/wERLX8pNM8
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) October 28, 2016
Here's video of that Duckworth/Kirk exchange. It's as bad as it sounds. https://t.co/aC8ahtFalo
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) October 28, 2016
The entire Republican party has lost their god damned minds.
by Betty Cracker| 185 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Post-racial America, Republican Stupidity, Vagina Outrage, Assholes, General Stupidity
I remember clearly when Donald Trump’s birther crusade stopped being funny. There was never anything truly comical about it, of course; it was always an outrageous racist lie concocted to delegitimize the first black president. But living in a nation of 320M people, a not-negligible percentage of whom are raving idiots, we learn to laugh. Baratunde Thurston taught me to stop laughing and see the tragedy of it.
When President Obama produced his “long-form” birth certificate in 2011, I perceived it as a president hilariously smacking down an absurd, malignant, preening blowhard. Thurston saw it as an affirmation that the president — and by extension Thurston himself, and all other black people — were still less than full citizens. Even with a black man in the Oval Office.
Five years later, we’ve come full circle. That very same absurd, malignant, preening blowhard — whose birther antics should have banished him from the company of serious people forever — has instead been elevated to head one of our two major political parties. And this time, he’s telling Hillary Clinton, and by extension all women, that their aspirations are illegitimate and that they are less than full citizens.
Trump’s vile misogyny and painfully obvious lack of basic human decency — and more importantly, its echoes from tens of millions of our fellow Americans — have tarnished what should have been a joyous celebration of a historical milestone. We see them. We understand the implications.
Trump had help from nearly the entire GOP establishment, the Beltway media, his abhorrent family, his pack of ghastly political operatives, the Putin-reanimated remnants of the KGB and a self-important wanker with a grudge residing in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London as a fugitive from justice.
But that’s only the latest cast of characters. The hit has been out for Hillary Clinton ever since she emerged from Arkansas as a woman with a national profile and an agenda of her own.
During the recent debate, Clinton called Trump Putin’s puppet, and good for her. It’s about goddamned time someone said as much while the country was listening.
But Trump is not just Putin’s puppet. He’s America’s rage puppet, dancing in a fury because change is coming — no, it is here. And there are so many hands on the strings. That’s the tragedy of it.