Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Everybody saw this coming.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

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Post-racial America

Stochastic Terrorism Comes To Boston

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Talking Points Memo reported yesterday on a series of bomb threats delivered to Tufts University.  Tufts–which occupies the border region between Somerville and Medford, west and north of Cambridge and Boston, had, it seemed committed the sin of teaching about race and the concept and history of whiteness in the US.

The first threat came last Wednesday, following the Tuft’s Diversity and Inclusion department hosting “Unpacking Whiteness” — part of a series of programs focused on addressing “the experience of those who have racial privilege and who would like to find support in understanding how to practice anti-racism in their daily lives.”

The bomb threat, emailed to the Diversity and Inclusion department, said it was a response to the event.

“Tufts university continues to fuel anti white racism in this country by having bullshit courses like ‘unpack whiteness’ which is anti white propaganda,” the email read. “We are a multiracial group who doesn’t want white people to be treated like shit… We placed several bombs in Tufts university, we don’t want anyone to die, we are just here to send a message.”

This was followed by renewed threats on Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday and yesterday.  They seem all to have been hoaxes, though the group escalated this week by adding the Boston office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to their target list.  That will, I think, prove to be a notable mistake. Whatever the feds may feel about university DEIJ efforts, they do not take kindly to threats against themselves.

Tufts has moved its finals online, which seems to me to be prudent.

Stochastic Terrorism Comes To Boston

But that’s already a minor win for the terrorists behind these threats.  As Adam has written many, many times, the American radical right wants to destroy civic space, the places where we encounter each other, experience things together, talk and learn. That space at Tufts has been narrowed this week.

The only other comment I have is that the GOP is to the people behind this as pre-1933 Nazi members of the Reichstag were to the Brown Shirts: the “polite” wing of a movement explicitly aiming to seize power by any means available to them.

But we knew that.

Happy holidays, I guess…and open thread.

Image: Albert Anker, The School Examination, 1862.

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(Insufficiently) Retro History: Rest in Power, Mr. Dick Gregory

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And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.

Dick Gregory, one of a kind, died five years ago today. I found a draft of this post while doing clean-up for the Great Blog Merge, and he’s still — sadly — all too relevant…

.. Most of his career was based on using humour to make fun of and combat racism. For this reason he upset a lot of racist people, who branded him as anti-white and a danger to society…

Gregory published an autobiography, N*gger, in 1964. Many people were offended by the title of his book, but he defended it by saying “Any time you hear that word, they selling my book.”

During the Vietnam War, Gregory was one of the people at the forefront of opposition to the war and opposition to racial injustices, particularly against African-Americans but also against Natives. He was arrested at multiple protests for both of these issues and went on several hunger strikes.

Gregory was an outspoken feminist, and in 1978 joined a group of American suffragists in their march to ensure that the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by the United States Congress. The march got the deadline for the ERA extended, but it ultimately failed to pass…

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Fascism, Florida Style

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I know I sound like a broken record (scratched CD, corrupted MP3, whatever), but Steve is 100% right here about the all-out push by every Murdoch outlet to make President DeSantis happen:

I’m on board with a boycott even though I’d be collateral damage; we have to keep this sociopath out of the Oval Office. But the depressing truth is it’s probably too late for an effective boycott because DeSantis, with the help of Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets, is successfully creating consent for Republican cultural and economic control through disinformation.

Case in point: DeSantis is currently in a showdown with Disney over the Don’t Say Gay law. When the state operated as a comically corrupt but still functionally capitalist and democratic entity, a right-wing political crank who took on Big Mouse over a culture issue would get squashed like a palmetto bug at a pest control industry picnic. Maybe not this time:

What Ingraham is describing here with her trademark lock-jawed, menacing smugness isn’t “choosing where your dollars go,” and it sure as hell isn’t legitimate regulation of industry. It’s fascism.

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OH Whoopi Goldberg NO

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So, while The View team discussed the MAUS-banning school board, it turns out Whoopi Goldberg needs to be working thru her business:

[Whoopi] Goldberg continued to assert that Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not racial.

“What is it about?” Behar asked at one point.

“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.

“But it’s about white supremacy,” co-host Ana Navarro retorted. “It’s about going after Jews and G*.”

Goldberg, meanwhile, claimed that “these are two white groups of people,” prompting co-host Sara Haines to point out that “they didn’t see them as white” while Behar noted that the Nazis targeted Black people as well.

[Edit and Emphasis mine — MisterDancer]

Now, I showed my ass in comments on this topic a few days ago. I’m still working thru my crap on this. So take this post with that pound of salt y’all keep in the pantry, please.

Yet: who just drops Jewish identity as unambiguously “white,” even in my relative ignorance compared to many? She should at least understand that whiteness, and the power it’s stamp brings, is a social construct. As such: it can be granted, denied, or even rescinded. Its arbitrariness is a boon to those who wield it — and Jews are so not in charge of that wielding.

And sometimes, that is explicitly laid out, in black and white.

See, Whoopi might not know this: Jim Crow and related US laws were used by the Nazis to baseline their Nuremberg Laws:

[…]American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state. America was the leader in a whole variety of realms in racist law in the first part of that century. Some of this involved American immigration law, which was designed to exclude so-called “undesirable races” from immigration. In 1924 American immigration law in particular was praised by Hitler himself, in his book Mein Kampf.

But it wasn’t just about American immigration law. There was also American law creating forms of second-class citizenship — for African-Americans, of course, but also for other populations including Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Not least, there were statutes in 30 American states forbidding and sometimes criminalizing interracial marriage. Those were of special interest to the Nazis.

[Bill] Moyers: And these lawyers saw America’s “Negro problem” as similar to their “Jewish problem?”

[James] Whitman: You bet they did.

Moyers: American law did not specifically target Jews, but— 

Whitman: But it certainly had a highly developed body of law targeting other groups.

Being a born-and-bred New Yorker, she might have heard about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. If she had, its implications should have been echoing in her ears as she made that horrible argument, pulling her up.

That implication? That our struggles are united. Harm done to one easily spreads to all. It’s imperative we understand the cross-currents of bigotry, lest we fail to see the warning signs.

Yes, she should know better, as should have I. I’m not going to dive into the long a painful history around Black and Jewish communities, and struggles for equality. Yet I must say: to buy into this “they both white!” bullshit is beyond merely “harmful.” And we Black folx should know that, more than most.

She deserved not just the pushback on the show, not just the callout from the ADL, but a lot more, besides. And it’s something to not just throw vitriol at, but to learn from and strive to avoid.

I don’t have a great ending for this post. Just a promise that I’ll try to do right by y’all — and a fucking great heap better than Whoopi.

(Also, too: I get The View person trying to correct Whoopi via incorporating the other groups targeted. Yet Romani is a much better term to use; something else I learned the hard way. Those folx are to this day getting the short end of damned near every stick there is, and deserve at least a modicum of respect.)

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A Reason to Sing.

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[EDIT: Yes, this is Woodrow/Asim, in my new nick!] Nothing pisses off The Right, like actually enjoying your life, even when that life holds pain and sorrow.

So let’s talk late 90s’ pop tunes!

Specifically: how one of them came to be played at the Inauguration…and how it reminds me, of the emotional richness from singing Gospel, many years ago. A richness that can help, to push back a bit of the darkness.

Let’s start with the song — “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals, aka Beau Biden’s “theme song” as he fought cancer…:

…and a One-Hit Wonder. Yet, despite it’s seemingly ephemeral nature, so many of us who heard it at that time, kept it close to our hearts. As a struggling dancer myself, it was a massive uplift for me.

And for a Beau Biden who, years later, would struggle with something much more serious in his life? It became a balm, one he passed onto his “old man” — a man who is now our President, and who had the band come back from the dead to play the song at his Inauguration.

But why this song? And what the heck does any of this pop pablum, have to do with the long and treasured history of Gospel Music?

So let’s dive into Joy…and Pain. How “life is more, than mere survival.”

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Look at these grotesque goobers…

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Standing among cheering rubes, Ron DeSantis demonstrates yet again why it’s so important for grown-ass adults to examine the racist frameworks in which our legal and educational systems are embedded:

This new round of honest-to-dog gubmint censorship and cancel culture isn’t just about schools, though that’s the main focus. DeSantis is also asking the Republican-controlled statehouse to ban CRT from private businesses because, as everyone knows, Edmund Burke was all about policing corporate HR programs. From The Orlando Sentinel:

TALLAHASSEE — Critical race theory shouldn’t be taught to Florida’s children or workers, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday, and he’ll seek legislation next month to ban a practice that is stirring debate nationwide.

He also wants parents to be able to sue schools suspected of teaching the theory and receive attorney’s fees.

“In Florida, we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory,” DeSantis said at an event before cheering supporters in Wildwood. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other…”

DeSantis wants the Legislature to codify that rule into state law when lawmakers convene their 60-day regular session starting Jan. 11. But he also wants them to go further and ban CRT from being used in seminars and training sessions for K-12 school employees and in all workplaces in the state.

The attorney’s fees part of the scheme will unleash partisan nutcases like the so-called “Moms for Liberty” to intimidate school administrators and teachers. My guess is it will work. Even if lessons are certified 100% CRT-free, no one wants to invite the hordes of screechers to come down on their school or workplace.

I wonder if the anti-woke Substackers who constantly bemoan the “self-censorship” they supposedly endured at prestigious, well-compensated media perches they formerly or currently occupy will take up Florida teachers’ free speech cause? Haha, of course they won’t.

Open thread.

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CRT Panic Forces Resignation

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I missed this earlier. The black high school principal in Texas who was targeted for removal by white conservatives on bogus charges that he indoctrinated children with critical race theory was forced to resign.  NBC News:

COLLEYVILLE, Texas — The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students…

“This is beyond me,” [James Whitfield] said in an interview Monday with NBC News. “I’m hopeful that we can use this to move forward and to progress and get some true meaningful change and for people to be OK with teaching truth, people to be OK with embracing inclusivity and diversity, celebrating every student that walks through the doors of our schools.”

Whitfield will remain on paid administrative leave until August 2023.

All of the reports indicate there’s zero evidence the school was teaching CRT because of course they aren’t, but here’s an account from an earlier NBC report that outlines the principal’s alleged offenses:

After Whitfield was named principal, some parents issued unspecified complaints about photos of him and his white wife celebrating their anniversary that were kept in album on his Facebook page. Other parents grew outraged after he took part in a district-approved presentation on diversity. Some parents were particularly angry after he wrote an email about George Floyd’s murder in which he said systemic racism was “alive and well.”

The horror. The forced resignation is bullshit, but at least Cow Town taxpayers will be on the hook for paying Whitfield through most of 2023. When communities encourage bad behavior, whether by hiring and retaining rogue cops, caving to extremists who disrupt schools, etc., there should be a price.

Lots of the high school students, including some white kids, stood by their principal during his fight to retain his job. Those kids learned a bitter lesson this year. Maybe they can change Texas if they choose to stick around. Open thread.

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