Excellent Read: “How Trump Made Hate Intersectional”

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.

Friday Evening Open Thread: Working As Intended!

“Ambulatory cream cheese sculpture” Hewitt, not seeing a downside!


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Apart from meditating on the never-ending revanchist urges of our GOP compatriots, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Celebratory Gathering of Happy Trump Supporters

ETA: Original tweet got removed by Twitter, for some reason or other…

No, seriously: This happened. Rosie Gray, at Buzzfeed:

The white nationalist alt-right movement, once the very definition of fringe politics, is facing a truly unexpected scenario: Their preferred candidate is about to be in the White House.

To capitalize on this turn of events, alt-right leaders held a press conference on Saturday at the gathering of the National Policy Institute, the white nationalist think tank headed by Richard Spencer. The event was held in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, and attracted vigorous protests outside.

Spencer appeared onstage with VDare’s Peter Brimelow, anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald, Arktos editor Jason Jorjani, and American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor. More than two dozen reporters were in attendance, a stark shift from previous alt-right gatherings that attracted fewer. Behind the press conference, the rest of the NPI attendees gathered to watch, at times booing and jeering the reporters when they asked questions. The audience was nearly all young, white, and male, with some sporting Make America Great Again hats and many displaying the “fashy” cropped-sides haircut common to the movement….

[N.B.: That’s ‘fashy’ for ‘facist’. They’re proud of who they are.]

The alt-right, Spencer said, had before the election been like a “head without a body,” trapped in internal conversations and debates.

“The Trump movement was a kind of body without a head,” Spencer said, saying that Trump’s campaign had been “half-baked” on policy despite having the right instincts on foreign policy and immigration. “I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump.” Spencer, who can take credit for coining the name of the movement, believes the alt-right has a “psychic connection” with Trump in a way they do not with other Republicans. Indeed, the very name of the alt-right indicates its wish to disassociate itself from the wider right: An important part of its project is to challenge and dismantle the conservative movement.

Spencer and the others are careful not to identify Trump himself as alt-right, nor his campaign CEO and soon-to-be White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The alt-right leaders are aware of their political radioactivity and seek to not harm Trump by linking arms too firmly with him. “I don’t think Steve Bannon is alt-right as I would define the term,” Spencer said, saying Bannon has no direct connection to the movement but that “I think a few of us have shaken his hand” and that there is “common ground” between the beliefs of Bannon and those of the alt-right…

So much common ground, that the two Venn diagram circles are locked in close embrace.

Now that Trump has won, the alt-right must grapple with policy in real-world terms. NPI plans to start putting out policy papers as recommendations for the Trump administration going forward (regardless of whether these specific plans will ever have audience in the White House); the first, out now, is called “Beyond NATO.” One proposal by Spencer is to institute a 50-year freeze on net immigration. He also spoke approvingly of Ivanka Trump’s federally sponsored maternity leave proposals, and of the choice of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Spencer told me later that he’s also proposing a “less is more” idea in which there is less college attendance and college is reserved for a “cognitive elite,” and a “greatness agenda” involving wildlife conservation…

Translation: State support for white babymakers, old-school racists in charge of the judiciary, college education once again reserved for white Christian men, and license for the NRA to run wild in national parks.

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If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Fellate ‘Em

So here’s an update on how that Trump/media heads meeting went:

President-elect Donald Trump raged at anchors and executives from America’s five largest television networks during an off-the-record meeting Monday, according to a new report.

Two sources described the hour-long meeting at New York City’s Trump Tower in catastrophic terms to The New York Post.

“It was like a f—ing firing squad,” one source said of the meeting. “Trump started with [CNN President] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.’”

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down.”

The Post’s second source said the meeting included 30 to 40 people, and said Trump also took aim at ABC and NBC.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room full of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong,'” the source said. “He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about a female correspondent who got it wrong.

“Then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when [Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary [Clinton] lost [and] who hosted a debate — which was [ABC’s] Martha Raddatz, who was also in the room.”

While that was going on, it was business as usual for CNN:

cnnfail

Take a second to absorb that. THAT. REALLY. HAPPENED. IN. 2016.

Since Zucker was busy being force fed his balls, I’ve come up with some future topics to help CNN normalize white supramecists:

blkpeople

mexicans

catholics

muslims

slavery

realracists

We are through the fucking looking glass.