#‘our bigotry is LEFT WING LIBERATION and not at exactly like the right wing because (looks at smudged note) xhrkaifnfl!’

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

It has been more than a week since the full1 report from special counsel Robert Mueller became public, including details of numerous actions by President Trump that could constitute obstruction of justice, and the Democratic Party seems split on what to do with it. Many of the newly elected liberal firebrands in the House say Congress should start the impeachment process. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats from the old guard seem hesitant to take this step.

This is a hard issue for Democrats because it pits electoral considerations (impeachment is not particularly popular right now) against values-based ones (some Democrats argue that Trump’s conduct as described in Mueller’s report requires at least the consideration of impeachment). But I doubt that the party will move toward impeachment unless the old guard suddenly has a wholesale change of heart. On issue after issue, the Democratic old guard on Capitol Hill is winning its fights with the party’s left wing. If, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has one position and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland holds another, expect the Hoyer view to win out.

At least that’s largely what has gone down so far. Here’s a short list of the progressive wing’s defeats since Democrats took control of the House in January:

The Green New Deal. Of the 235 Democratic members in the House, 91 have signed on to Ocasio-Cortez’s signature resolution that calls for aggressive action to combat climate change but also includes other liberal priorities such as guaranteeing jobs for all Americans who want them. There is no indication, however, that House Democratic leaders are trying to write a version that would unify the party and be approved in a vote.

“Medicare for all.” Nearly half (107) of House Democrats support the single-payer health care bill written by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a bloc of the most liberal figures on Capitol Hill. But there is virtually no chance that Pelosi (who has not embraced the legislation) will put it up for a vote in the full House any time soon.

Primary challenges. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, confirmed last month that it would not work with any campaign consultant or firm that helped Democratic candidates mount primary challenges against the party’s incumbents. Remember that influential progressives like Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ocasio-Cortez got to Congress by first defeating Democratic incumbents. The liberal wing protested the policy, but Democratic leaders have said that it will remain in place.

A resolution condemning Ilhan Omar. Veteran House Democrats pushed for a resolution condemning Rep. Omar of Minnesota in the wake of comments she made that some in the party felt were anti-Semitic.2 Pelosi brought the resolution up for a vote, although the version that the House adopted was a broad condemnation of bigotry that addressed Islamophobia and other kinds of hate, in addition to anti-Semitism. News coverage still reflected the fact that Democrats initially came up with the resolution as a way to chastise Omar.

In all, the newly elected progressive members have made a lot of news but less legislative impact — a fact not lost on the members themselves.

“They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, one of the liberal new members, recently tweeted. “However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored. To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us.”

I don’t want to overstate my thesis — Democrats have been in control of the House for only about four months, and these dynamics could shift. Also, I’m not saying that the progressives aren’t having any impact. On the Omar resolution, the progressives got a partial win — they basically forced party leadership to adopt the broader anti-bigotry legislation, instead of focusing just on anti-Semitism.

And it’s not surprising that massive policy proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for all aren’t advancing. It’s a logical decision by Pelosi and party leaders not to push proposals that will likely be controversial when they have no chance of passing in the GOP-controlled Senate or signed into law by President Trump. Moreover, these ideas are having an impact on the Democratic Party — just not on the Hill. For example, several of the party’s presidential candidates have embraced the Green New Deal.

“The progressives are having the impact they should have given the context: a Senate and presidency in the hands of the Republicans, plus all the electoral considerations,” said Gisela Sin, a political scientist at the University of Illinois. Sin argued that the progressives’s strong opposition to allowing any dollars for Trump’s border wall was a factor in Pelosi taking a no-compromise stance on that issue. “We should contemplate the possibility that whatever the Democrats are achieving, it is because they have this left flank that gives the leadership more negotiating power with Republicans,” Sin said.

But so far, the party’s “Super Progressive” wing, as I think of it, has had substantially less influence on the congressional agenda than the House Freedom Caucus had in 2017 and 2018, when Republicans controlled the chamber. For example, the conservative bloc forced the House to adopt its proposal for repealing major parts of the Affordable Care Act after it blocked legislation that had largely been written by then-Speaker Paul Ryan. Members of the caucus also pushed their fellow House Republicans to pass a resolution attacking the Justice Department over its handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of e-mail as a secretary of state.

You are probably wondering why exactly the progressives are losing. There is not one simple explanation — it’s a fairly complicated story. We’ll try to answer that question in a follow-up article this week.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

One of my followers is a lefty, but unlike most left-wingers today, she's an actual liberal. Not the kind that hates conservatives because our ideology is different. But she seems to think that us right-wingers hate black people and the only difference is we're more honest about it than the left. I wanna give her a convincing argument against this notion but I'm not Ben Shapiro or the right-wing equivalent of Jordan Peterson, so what do I say to her, exactly?

Lol you don’t need to be either of them to know that’s simply not true. I think it’s senseless to suggest either side hates black people. I’d love to talk to your follower and find out what reasons she has to believe majority of the country hates blacks considering she believes both sides hates blacks just one is more honest about it than the other. I think she’s confusing the black civil rights leaders who would say the only difference between a liberal and conservative is liberals pose as black’s benefactor while conservatives are more honest about not being blacks’ benefactor. That’s very different to hating black people.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment either, as conservatives openly have no interest in being the benefactors for anyone. Conservatives don’t want us dependent on the government, they’re against creating a socialist welfare state and they’re against creating policies which enforce special treatment to entire groups. They believe in individualism, self-sufficiency and productivity. And this is why they’re considered racists today. They refuse to treat blacks differently and they don’t encourage blacks to be dependent on them, so that clearly must mean they hate black people.

Blacks had always overwhelmingly voted Republican as they once valued family, freedom, independence and personal responsibility. It also helped that Democrats were the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation and anti-civil rights. Only after the black vote started to count, Democrats rebranded themselves as the sympathizers, defenders and saviors of black Americans, telling blacks they will give them the free ride they are owed, they’ll give them reparations and entitlements and welfare in return for their vote. Unfortunately, they fell for it, and Democrat policies and Democrats elected in black-majority cities have turned out to be disastrous for blacks. 

Racism and “the legacy of slavery” is the go-to explanation for the struggles faced by black Americans, and if only the government righted the historical wrongs of whites and promise to coddle blacks and provide for them, and if only we have Democrat/black leaders (despite having a black Democratic president and largely black administration for eight years), well only then can black people succeed. This is the winning formula for the Democrats hooking the black vote, but what would happen if blacks regained their conservative values and stopped asking what the government can do for them and instead go back to asking what they can do for themselves.

Before blacks latched onto welfare and reparation programs and believed success was owed rather than earned, black high schools were doing better than many other majority-white schools, blacks had higher rates of workers than whites, blacks had a lower rate of teenage unemployment, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at greater rates, the large majority of black couples were married, most black babies were born to married parents, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing, both poverty and dependency were declining and black income was rising at equal rates to white income. There was also far less black crime and less black homicide.

Fast forward to the implementation of Democratic welfare and “we owe you” programs and rewarding single mothers, black workers and black teenage employment decreased in half, less than half of black students graduated from high school in 2005, 75 percent of blacks aren’t married, almost every black baby is born to a single mom and raised by a single parent, teenage pregnancy has accelerated, blacks today commit the overwhelming largest rates of murder and violent crime, in many cities blacks constitute majority of shooters even when they’re a minority and black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age combined. But let me guess, racism is worse today than it was pre-1960? Or the legacy of slavery is more prevalent today than two generations ago?

You may not think black married families is important, but when you consider almost no black married family live in poverty while the large majority of unmarried, single black mother households do live in poverty, it’s probably something we should be treating more seriously. Imagine what could be possible if we took the values blacks once believed in such as marriage, education, nuclear family, high expectations, holding everyone to the same standards, being self-empowered, respect for law, and combined them with the ceaseless rights, opportunities and freedom we enjoy today. It’s never been done and it probably never be will for as long as conservative values are racist and our rights, opportunity and freedom only exist for white guys…

This is the problem with feeding blacks the idea their lives are hopeless, threatened and oppressed. It makes them feel powerless which is great for Democrats as they become black’s only hope to provide for them like wounded pets but it’s proven to be a massive setback for blacks because once you give up your self-determination and independence, productivity and progress can never exist. Black Americans continue to sit at the bottom and in many ways have fallen backwards more today than 50-100 years ago. No group has ever successfully improved their circumstances by clinging to a counterproductive culture that is supposedly “authentic” in the name of group pride or identity. The only way up is to work for it, the excuses and blame have to stop. We have to reach out, forgive and move on. Walking on eggshells out of fear or guilt or throwing money at the problem solves nothing. 

Apart from the myths about oppression and victimization which push more blacks into welfare, crime, broken homes, poverty, drugs and self-destruction, I despise the well-intentioned, sympathetic liberal view on black people. Have you seen the video where young liberals all agree blacks shouldn’t have to hold an ID to vote because most blacks are either too broke or don’t know how to use the internet to find their local DMV? Or that it’s not black people’s fault for being unhealthy because all they can afford is fried chicken or they don’t know how to find healthier places to shop… I sure as hell believe this liberal shit is more offensive than expecting blacks to be held to the same standards, rules and accountability as everyone else. 

It’s also why they vote for affirmative action and racial quotas, rather than wanting blacks to be better educated or be employed based on skill and merit, they rather just lower the bar altogether and admit based on skin color where they will ultimately fail and drop out or come out of college less educated than before holding an expensive degree in Fuck Trump studies. Just look at the black student who was accepted into a top university just for writing lines of ‘black lives matter.’ Professors are told to not correct the spelling of black students as their broken english is their “own language” and now they want to do away with tests altogether as the results discriminate against blacks. 

We can add the bigotry of low expectations to the list of Democrats screwing over black Americans. Ask your follower if she can come up with a list of examples of Republicans or conservatives “hating blacks” that can out-do the left. She might want to leave out the inevitable incarceration rates though as they perfectly match the black homicide and violent crime rates, plus older blacks support the no-sense approach as they’re just as fed up with young blacks terrorizing their neighborhoods and shooting each other daily. She might also want to read up on Black Lives Matter, their violence, agenda and the facts surrounding their founding martyrs before claiming the right unfairly criticizes the movement. And she sure as heck can’t point to pro-lifers as the majority of aborted babies are black, probably not something racists would protest.

None of this not to say the right doesn’t have its racists or major faults, but if they’re as so honestly and openly racist as your follower believes, surely she could prove it? Thanks :) xx

[entireconfection]

Can We Turn It Around?

Hard to believe it’s been four years, isn’t it?

           As I sit down to write this, 5 weeks out from the 2020 election, it’s hard to know where to start. For almost four years now, we’ve been living in an altered (and very shitty) state of reality. Donald Trump’s America. A never-ending dumpster fire. And, to be frank, one of the worst chapters in our country’s history. On top of that, we’ve just crossed the half-year mark of a global pandemic, an ongoing crisis by turns devastating and surreal, one that seems sadly befitting of our dystopian, is-this-really-happening times.

           After 4 agonizing years of hate and stupidity ruling the roost, of nonstop assaults on science and decency and civility, of the obliteration of democratic norms, destruction of the checks and balances that we naively assumed would always be there for us, we’ve almost arrived at another election. And with it, the possibility that we can start to turn this around. That we can rise up and say “NO. We DON’T want a dictatorship. We WON’T go along with this. We will FIGHT for love and decency and our democracy.”

           Personally, I am proceeding under the assumption that Trump will be reelected. I have to do so for my own wellbeing. I don’t want to get my hopes up. The bitter, blindsiding defeat of 2016 is still fresh in my mind. There are many ways that this election could turn into a shitshow. Not the least of which is we have a ruthless dictator as President who is doing everything he can to sabotage the vote. And he has a powerful ally in the Republican party, which has expertly suppressed the vote for decades and is doing so now with as much gusto as ever, determined to hold onto power at all costs. Throw in all of the logistical challenges and obstacles caused by COVID, along with all of the flaws of our antiquated, broken-by-design voting system (courtesy of the democracy-hating GOP), and no one really knows what the hell is going to happen on November 3.

           So I have to assume that Trump will win. Because, awful as that will be, life will go on if he wins. And I need to be able to carry on as well.

           Still, as accustomed as I’ve become to the insanity of the Trump era, it’s sometimes hard to grasp that it’s come to this. That we are perilously close to becoming an authoritarian country with a permanent conservative majority. That it pretty much all hangs on this election.

           It’s not just our country either. It’s our planet that’s on the line. Perhaps you’ve heard of climate change? You know, that little issue that Americans don’t give a shit about, but is an existential threat to human civilization? Well, it’s only getting worse. The Northern Hemisphere just had its hottest summer ever, 2 degrees above normal. You can expect a new record every year for your lifetime.

           Trump, as expected, has been a disaster for the climate – withdrawing from the Paris Accord, gutting environmental regulations left and right, and basically doing as much damage to the earth as possible. Given that experts say we have 10 years to make major cuts in emissions if we have any hope of avoiding irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption, it’s safe to say that a second Trump term would pretty much be game over for the climate, and for life as we know it. It’s the predictable outcome when you elect an idiot climate denier president of the most powerful country in the world.

           Then there’s the fate of democracy itself, which is in a perilous position around the world. Fascism masquerading as “right-wing parties” has been on the march across Europe for years. Trump has gleefully helped that effort, cozying up to ruthless dictators like Kim-Jong Il and giving his buddy Putin the green light to continue to ratfuck elections, sow chaos, and wage cyber warfare on any country he chooses.

Meanwhile, Trump has given the middle finger to our allies constantly since taking office. Again, completely to be expected from a jingoistic simpleton whose entire understanding of foreign policy boils down to “America First.” Remember his shit-eating smirk while refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand in the Oval Office? Trump exemplifies the right’s foaming-mouth hatred of Europe, foreigners, and diplomacy. Just one of their many flavors of bigotry, he and his base believe that the rest of the world basically consists of international elitists determined to destroy America. Not exactly a philosophy conducive to preventing trifling matters like, say, global pandemics or world wars.

The more I write, the more I remember when an absolute sleazebag our president is, and the more astonished I am that this man is our president. This is the guy who 60 million people voted for in 2016. This is the guy who is nothing less than a savior to millions and millions of white Americans. Donald fucking Trump? You would be hard-pressed to find a more loathsome person in all of America. And despite knowing full well how polarized and tribalized we have become, it’s still hard to fathom that so many Americans can look at this vile, morally bankrupt con man and see a great leader, a champion of their values, the greatest president of all time. It just doesn’t compute.

           And yes, many of his voters are well aware of his vices, and yes, white working-class voters have legitimate problems, and on and on. For four years, we’ve discussed and dissected these reasons for Trump’s victory. They are admitted and entered into the record. Now can we please get rid of this menace because he destroys our democracy, wiping out the great experiment that has endured for 244 years?

           Because that’s what’s really on the line on November 3. We’re all deciding if we want to go back to being a democracy – a flawed, messy, imperfect democracy to be sure, but still a democracy at heart – or a dictatorship.  That’s not hyperbole. That’s just the situation.

Trump, aided and abetted by the entire Republican apparatus and 40% of the population, has turned us into a dictatorship. He has put his cronies in positions of power. He has fired anyone who refuses to become his unquestioning flunky, smearing public servants who have spent decades working to help people – a concept completely alien to Trump. He has demonized the media (except for the propaganda outlets who run only pro-Trump news), relentlessly undermining one of the pillars of a liberal democracy, turning people against the very journalists who are trying to expose how Trump is screwing them over. He has conspired with our enemies to compromise our own elections. He came to power by colluding with Russia to his political opponent. He tear-gassed peaceful protestors in front of the White House and painted Black Lives Matter as radical terrorists and applauded right-wing vigilantes who pointed guns at BLM protestors. Hell, he gave them a plum speaking slot at the RNC. Because that’s who calls the shots in Donald Trump’s America – racists and white supremacists.

So, yeah…it’s a rubbish time. And as anyone who remembers the train wreck of Election Night 2016 can understand, I don’t want to get my hopes up. We’ve all been burned one too many times.

Still, it is nice – if only for a moment – to think about a President Biden.

A president who acts like a fucking adult, not a tantrum-throwing toddler or a schoolyard bully.

A president who condemns violence, not one who exploits and encourages it for political gain.

A president who speaks carefully and thoughtfully, knowing his words have real-life consequences. Not one who constantly spews venom and lies, not caring if people die as a result because they’re not his base so screw them.

A president who refuses to legitimize dangerous conspiracy theories. Not one who gleefully seizes on every twisted fairy-tale to emerge from alt-right trolls lurking on 4chan.

A president who accepts the simple fact that our world is interconnected and that diplomacy, respect, and civil discourse are our best tools for making life better for everyone. Not one who embraces the right’s phony-ass “patriotism” and thinks Americans – more specifically, his supporters – are the only people on Earth who matter.

A president who does his fucking job, not one who sits on his ass tweeting and watching Fox News to get his daily ass-kissing. When he’s not golfing or holding white supremacist rallies, that is.

Trump’s awfulness is simply unparalleled, probably in human history. It is an expansive mass so vast and blatant and unashamed that it’s almost a work of art, in a sick way. You could go on forever about the cringe, the iconic moments of incompetence, the garish displays of smirking idiocy and unabashed bigotry that have come to define our time. Sharpie-doctored hurricane maps, Kanye in the Oval Office, calling African countries “shitholes,” telling black and Latina Congresswomen to “go back where they came from,” toilet paper on the shoe, shoving a world leader on stage, soundproof phone booths at the EPA, white supremacists as “very fine people,” caravans, paper towels, upside-down Bibles, covfefe…it has just been a constant, dizzying tornado of hate and evil and stupid. It’s why I stopped watching the news. It’s too much. We weren’t wired to ingest this level of crazy and awful every day. Being a human being is hard enough as it is.

It’s hard to stomach the thought of one more day of this shit, let alone 4 years. Should Trump get reelected, it’s hard to see how anything good will survive. And should his victory come once again come via dirty tricks, be it foreign interference or voter suppression or both, it would appear to confirm that our system has been so hopelessly corrupted by the right that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win. It would suggest that it is now impossible to have a fair presidential election and we’re doomed to have permanent tyrannical rule by a racist, reactionary, science-hating, authoritarian minority. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

I hope we can turn it around. I hope there are enough decent people out there who are fed up with this asshole. I hope the myriad GOTV efforts we’ve seen in recent months will motivate people who sat out last time, and maybe some people who have never voted. I hope the collective determination of people who are against Trump is enough to overcome the GOP’s perennial cheating and voter-suppression campaigns. I hope, no matter the outcome, that the whole thing doesn’t devolve into an epic shitshow that makes Florida 2000 look like a calm and orderly affair.

So I have hope. Is it well-founded? Is it anything more than wishful thinking? Hard to say. But when all appears lost, that’s what we have. Hope.  

In closing, if you are dismayed by what America has become these past 4 years, if you want to save the democracy that so many people fought and died for throughout our history, please vote for Biden. Your kids, your grandkids, and the entire world will thank you.

#election #politics #biden #democracy

[theliterateape]

Insight from the Desert on the Coming Presidential Election

By Don Hall

Working in a casino just off the Strip means I run into a lot of odd types. It also means I’m pretty much prohibited from responding with my own views on politics when guests decide its time they discuss theirs.

He’s a middle-aged white guy playing keno for a few hours at fifty cents a bet. I ask how he’s doing and if he needs anything. He says he needs the air conditioning turned up because it’s 107˚ outside and he can’t take it today. He starts talking about the science behind the weather and, for awhile, we are in complete agreement. He touches on climate science accurately (in my view), he talks about the tectonic plates in California with a perspective that indicates he knows a few things about geological science, he waxes on about our slow descent into a Garbage Planet.

Then.

“The fucking liberals want this Green Deal and they just don’t care about raising my taxes or what it would take to implement such a mess. Thank god Hillary Clinton lost that election! At least President Trump is a businessman and understands that things have to be paid for!”

I feel myself disembody and float somewhere above the two of us. 

Given the constraints of the job, instead of launching into a litany of “What the fuck are you thinking?” and “Let me school you on the facts!” I am required to listen. In listening, I have to hear this dude’s worldview. A part of my job is to make him comfortable enough to keep playing because, after all, a casino exists solely to take his money from him. So I ask questions. And listen.

Mike is a regular. I see him almost every day. He’s a contractor who comes in for lunch and plays the bar poker machines (usually the one on the far end corner). He’s a nice guy and always has a good story or two.

“Don! C’mere! I wanna show you this!”

He holds up his phone and shows me a picture of a chrome-plated pistol that looks so ridiculously oversized and monstrous at first I think it’s a drawing. It’s not.

“This one is so big, I may only get to fire it at the range!”

“When would you fire it otherwise?”

“You never know. Next time I go to Seattle, I’m bringing it.”

“Why Seattle?”

“You read what the liberals have done to that place? Homeless hippies everywhere, over running the local businesses. It’s like an infestation of fucking social justice assholes who don’t understand the basics of hygiene. Crime has gone through the roof and the cops can’t touch ‘em because they’ll put ‘em on YouTube.”

My brain goes into a tailspin of gun control, the reasons for rampant homelessness in the country, and videos of police brutality. But I say nothing. And listen.

Most of them don’t lead with their right-wingness. I’ve never seen anyone in the casino with a MAGA hat or Trump T-shirt on. They appear to be just like anyone else. Often, as I engage them, the views are benign and interesting but somehow they get around to some nugget of Trumpsterism. I’m always a little surprised when a Latino suddenly pivots and reveals he is a hardcore republican but I’m getting used to it. 

“You aren’t one of those Obama people, are you?”

“Obama people?”

“You said you used to work for NPR. Are you one of those Obama-was-a-great-president kind of guys?”

“I did vote for him — twice — so I guess I am.”

“Fucking Obama. No offense but what the hell were you thinking?”

Oh shit. An invitation. I reign myself in.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

The common thread is not bigotry, not white supremacy, not xenophobia. The thing that binds these casino-dwellers ideologically is simply a base disgust with liberals. They hate us. They hate our condescension, our moralizing, our expectations that they should have to pay for our comfort or ideas. If I ask the right questions, I find that while we don’t see eye to eye on a host of things, most of them aren’t the monsters the Rage Profiteers paint them out to be.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

“He tried to take our guns! And that time when he went around apologizing for being American was just too much.”

“Hmmm.”

“What?”

“That’s just not how I saw his presidency. I saw a decent man who did his best to govern our country at a time when the economy was in tatters, when we were at war with an idea rather than a country, who was just trying to make sure everyone had healthcare and food. I can’t imagine those things are easy.”

“He wasn’t even American! He was born in Kenya!”

“Does that matter?”

“So you admit he wasn’t American?”

“No. Just curious as to why that matters one way or another.”

I’d love to say I changed his mind but I was no more successful at changing his mind than I have been at changing Dave Colan’s mind as he states with no irony that if Trump wins again in 2020 it means that Americans are just in favor of bigotry. I’d love to say that I’m finding people of all stripes who are looking for some common ground rather than seeking out at every occasion some reason to be enraged or argue the minutia in order to win the conversation. But I’m not.

I’m finding that despite opposing worldview, I’m more inclined to be more polite in person than I am online. My willingness to listen and respond with a bit of care is heightened in real life than on the internet. Online, people are all becoming dogmatists and assholes and I’m seeing everyone start to see the world as Trump seems to: a sea of theoretical people.

I’m finding that my intolerance for those strident moralists on both sides are almost exactly the same: each one believes without almost any evidence that the Other is out to get him, that the only way through this forest of misunderstanding and vitriol is to burn it down, that this is truly a fight of Good vs. Evil and they are on the right side of things and I find that attitude to be that of the brainwashed and overtly religious.

It’s a sorry circumstance to see those activists on the Left in the same category as the alt-Right because I agree with most of what the virtue-signalers are fighting for. I just can’t get behind the fact that they’re fighting for the right things the wrong way. Without a sense of rationality, compassion, humility, and honor. They’re fighting like Trump and his ilk and, at the end of the story, what you accomplish is only colored by how you got it done.

Working in a casino has its ups and downs. Meeting people of differing points of view has not been a negative aspect.

#Casino Life #Red vs Blue

[bountyofbeads]

Excellent article by Adam Serwer @AdamSerwer and he is correct in that what we do now in relationship to Trump's racism will define who we are in the future 🔮. This is a defining moment in the history of the United States. PLEASE READ 📖 AND SHARE.

"Omar must be defended, but not because of her views on Israel, gay rights, or progressive taxation. You needn’t agree with her on any of those things; in fact, you needn’t like her at all. But she must be defended, because the nature of the president’s attack on her is a threat to all Americans—black or white, Jew or Gentile—whose citizenship, whose belonging, might similarly be questioned. This is not about Omar anymore, or the other women of color who have been told by this president to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever."

What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever

If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.

Adam Serwer | Published July 18, 2019 12:17 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted July 18, 2019 7:42 PM ET |

The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.

Some other attendees, such as National Review’s Rich Lowry, took pains to distance themselves from the president’s brand of nationalism. “We have to push back against Donald Trump when he does things to increase that breach between the right and African Americans,” Lowry said. But in the fall of 2017, when Trump attempted to silence black athletes protesting police brutality, Lowry praised his “gut-level political savvy,” writing, “This kind of thing is why he’s president.”

Read: The nationalist’s delusion

The conference stood solidly within the conservative intellectual tradition, as a retroactive attempt by the right-wing intelligentsia to provide cover for what the great mass of Republican voters actually want. Barry Goldwater did not break the Solid South in 1964 because the once Democratic voters of the Jim Crow states had suddenly become principled small-government libertarians; voters who backed Donald Trump in 2016 did not do so because they believed a nonracial civic nationalism had been eroded by liberal cosmopolitanism.

The consensus that American civic nationalism recognizes all citizens regardless of race, creed, color, or religion was already fragile before Trump took office. That principle has been lauded, with varying degrees of sincerity, by presidents from both parties, and in particular by the first black president, who reveled in reminding audiences that “in no other country in the world is my story even possible.” The nationalism that conservatives say they wish to build in fact already existed, but it was championed by a president whose persona was so deformed by right-wing caricature that they could not perceive it. Instead, they embraced the nationalism that emerged as a backlash to his very existence and all it represented.

Trump’s nationalist innovation is not taking pride in his country, supporting a principled non-interventionism, or even advocating strict enforcement of immigration laws. The only thing new Trump brings to the American nationalism of recent decades is a restoration of its old ethnic-chauvinist tradition. Conservative intellectuals cannot rescue nationalism from Trump, any more than they could rescue Goldwater from Jim Crow, because Trump’s explicit appeals to racial and religious traditionalism, and his authoritarian approach to enforcing those hierarchies, are the things that have bound conservative voters so closely to him. The failure of the conservative intelligentsia to recognize this is why it was caught so off-guard by Trump’s rise to begin with.

At a rally last night in North Carolina, Trump was reminding the country of this truth. Last week, the president told four Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—to “go back” to their countries, even though all of them are American citizens. This is literally textbook racism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers “Go back to where you came from” as its example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin.

Trump’s demand is less a factual assertion than a moral one, an affirmation of the president’s belief that American citizenship is conditional for people of color, who should be grateful we are even allowed to be here. Some elected Republicans offered gentle rebukes; others defended the president’s remarks. But at his rally in North Carolina, Trump showed them all that the base is with him. The crowd erupted into chants of “Send her back” when the president mentioned Omar, the Minnesota representative who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia.

Republicans, in the week since Trump’s initial tweet attacking the four representatives, have tried to argue that the president was criticizing their left-wing views and “hatred for America,” or that the attacks on Omar were justified because of her past remarks about Israel. This is belied by the nature of the attack itself—not only did Trump say “countries” in his tweet telling the representatives to “go back,” but much of the bill of particulars against Omar that his supporters use to justify calling for her banishment also applies to the president, long a hyperbolic critic of the American political establishment.

Adam Serwer: Trump tells America what kind of nationalist he is

Some of Omar’s remarks in the past (for which she has apologized) have echoed anti-Semitic language about Jewish conspiracies and dual loyalty, but the president has described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister” to American Jewish audiences, and is a proponent of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories around immigration that terrorists have used to justify killing American Jews. No apology from the president on these matters is forthcoming, and the right will not demand one. The ancient anti-Semitic charge of dual loyalty does not somehow become more justifiable when applied to Muslims. As James Kirchick wrote for The Atlantic, “Trump’s invocation of Israel to attack four ethnic-minority women is breathtakingly cynical, effectively working to pit Jews and people of color against each other.”

Trump has falsely accused Omar of supporting al-Qaeda, of betraying her country. But when a foreign power attacked American elections, it was the president who first sought to profit from that attack, and then to obstruct the investigation into it, and finally to offer a vocal defense of the perpetrators.

The argument that Omar’s criticisms of her adopted country for failing to live up to its stated ideals justify revoking her citizenship substantiates the very criticism she lodged. Trump has said, “If you hate our country, or if you are not happy here, you can leave!” but his entire 2016 campaign was premised on the idea that many Americans not only are deeply unhappy, but also have every right to demand that things be better. That Trump’s supporters believe Omar’s sins justify her banishment, and Trump’s similar transgressions justify his presence in the White House, helps illustrate exactly what is going on here. Under Trumpism, no defense of the volk is a betrayal, even if it undermines the republic, and no attack on the volk’s hegemony can be legitimate, even if it is a defense of democracy.

Faced with the president’s baldly expressed bigotry toward four women of color in Congress, Republicans turned to reporters to argue that his attacks are part of a clever political strategy, elevating four left-wing women of color into the faces of his opposition. I suspect these Republicans, and some political reporters, believe that this somehow exonerates Trump from the charge of bigotry, as though prejudice ceases to be prejudice if it becomes instrumental. In fact, the admission that fomenting racism and division is central to Trump’s strategy is a stunning rebuke to those political reporters and pundits who, for four years, have insisted that the rise of Trump is about anything else. Trump and his most ardent liberal critics are in full agreement about the nature of his appeal, even as they differ on its morality. Only the Trumpists, and those who wish to earn their respect, fail to see it.

Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

It also speaks to the futility of trying to somehow rescue a Trumpian nationalism from Trump. Racism is at the core of Trumpism. The movement cannot be rescued from its bigotry, and those at the National Conservatism Conference who believe it can are in denial. Conservatives can make their case for limited government, or for religious traditionalism, but as long as it is tied to Trump or Trumpism, it will be tainted. Trump is not a champion of the civic nationalism Hazony and others claim they want to see. He is a mortal threat to it.

I often open my articles on Trumpism with explorations of American history. I’ve spent much of the past four years trying to illuminate the historical and ideological antecedents to Donald Trump, to show how America got to this point.

So I want to be very clear about what the country saw last night, as an American president incited a chant of “Send her back!” aimed at a Somali-born member of Congress: America has not been here before.

White nationalism was a formal or informal governing doctrine of the United States until 1965, or for most of its existence as a country. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Johnson to Woodrow Wilson, have occupied the White House. Trump has predecessors, such as Calvin Coolidge, who imposed racist immigration restrictions designed to preserve a white demographic majority. Prior presidents, such as Richard Nixon, have exploited racial division for political gain. But we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

Nevertheless, most of Trump’s predecessors had something he does not yet have: the support of a majority of the electorate. Ilhan Omar’s prominence as a Republican target comes not, as conservatives might argue, simply because her policy views are left-wing. Neither is it because, as some liberals have supposed, she is an unmatched political talent. She has emerged as an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Trumpist right because as a black woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and a progressive member of Congress, she represents in vivid terms a threat to the nation Trumpists fear they are losing.

To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose. Many of the president’s most outrageous comments have been delivered extemporaneously, when he departs from his prepared remarks. Last night, though, his attacks on Omar were carefully scripted, written out by his staff and then read off a teleprompter. To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.

Still, a plurality of Americans in 2016 and 2018 voted against defining American citizenship in racial terms, something that has perhaps never happened before in the history of the United States. There was no anti-racist majority at the dawn of Reconstruction, during the heyday of immigration restriction, or in the twilight of the civil-rights movement. The voters of this coalition may yet defeat Trumpism, if they can find leaders who are willing and able to confront it.

That is not a given. In the face of a corrupt authoritarian president who believes that he and his allies are above the law, the American people are represented by two parties equally incapable of discharging their constitutional responsibilities. The Republican Party is incapable of fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities because it has become a cult of personality whose members cannot deviate from their sycophantic devotion to the president, lest they be ejected from office by Trump’s fanatically loyal base. The Democratic Party cannot fulfill its constitutional responsibilities because its leadership lives in abject terror of being ejected from office by alienating the voters to whom Trump’s nationalism appeals. In effect, the majority of the American electorate, which voted against Trump in 2016 and then gave the Democrats a House majority in 2018, has no representation.

The electoral coalition that gave Democrats the House represents perhaps the strongest resistance to the rising tide of right-wing ethnonational- ism in the West, yet observe what the party has done with that mandate. The great victory of the House Democrats has been to halt the Republican legislative effort to deprive millions of health-care coverage, a feat they accomplished simply by being elected. But over the past seven months, Democrats have proved unable to complete a single significant investigation, hold many memorable hearings, or pass a single piece of meaningful legislation that curtails Trump’s abuses of authority. Instead, they held their breath waiting for Robert Mueller to save them, and when he did not, they, like their Republican predecessors, took to issuing sternly worded statements, tepid pleas for civility, and concerned tweets as their primary methods of imposing accountability.

As the president’s declarations of immunity from oversight have grown more broad and lawless, the Democrats have slow-walked investigations, retreated from court battles, and unilaterally surrendered the sword of impeachment. They have only just begun to call witnesses from the Mueller inquiry, they have only just begun to challenge the president’s lawlessness in court, they have only just begun to hold Trump officials in contempt for their defiance of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. This foot-dragging will leave them with little time to actually look into presidential abuses before campaign season begins, effectively forfeiting a massive political advantage, to say nothing of abdicating their constitutional duties. The leadership of the Democratic Party has shown more appetite for confronting and rebuking legislators representing the vulnerable communities Trump has targeted most often than it has for making the president mildly uncomfortable.

Although two prior presidents, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, faced articles of impeachment over obstruction of justice, Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered the gibberish analysis that the president was “self-impeaching,” so no actual impeachment was necessary. When confronted with yet another woman accusing the president of sexual assault, Pelosi said, “I haven’t paid much attention to it.” When the politically connected financier Jeffrey Epstein was indicted again on charges of sex-trafficking minors, and Pelosi was asked what she would do about now-ousted Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who negotiated a previous sweetheart deal with Epstein, she said, “It’s up to the president. It’s his Cabinet,” a position indistinguishable from that of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is a member of the president’s party.

“If you start endangering children, I become a lioness,” Pelosi declared, before caving on a funding bill for border security that will do nothing to relieve the systematic abuse of migrants at the border, and whose restrictions the Department of Homeland Security is already ignoring. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, took the occasion of federal prosecutors in New York mysteriously closing their investigation into the president’s hush-money payments to former girlfriends to ask the FBI to look into a popular app that ages pictures of people’s faces. The president’s racist attacks on Omar and her colleagues were precipitated by Democrats leaking a poll of “white, non-college voters” supposedly showing that they might cost the party the House and the presidency. Having publicly told the school bully where and how to take their lunch money, the Democrats were surprised when he showed up.

One could protest that the Democrats’ timidity is a cold, calculated strategy. Republicans hold the Senate, the argument goes, so an impeachment inquiry would only lead to the president’s acquittal. The whiter, more conservative voters who form much of Trump’s base are geographically distributed in a way that maximizes their political power. Democrats may need to win over some of these voters, who would be alienated by impeachment, to take the White House. If the Democrats cannot hold the House, they cannot hold back Trump.

But Democrats now hold the House, and they are not holding Trump back. The president has abetted a foreign attack on American democracy, he has obstructed justice, he has vowed to turn federal law enforcement on his political enemies. There are squalid camps at the border where families are being separated, and children are being sexually assaulted, their existence justified as a necessary response to a foreign “invasion.” Trump has sought to rig American democracy in favor of white voters and refused to recognize the oversight authority of Congress, and now assails the cornerstone principle of multiracial democracy that none of us is more American than any other. What, exactly, would be enough to rouse Democrats to action?

In the face of such a challenge to the American idea, tactics become intertwined with morality. If the Democrats convince themselves that anything they do to attack the president risks alienating white voters who believe the country belongs only to them, then they will be partially responsible for the path the country is taking, and the standard it is upholding. The Democrats’ weakness has not appeased the president. Instead, it has only invited bolder challenges to democracy and the rule of law. This will not change. If congressional Democrats cannot or will not defend the principle that America belongs to all of its citizens, regardless of race, creed, color, or religion, their oaths to defend the Constitution are meaningless.

Omar must be defended, but not because of her views on Israel, gay rights, or progressive taxation. You needn’t agree with her on any of those things; in fact, you needn’t like her at all. But she must be defended, because the nature of the president’s attack on her is a threat to all Americans—black or white, Jew or Gentile—whose citizenship, whose belonging, might similarly be questioned. This is not about Omar anymore, or the other women of color who have been told by this president to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever.

#u.s. news #politics #donald trump #trump administration #politics and government #president donald trump #white house #trump #republican politics #us: news #republican party #must reads #immigration #trump scandals #racism #maga #democrats #democratic party #democracy #world news #2020 candidates #civil-rights #2020 election #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #activism #impeachthemf #2020 presidential election #impeachtrump #u.s. presidential elections #trumpism

[96thdayofrage]

The following are thoughts on some of the chief claims put forward by a recent “Media Matters” article, nearly all of which seem to neatly recapitulate the criticisms that could be found in the alleged N’COBRA memo, “ADOS Exposed.”

1.) American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) is an organization that is campaigning for reparations.

False. Or, at the very least, imprecise and breathtakingly reductive. ADOS is not an “organization.” It is a bourgeoning political movement made up of a specific group of American citizens who’ve begun self-identifying around what is easily the most consequential factor of their personhood; namely, that their lineage is rooted in the American institution of chattel slavery, a practice which not only sought to deny those enslaved individuals any personhood in the first place, but which—because of the trans-generational nature of its economic injustices—has effectively ensured that same negation of humanity be extended and conferred upon their descendants. They’re not just “campaigning for reparations,” either. That is, without a doubt, the most superficial, simplistic and journalistically-lazy read of the political project. It is exactly the sort of thing that someone who was told to write about ADOS—but who has no interest in actually researching the movement—would write. What ADOS is doing is what oppressed groups have always done in movement politics, which is emphasize the singularity of their struggle and advocate as a collective for redress specific to those harms and damages. If, at this juncture, ADOS is “campaigning” for anything, it is to have the group’s particular experience of enduring centuries of persecution through private racism and anti-black federal policy recognized as that which is theirs and theirs alone. They are “campaigning” for why—in the context of justice for black America—only they deserve reparations specific to that history and lived experience.

2.) There is evidence that ADOS is advancing a right-wing agenda, and while it calls itself progressive, it pushes pro-Trump, anti-immigrant views.

There is evidence that ADOS is advancing a black agenda; that is, an agenda specifically drawn up with the aim of avoiding precisely those pitfalls involved in doing partisan-oriented politics that lump together disparate and—in the case of ADOS—often competing interests which have traditionally tended to appropriate the black struggle for its moral value and leave off the need to provide that group with tangible results in exchange for their ballot punch. The ADOS agenda is a response to the failures of that model of (non)co-operative advocacy and a clarion call to instead foreground a particular set of issues that are most relevant to the community and its uplift. And insofar as one of the most salient aspects of ADOS life is the steadily depressed rates of participation in the labor market since the advent of liberal immigration policy, it stands to reason that the group would support legislation that helps reverse that trend. The fact that ADOS gets attributed to it the same base prejudices and needless bigotry that actually does characterize a particular anti-immigrant attitude on the Right—when in fact the movement has consistently presented a far more nuanced and rational argument supported by evidence that shows a correlation between the prospects for working-class blacks and immigration (and has staked out its position exclusively on those grounds)—reveals nothing so much as the startling inability in our immigration discourse to accommodate dissent, and an observably illiberal state of affairs in the Left wherein adopting anything less than an explicitly pro-immigration stance is reflexively perceived as being xenophobic. The most that could be said about ADOS “pushing” certain views on immigration is that it pushes back on a status quo that—while consistently ensuring that ADOS has been excluded from enjoying the kinds of opportunities that immigrants typically come here to access—now demands they support policies that make it even easier for those groups to come here and further compromise the potential for material gain in the black community. There is, moreover, another, even more pernicious aspect of contemporary immigration policy to which ADOS is right to object; namely, the false impression of progress within black America that is created when foreign-born blacks—who routinely have come from a class position that Sandy Darity recently described as “exceed[ing] not only the average black American, but [that of] the average white American”—arrive in the United States. Leaving aside the issue of those immigrants’ typically contemptuous attitudes toward native blacks in America, the way in which their presence distorts and masks the alarmingly persistent and deliberate underdevelopment of the native black community is an obviously grave matter for a group whose ability to make an argument for their justice claim by pointing to the data on black life in America is, in effect, undercut by a growing number of upper-class, prosperous black immigrants in their midst. That reparations for American chattel slavery is, for this non-native group, largely a politically irrelevant matter, lends further credence to ADOS’s principle critique of contemporary immigration dogma: that it is an issue which, presently, is too fraught with contradictions for the group, and which must be resolved in a way that’s beneficial to them before they can advocate on behalf of other populations to come here.

3.) ADOS attacks other supporters of reparations, apparently for the benefit of Republican politicians.

ADOS is understandably vexed and offended by “other supporters of reparations” who demand that the group uncritically support politicians who themselves do not support reparations.1 Or whom (insofar as certain politicians do endorse reparations) nonetheless evince a thoroughly misguided understanding of what the word needs to mean in order to effect meaningful justice for American Descendants of Slavery. Reparations for ADOS is not a soundbite; and being a committed pro-reparations advocate means more than writing two rap lyrics about it over the course of seven years.2 For ADOS, it is the central, organizing principle in their eleventh-hour effort to be made whole and participate in a recognizably normal manner in the political, economic, and civic processes of the country that was built off the theft of their labor. It is their Hail Mary pass. And the fact that it has come down to a Hail Mary pass for black America in the year 2019 is such a fucking monumental failure of justice that it’s no wonder they respond with outrage when they’re chided with some faux-sage political counsel that recommends restraint, prudence, and a willingness to postpone their demand to receive redress. ADOS—like nothing before it—provides the group with such a truly empowering and necessary thing: not only a political, but existential anchoring through which they can pursue justice with the same singleness of aim and purpose with which injustice has, for centuries now, been done to them. So pardon the group for not running hangdog back to the Democratic Party where—if history is any indication—their being forsaken for a slew of other causes all while being told to surrender their vote without complaint for their own good is a fait accompli. That’s the alternative to ADOS not doing self-interested politics in 2019. And so is it really any wonder that the specter of four more years of Trump fails to sufficiently persuade them to fold on what they (rightly) understand is the group’s only recourse to gain some footing in the contemporary U.S.? Maybe that conviction and determination is better understood less as a matter of them carrying water for the conservatives, and more as the dawning consciousness of the Democrats being essentially a placebo party for ADOS, a trap-nest that for the past half a century has observably chosen to commit to paying—not reparations to ADOS—but only the most patronizing lip service to their suffering.

4.) ADOS has been promoted on Twitter by right-wing bigot Ann Coulter.

With respect to ADOS, Ann Coulter has literally only ever commented on what she feels would be a superior arrangement of the movement’s initials. To imply that she has been actively tweeting support for ADOS is just one of any number of examples of sloppy, misleading and just downright abysmal political journalism in the article.

5.) There is evidence that white supremacists have jumped on board with ADOS and that 4chan posters may be using the movement to sow division.

The ‘evidence’ posted was from a user with a Canadian flag icon, and whoever the person is doesn’t even know what the initials of the movement stand for. Go home, Media Matters. There is evidence you’re drunk.

1. The exchange that is cited exclusively in the “Media Matters” article took place between Yvette Carnell and Talib Kweli on the 3rd of March 2019, a time when Bernie Sanders had been unequivocally opposed to the idea of reparations for slavery.↩

2. For whatever reason, Talib Kweli has become the focal point for commentary on ADOS’s apparent hostility toward “other supporters of reparations.” In his Medium piece “Why #ADOS is Trash. Receipts Attached,” the rapper submits as irrefutable evidence of his advocacy for the cause of reparations two (2) lyrics that he wrote between the years 1997 and 2004, one of which he bafflingly misquotes: “They call it reparations (he means I call it reparations), they call it extortion.” Leaving aside the question of how a person whose whole life is words ends up misquoting himself on an issue he is apparently deadly serious about (it’s almost as if he has someone else writing his Medium articles!), if one is left scratching their head at how this qualifies as substantive reparative justice advocacy, I promise you that you are not alone. Kweli does, for the record, also cite having once “worked closely” with a grassroots organization, though whatever ‘working closely’ actually entailed is left entirely unspecified. ↩

[theconservativebrief]

Bari Weiss and Eve Peyser thought they would hate each other and are now friends. I’m glad they’re happy, but I’m not sure what the rest of us are supposed to learn from their experience.

Weiss is a staff editor/writer at the New York Times opinion section, where she’s developed a reputation for making arguments that maximally annoy the online left (example headlines: “We’re All Fascists Now”; “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation”; “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.”). Charitably, she’s a provocateur; less charitably, she’s a troll with a huge platform.

Peyser, on the other hand, is a reliably left-of-center writer at Vice. Weiss describes her as “like the caricature of the person I know hates me on the internet: Gawker Media alum, probable Democratic Socialists of America member, many tattoos.”

So, naturally, they met up. Weiss insisted on going swimming so that Peyser wouldn’t wear a wire, a very normal precaution. And — surprise, surprise — they got along. Swimmingly, one might even add!

The piece, published in the New York Times and structured as a conversation, is ultimately about the deleterious consequences of Twitter on interpersonal relationships — how it can create enmity and contempt where none would exist in person. So the authors would probably view the hostile response the article has received in some corners of Twitter as evidence for their thesis.

The piece’s critics make some good substantive points: Journalists are supposed to be able to build productive relationships with a wide range of people; Peyser and Weiss are actually quite similar to each other and even agree on most of the topics they discussed; the piece treats disagreements on issues that matter as peripheral to whether you’re a good person or not.

But I want to make a much simpler point: You do not have to do this. You do not have some kind of civic duty to reach out to and actively befriend people you disagree with, and doing so is a very high-cost and ineffective way to address political polarization.

The undercurrent driving the Weiss/Peyser team-up is that what they’re doing is, in some way, a model for how we all should be behaving. Their piece ends with an ask from the Times: “Maybe you have a political nemesis whom you subtweet.… If so, we’ve got a challenge for you: Invite that person to have a beer or coffee, or join you in a FaceTime chat. Tell us how it went.”

That goes quite beyond what even Weiss and Peyser themselves are arguing. If they want to be friends, fine, do your thing. But the Times op-ed page as a whole appears to believe this is something you — not journalists but you, the reader, average person — should be doing, part and parcel of good citizenship.

This notion has spread widely since Trump’s election: that Americans just don’t talk to each other enough, that we need to build friendships that reach across our personal info bubbles if America is ever going to heal. You see this in Mark Duplass’s abortive attempt to build bridges with right-wing polemicist Ben Shapiro. You see it in the group Better Angels, which aims to “reduce political polarization in the United States by bringing liberals and conservatives together.” The group holds workshops that function as scaled-up versions of the Peyser/Weiss meeting, and it’s gotten copious press coverage for its efforts, including a whole David Brooks column.

[embedded content]

For journalists, understanding what other people are thinking and why is part of the job. For average citizens and voters, it’s another burden to add to the list after work, schlepping the kids to and from school, taking care of elderly family members, and attending PTA and church/synagogue/mosque meetings, etc.

What the call for cross-partisan friendships asks people to do, essentially, is to make an altruistic sacrifice of time, perhaps money, and definitely emotional energy, in an attempt to heal our politics.

But if we’re going to make that ask, we should be pretty confident that good things will come of it, because the cost is not trivial. And there is no good evidence, to the best of my knowledge, that these efforts are effective at scale.

It would be one thing if this attempt at depolarization were an attempt to persuade participants of certain specific, socially beneficial beliefs. Insofar as individual beliefs are deforming our politics, the beliefs that do so the worst involve bigotry — especially, in the American case, racist sentiment. There’s a role for small-scale persuasion in trying to reduce prejudice, as well as large-scale structural changes.

But the “can’t we all get along” gambit of Better Angels and the NYT op-ed page isn’t that. This is a small-scale attempt to make people nicer to each other, with a hope that this will somehow improve political outcomes in the United States.

And that can be a big ask. Asking a Muslim mother to sit and listen patiently as a white Trump voter explained why the “Muslim ban” appealed to him — that’s not a trivial request.

It’s not clear to me what exactly that conversation is accomplishing. The Muslim mom knows there are people who hate her and her family. She doesn’t need to be reminded face to face. She isn’t learning anything. And when the goal of the conversation is “depolarization,” not prejudice reduction, it’s far from clear that her white interlocutor will emerge with less socially deleterious views either. There’s some evidence that contact with people from a vulnerable group can reduce prejudice against that group — but notably, a recent meta-analysis concluded that the effects are weakest for racial prejudice, and the evidence sparsest when it comes to adults.

There’s also some reason to think that interventions like this, in certain circumstances, could do harm. In a wonderful paper, evocatively titled “When Going Along Gets You Nowhere and the Upside of Conflict Behaviors,” the psychologists Mina Cikara and Elizabeth Levy Paluck argued that promoting cooperation and avoiding social conflict can backfire — and promoting conflict between groups can, on occasion, bring positive change. The authors write, citing this study:

For example, an intervention, in which low-power groups (i.e., Mexican immigrants, Palestinians) were able to voice their grievances to the high-power group (i.e., White Americans, Israelis), and in which the high-power group had to take their low-power perspective, resulted in more positive regard between the groups compared to when grievances were not voiced or heard.

It seems plausible to me that Twitter could serve a purpose like that. From its very inception in the late 2000s, Twitter was massively appealing to journalists and had a disproportionately large and influential black community. This happened, probably not coincidentally, after a large “white flight” of wealthier white users from MySpace to Facebook. And it pushed white journalists into contact with black voices in a way that they (we) hadn’t been before. It was a more even playing field, where a group with less power had the same claim to a voice as a group with more power. If we should expect that forcing high-power groups to hear the perspectives of low-power groups promotes tolerance, on net, then maybe we should expect that on Twitter too.

That’s not to say Twitter is perfect; using it makes me wildly unhappy much of the time. But it does make me wonder if the Weiss/Peyser hypothesis, that Twitter prevents us from listening to each other and we should really just try to get along as people outside it, is right. And if we’re not sure that hypothesis is right, then asking that people bear significant personal costs to reach out and befriend their political enemies starts to make less sense. That goes not just for takesters but for politicians like Barack Obama, who often emphasize the value of civil discussion and collaboration ahead of heated disagreement and confrontation. We need both.

We have a tendency, as a culture, to equate morality with bearing a heavy burden. Actually running and operating an orphanage and taking care of orphans day to day looks more saintly than funding 15 orphanages while living in a mansion does. And this kind of reasoning makes for effective, click-friendly articles. “Befriend people you disagree with” seems like the kind of thing you should do but is something you probably resist doing for one reason or another (it’s hard, it’s unpleasant, etc.). That tension, between duty and revulsion, has the makings of good content.

But I don’t think it makes for good moral reasoning. If you want to heal America, donate to and vote for candidates you think can do that. Give cash to poor people in the US, or people working to reduce prejudice. Do what you feel you can. But don’t let anyone guilt you into befriending people you don’t actually want to befriend. Don’t force yourself to listen to people spouting hate against you and your family in the name of civil comity. Life is too short, and the costs are real.

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Original Source -> The “why can’t we all just get along” theory of politics

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[latestnews2018-blog]

We Don't Need 'Who Is America?' To Tell Us How Bad Things Are

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/we-dont-need-who-is-america-to-tell-us-how-bad-things-are/

We Don't Need 'Who Is America?' To Tell Us How Bad Things Are

His pants lowered to bare his buttocks, Georgia state Rep. Jason Spencer scuttled backward at his opponent, who was portraying an Islamic terrorist. “America!” Spencer bellowed. “I will turn you into a homosexual!” he tells the terrorist.

Welcome to the second episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime comedy “Who Is America?” The premiere arrived last week on a wave of critical buzz, thanks to a torrent of outraged statements from conservative politicos who’d been fooled by the actor into advocating for the arming of small children.

But despite the anticipation, the debut ratings were dismal. Though the numbers edged up with encore and On Demand viewings, viewership was weak compared with the debuts of cable TV’s recent successful political comedies, like TBS’s “Full Frontal with Sam Bee” and HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” Even Comedy Central’s “The Opposition with Jordan Klepper,” canceled thanks to abysmal ratings after one season, started stronger than Baron Cohen’s new vehicle.

Why is “Who Is America?” opening with more of a whimper than a bang? Perhaps we’re tired of political humor, or it’s been too long since Baron Cohen’s last hit. Or perhaps this particular brand of comedic exposé has lost its appeal. After all, it’s not like we really need it anymore to grasp how bad things are.

Not that Sunday night’s segment with Spencer wasn’t jaw-dropping. The Republican lawmaker believed he was taking part in anti-terrorism training with an Israeli former military officer, Erran Morad (Baron Cohen in heavy, rather obvious makeup). Morad put Spencer through his paces, having him participate in exercises in which he yelled racial slurs as a diversionary tactic, performed an offensive parody of a Chinese tourist, and took an upskirt photo of a person in a burka to check for weaponry. 

It was an astonishing display, even for a politician previously best known for threatening a former Democratic state rep — a black woman — that she might “go missing” in the swamp due to her public support for removing Confederate statues. Spencer, who in May’s GOP primary lost his bid for a fifth term, put out a statement before this embarrassing footage aired, saying, “It is clear the makers of this film intended to deceive me in an attempt to undermine the American conservative political movement.”

But meanwhile, the party’s leader, President Donald Trump, was in the midst of a rather typical evening of tweeting: referring to his long-ago opponent in the presidential election as “Crooked Hillary,” then sending an all-caps threat of military engagement to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran. 

Of course, no statement needed to be issued to explain how the president was tricked into this unhinged behavior. With Trump leading the way, conservatives have become more and more comfortable showing their own asses unprompted. 

Sure, it’s still quite alarming to see lobbyists and congressional representatives eagerly advocate arming kindergartners with stuffed animal guns. In the most successful sketch from the premiere, Morad peddles a program, “Kinder-Guardians,” intended to solve America’s school shooting epidemic by arming schoolchildren as young as four. As a work of entertainment, the segment is masterful ― and it takes the gun debate in a daring direction by pulling in the right-wing fascination with Israel and its military culture.

Showtime

Gun rights advocate Philip Van Cleave participating in an fictional ad campaign for stuffed animal guns for children in the premiere of “Who Is America?”

The Republicans caught by the Kinder-Guardians trick are defensive and embarrassed, at least for now. Being fooled by a liberal comedian makes them look gullible. But then again, they really weren’t fooled into revealing much that didn’t already exist out in the open.

There was a moment, when “Da Ali G Show” and “The Daily Show” were in their prime, that comedy like this could be genuinely revealing. In the old-fashioned days of the aughts, seeing Baron Cohen or a “Daily Show” correspondent coax a shocking statement out of a public figure, or even a random person on the street, had the power to truly jolt us.  Comedy interviews stood to expose the depths of our fellow humans’ carefully hidden cravenness, bigotry, ignorance, extremism.

“Da Ali G Show” character Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh reporter also played by Baron Cohen, made a specialty of baiting subjects with his own professed anti-Semitism, racism and sexism. During a wine-tasting segment, he asked Norman Harris, the head of a Mississippi wine organization, whether the black waiter was “his slave.” Harris responded that slavery had been outlawed, which was a good thing. “For them,” he added. “For you, not so much!” Borat replied jovially. Harris agreed.

“That guy normally would never say that he thought it’s a shame that slavery doesn’t exist anymore,” Baron Cohen told The New York Times. “But because he’s in the room with somebody who’s totally naïve and seems to not mind that slavery existed, he was fully honest.”

By comfortably displaying racist views, a character like Borat made interviewees feel safe in revealing their own. In another interview, the comedian described the technique as “a dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as rabid bigotry.”

Now, 14 years later, that seems hard to dispute. We don’t even need to turn to edgy comedy for overt demonstrations of the phenomenon. Trump himself functions as an always-in-character version of what Baron Cohen pretends to be for a comedy show: a public figure who offers tacit encouragement for others to voice and enact bigotry by doing so himself.

Baron Cohen’s variety of comedic exposé was perfectly engineered for a time when the kind of middle-class white liberals who watched “Ali G” and “The Daily Show” weren’t confronted with the extremity of others’ views all the time. Back then, it was relatively easy to avoid people who think things were better before the Civil War or that, I don’t know, you should give high-powered weaponry to children on the cusp of learning to use a fork.

But we’re bathed in it now, in the ambient Pizzagate conspiracy theories and “build the wall” rants we face on every platform. We don’t need Borat to bust GOP officials and candidates when they’re recklessly posting racist memes to their own Facebook pages. 

As for random citizens, they easily can, and do, broadcast their own anti-Semitic, misogynistic, anti-gun control and racist views to Twitter ― no comedic sting required. During the second episode, NPR host Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, another Baron Cohen character, announces the construction of an enormous new community mosque to a meeting of Kingman, Arizona, residents. They respond with trembling outrage; one shouts that he identifies as “racist against Muslims,” and several more argue that they already tolerate black people, although they don’t like it. The scene felt gratuitously painful, an unfunny rehash of a racist debate we already know too well.

Then again, much of Baron Cohen’s shtick has always been a straightforward troll. In “Who Is America?,” he subjects Bernie Sanders to a mathematically incomprehensible presentation on how to move all of the 99 percent into the 1 percent while the senator, with a single-mindedness familiar to those who followed the 2016 Democratic primary, steered the conversation back to his stump speech. This showed nothing new about Sanders, but Baron Cohen didn’t seem to be aiming to.

Showtime

“Bachelor” star Corinne Olympios poses as an aid worker who helped combat an ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. She didn’t perform such service, and the scene for the second episode of “Who Is America?” was filmed in front of a green screen.

Aside from Morad’s interviews with conservative officials and activists, Baron Cohen’s antics seemed tame, even pointless, compared with the charged conversations we deal with daily in real life. Take the segment in which one-time “Bachelor” star Corinne Olympios, while endorsing a fake charity supposedly providing relief for an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, blankly reads a script for an ad urging people to support child soldiers by providing them with training and equipment. Yes, yes, reality stars will do anything for attention; it’s hard to recall a time when such a revelation would have rocked anyone to their core.

In “Who Is America?,” Baron Cohen repeatedly whiffs on opportunities to illuminate what bizarre things people really would support. Why send an absurd parody of a lefty NPR host to the home of GOP local bigwigs? Without exactly giving a flattering read to the Trump-supporting couple, it does offer them an opportunity to politely condemn behavior that most on the left would also decry, like forcing a young girl to stand while urinating. The takeaway is muddled at best. Getting liberals to cosign those choices on camera ― that might be a coup.

Resurrecting his particular brand of stunt comedy journalism ― honed in a very different cultural and political context ― for a Trump era already awash in gleeful incompetence, extremism and trolling, might seem like a perfect fit for the times. Instead, it’s outdated. (Perhaps that’s partly due to the outdated writers’ room, which consists entirely of men, including one who lost his job on “Inside Amy Schumer” after publicly bragging about choking his ex and sending hordes of sexist trolls after female writers.)

We also must ask whether his approach could be as harmful as it is informative and entertaining. Baron Cohen’s provocations have always raised the question of whether the end of exposing prejudice justifies the means of recreating it, and the evidence is piling up that comic bigotry may only make people more comfortable with the real thing. Take the spillage of Reddit Nazism-for-lolz into genuine radicalization and violence. Take Trump himself.

GOP politicians certainly haven’t become less openly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Islam and sexist than they were when Baron Cohen first started scamming them in the early aughts. And given how far-right shit-posting has likely helped accommodate the country to outright white nationalism, I found myself wondering uncomfortably whether the guns-for-kids stunt on “Who Is America?” might not also be absorbed into the political debate. Maybe irony can move the  Overton Window, too. 

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[loudlytransparenttrash]

The phobia of Islamophobia

Lol so I just had someone tell me that it is Islamophobic to tell Muslims that they aren’t being banned from entering the US and to not use the word “Islam” in tags.

It reminds me of those groups like the Interfaith Center, who demands films and television to edit and remove the words “Islamist,” “Islamic,” and “jihad”, even from documentaries such The Rise of Al Qaeda - referencing the 9/11 hijackers and their motives. They don’t want the public to think that Islamism or jihad had anything to do with Al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, because that would be “Islamophobia.”  

Everybody seems so afraid of this word. From the police who are scared to investigate Muslim human trafficking and child abuse rings in the UK, being afraid to make public the mass sexual and violent attacks committed by Muslim refugees across Europe, being afraid to report their fellow officers who expressed radical Muslim beliefs or the teachers being afraid to alert authorities when their Muslim students show warning signs of becoming radicalized. What we are dealing with is not Islamophobia, but Islamophobia-phobia.

As author Ali Rizvi says: “As a brown-skinned person with a Muslim name, I can get away with a lot more than you’d think. I can publicly parade my wife or daughters around in head-to-toe burqas and be excused out of “respect” for my culture and/or religion, thanks to the racism of lowered expectations. I can re-define “racism” as something non-whites can never harbor against whites, and cite colonialism and imperialism as justification for my prejudice. And in an increasingly effective move that’s fast become something of an epidemic, I can shame you into silence for criticizing my ideas simply by calling you bigoted or Islamophobic.”

For decades, Muslims around the world have rightly complained about the Israeli government labeling even legitimate criticism of its policies “anti-Semitic,” effectively shielding itself from accountability. Today, Muslim organizations like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) have borrowed a page from their playbook with the “Islamophobia” label - and taken it even further.

In addition to calling out prejudice against Muslims (a people), the term “Islamophobia” seeks to shield Islam itself (an ideology) from criticism. It’s as if every time you said smoking was a filthy habit, you were perceived to be calling all smokers filthy, horrible people. Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. But when did we start extending those rights to ideas, books, and beliefs? You’d think the difference would be clear, but it isn’t. The ploy has worked over and over again, and now everyone seems petrified of being tagged with this label.

The phobia of being called “Islamophobic” has been on the rise for some time and it has become much more rampant, powerful, and dangerous than Islamophobia itself. Not long ago, a white American man successfully convinced the Massachusetts liberal arts school Brandeis University that he was being victimized and oppressed by a black African woman from Somalia - a woman who underwent genital mutilation at age five and travels with armed security at risk of being assassinated. That is the power of this term.

The man, Ibrahim Hooper, is a Muslim convert and a founding member and spokesman for CAIR. The woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is an unapologetic activist for the rights of girls and women and a harsh, no-holds-barred critic of the religious ideologies (particularly the Islamic ideology in Muslim-majority countries that she experienced first-hand) that perpetuate and maintain their abuse. Having abandoned the Islamic faith of her parents and taken a stance against it, she is guilty of apostasy, a crime that is punishable by death according to most Islamic scholars, not to mention the holy text itself.

Hirsi Ali was also involved with the award-winning documentary, Honor Diaries, which explores violence against women in honor-based societies, including female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, domestic violence, and forced marriage. Despite featuring the voices of several practicing Muslim women, the film was deemed “Islamophobic” by - you guessed it - the poor folks at CAIR. Again, they felt they were the real victims, wanting their own voices heard while silencing those of the victims of FGM and honor killing in the film. Astonishingly, this ludicrous argument was enough to convince both the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan to cancel their screenings of the film which leads to even more deafness and blindness of a very serious human rights issue.

Progressive Muslim Maajid Nawaz tweeted a cartoon with the caption: “This Jesus & Mo cartoon is not offensive & I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it.”

The result? Vicious death threats. A petition signed by tens of thousands to have him removed from his candidacy. Targeting by Western liberal apologists. Admonishments from his own moderate Muslim counterparts. Tweets such as, “Have spoken to someone in Pakistan. They will have a surprise for him on his next visit. He is used to surprises in Pak.” The most tragic aspect of all this is what Alishba Zarmeen has coined the “Greenwald Syndrome” - the phenomenon of Western liberals, in a supposed show of tolerance, embracing an apologist stance in favor of the intolerant.

After being publicly accused by Glenn Greenwald of “spouting and promoting Islamophobia,” Sam Harris responded with these words, which should be read by everyone:

“Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas - like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male ‘honor’ that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls - you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims - especially women and girls. There is no such thing as ‘Islamophobia.’ This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it.”

The fear of being called Islamophobic once led many prominent Westerners to abandon their own values when they abandoned Salman Rushdie. It led Yale to publish a book about the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy, but without the cartoons. It led Comedy Central to censor their shows for fear of offending Muslims, even though the show irreverently lambastes virtually every other religion on a regular basis, unhindered and it has led to countless people being attacked, doxxed, threatened, silenced and their careers ruined, all for having a different opinion.

This epidemic continues today except now people aren’t taking “Islamophobia” as serious anymore and with good reason so Muslims have begun to create hoax hate-crimes against themselves to try and bring some credibility back to keep non-Mulsims in check.

Remember the 18-year-old Muslim girl who was assaulted and called a terrorist on the subway by Trump supporters and they tried to rip her hijab off and all of the social justice warriors had a complete meltdown? It was a lie that she made up to cover her parents finding out she was out fucking a Christian dude and getting drunk. It gets funnier, her Muslim father has forced her to shave her head completely for bringing shame on the family and she was arrested for making false accusations.

Remember the Muslim student who was robbed, beaten and had her hijab ripped off and stolen by Trump supporters? It was a lie. She is now being charged for filing a false report.

Remember when those white supremacist, anti-Muslim Trump supporters burned down the mosque in Houston? It was a lie. While the mosque did get burned down, it was done by a black Muslim who had attended the mosque for years.

Remember the Ohio student who was racially abused and assaulted by Trump supporters? It was a lie. She made it up the day after the election and after she made a post that she wants all Trump supporters to die of AIDS.

Remember the Michigan Muslim student who was harassed and threatened to be burned alive by the Trump supporter if she didn’t remove her hijab? It was a lie. Surveillance cameras show that she wasn’t even in the location where she claimed the attack took place.

Remember the Muslim woman who had her hijab ripped and forced off by police when they took her in for questioning? It was another lie.

Remember the Muslim kid who was beaten up on the school bus by five white kids and it forced the family to leave the country? Yes, another fucking lie.

Remember the student who had her face slashed and was called a terrorist in Lower Manhattan? Yet another lie.

These anti-Islamic hate-crimes even reached the UK with an 18-year-old Muslim student from Birmingham being punched in the face for wearing a hijab. It was a lie. She’s been charged for lying to the police.

These are just some of the false claims made within the past year alone and they received nation-wide coverage and left-wing outrage and hysteria, all pushing the agenda that America is a racist, Islamophobic hellhole and nobody except white people are safe.

This is an effective deterrent. This is exactly how terrorism works. This is how perfectly intelligent, well-read writers, commentators, and broadcasters become silenced by the Islamophobia smear fear - and rationalize themselves into becoming unaware victims of it.

When you’re unable to introduce Islamic-style blasphemy Sharia laws in a secular, Western society, you have to find alternative ways to silence those who offend you, right?

And that’s where the “Islamophobia” smear comes in - the ultimate, lazy substitute for a non-existent counter-argument. Don’t fall for it.

#islam #islamophobia #muslim #muslim ban #SJW #anti sjw #anti social justice warriors #social justice #social justice warrior #Trump #Donald Trump #feminism #feminist #anti feminism

[stopkingobama]

Notorious liberal scammer Morris Dees and his SPLC pocket a cool $1 million off Charlottesville tragedy

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons, Tim Pierce, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Pierce

In trying to fight racism—a laudable goal—Apple CEO Tim Cook has made a huge mistake by choosing to donate $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that smears some conservative groups as “hate groups.”

“What occurred in Charlottesville has no place in our country. Hate is a cancer, and left unchecked it destroys everything in its path,” Cook wrote in an email to Apple employees Wednesday announcing the donation, according toBuzzFeed.

Cook continued:

Apple will be making contributions of $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. We will also match two-for-one our employees’ donations to these and several other human rights groups, between now and September 30.

In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC.

But the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t just blast neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups as “hate groups.”

It also smears groups like Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, two socially conservative organizations that have bravely advocated traditional marriage, as “hate groups.”

There is no equivalence between the actions and views of a KKK supporter and a traditional marriage supporter.

Yet that equivalence is exactly what the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate groups” list promotes, by listing groups like the American Nazi Party and Aryan Nations on the same list as Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that just won a case in front of the Supreme Court this year, and Family Research Council, a respected social conservative group.

And it’s not just social conservatives at risk: It’s anyone who disagrees with the left’s thinking who can be tarred as a hater.

In a July City Journal article, Mark Pulliam wrote:

The SPLC … also labels moderates with whom it disagrees ‘extremists’ if they deviate from its rigid political agenda, which embraces open borders, LGBT rights, and other left-wing totems. The SPLC has branded Somali-born reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an ‘anti-Muslimn extremist’ for her opposition to female genital mutilation and other oppressive Islamic practices, and designated the respected Family Research Council as a ‘hate group’ for its opposition to same-sex marriage.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s labels have already led to violence.

James T. Hodgkinson, the alleged shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and others at the baseball field just this June, was a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook, according to Washington Examiner.

Had it not been for the courageous actions of the Capitol Police, there would have been a massacre that day of the lawmakers playing baseball.

Furthermore, in 2012, Floyd Corkins, who was armed, went to the Family Research Council. “Corkins—who had chosen the research council as his target after finding it listed as an anti-gay group on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center—had planned to stride into the building and open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many as possible, he told investigators, according to the court documents,” reported CNN in 2013.

He was only stopped because of the efforts of a security guard.

So when Apple donates to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s donating to a group whose smears of conservatives have already contributed to real violence against good people.

Again: It’s laudable and understandable for Apple to respond to the events of Charlottesville by wanting to take action against racists. It was horrifying to see the footage of men in the streets of the United States shout “Jews will not replace us.”

It’s unbelievable that 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others injured because a car was plowed into a group of counterprotesters. The driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., has been charged with second-degree murder.

According to Derek Weimer, who told the Associated Press he was a high school history teacher of Fields, “Once you talked to James for a while, you would start to see that sympathy towards Nazism, that idolization of Hitler, that belief in white supremacy.” (Weimer also claimed Fields had told him he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.)

As Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Saturday in a statement, “The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”

We should push back against the hateful actions in Charlottesville—the actions of the Nazi and KKK sympathizers, the white supremacists, and yes, the actionsof Antifa as well—and it’s commendable that Apple’s Cook wants to do so.

But unfortunately, in choosing the Southern Poverty Law Center, Cook is promoting an alternate hate-filled agenda targeting social conservatives and others.

Report by Katrina Trinko. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Race relations

[americanlibertypac]

Notorious liberal scammer Morris Dees and his SPLC pocket a cool $1 million off Charlottesville tragedy

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons, Tim Pierce, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Pierce

In trying to fight racism—a laudable goal—Apple CEO Tim Cook has made a huge mistake by choosing to donate $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that smears some conservative groups as “hate groups.”

“What occurred in Charlottesville has no place in our country. Hate is a cancer, and left unchecked it destroys everything in its path,” Cook wrote in an email to Apple employees Wednesday announcing the donation, according toBuzzFeed.

Cook continued:

Apple will be making contributions of $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. We will also match two-for-one our employees’ donations to these and several other human rights groups, between now and September 30.

In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC.

But the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t just blast neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups as “hate groups.”

It also smears groups like Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, two socially conservative organizations that have bravely advocated traditional marriage, as “hate groups.”

There is no equivalence between the actions and views of a KKK supporter and a traditional marriage supporter.

Yet that equivalence is exactly what the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate groups” list promotes, by listing groups like the American Nazi Party and Aryan Nations on the same list as Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that just won a case in front of the Supreme Court this year, and Family Research Council, a respected social conservative group.

And it’s not just social conservatives at risk: It’s anyone who disagrees with the left’s thinking who can be tarred as a hater.

In a July City Journal article, Mark Pulliam wrote:

The SPLC … also labels moderates with whom it disagrees ‘extremists’ if they deviate from its rigid political agenda, which embraces open borders, LGBT rights, and other left-wing totems. The SPLC has branded Somali-born reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali an ‘anti-Muslimn extremist’ for her opposition to female genital mutilation and other oppressive Islamic practices, and designated the respected Family Research Council as a ‘hate group’ for its opposition to same-sex marriage.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s labels have already led to violence.

James T. Hodgkinson, the alleged shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and others at the baseball field just this June, was a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook, according to Washington Examiner.

Had it not been for the courageous actions of the Capitol Police, there would have been a massacre that day of the lawmakers playing baseball.

Furthermore, in 2012, Floyd Corkins, who was armed, went to the Family Research Council. “Corkins—who had chosen the research council as his target after finding it listed as an anti-gay group on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center—had planned to stride into the building and open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many as possible, he told investigators, according to the court documents,” reported CNN in 2013.

He was only stopped because of the efforts of a security guard.

So when Apple donates to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s donating to a group whose smears of conservatives have already contributed to real violence against good people.

Again: It’s laudable and understandable for Apple to respond to the events of Charlottesville by wanting to take action against racists. It was horrifying to see the footage of men in the streets of the United States shout “Jews will not replace us.”

It’s unbelievable that 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others injured because a car was plowed into a group of counterprotesters. The driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., has been charged with second-degree murder.

According to Derek Weimer, who told the Associated Press he was a high school history teacher of Fields, “Once you talked to James for a while, you would start to see that sympathy towards Nazism, that idolization of Hitler, that belief in white supremacy.” (Weimer also claimed Fields had told him he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.)

As Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Saturday in a statement, “The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”

We should push back against the hateful actions in Charlottesville—the actions of the Nazi and KKK sympathizers, the white supremacists, and yes, the actionsof Antifa as well—and it’s commendable that Apple’s Cook wants to do so.

But unfortunately, in choosing the Southern Poverty Law Center, Cook is promoting an alternate hate-filled agenda targeting social conservatives and others.

Report by Katrina Trinko. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Race relations

[nothingman]

In trying to reckon with Donald Trump’s bizarre speech in Poland on Thursday, which was among the most troubling events of his troubling presidency, I couldn’t help thinking about Mahatma Gandhi’s supposed quip when asked by a British reporter what he thought of Western civilization: He thought it sounded like a good idea. As with so many famous quotations, the story is almost certainly apocryphal: It did not appear anywhere until almost 20 years after Gandhi’s death. But it endures for a reason, because it reflects the profound ambivalence and self-regard that lie at the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition.

President Trump professes no such ambivalence. He apparently thinks Western civilization is a good idea too, although it’s by no means clear what he thinks he means by that term and he is constitutionally incapable of irony or double meaning. Various commentators, including Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, have already pointed out that the propagandistic mishmash Trump delivered in Warsaw was aimed as usual at his most virulent supporters, and channeled a current of racism and white nationalism so overt it can hardly be called subtext.

THE WEST WILL NEVER BE BROKEN. Our values will PREVAIL. Our people will THRIVE and our civilization will TRIUMPH! http://pic.twitter.com/sozuVgdp5T

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2017

In this context, “Western civilization” presumably means the culture of white people in Europe and North America, as if that could be described as one coherent and continuous phenomenon, and as if any of those terms could be clearly defined. On one hand, Trump is deploying a false and dangerous form of mythology for narrow-minded, present-tense political purposes. (Breaking news, I know!)

Of course he doesn’t understand anything about the long and complicated legacy of what is conventionally called Western civilization, and if he did he would be against it. Trump’s self-appointed status as defender of the West is primarily about excluding or vilifying Muslims and other immigrant groups, and secondarily about marginalizing those Westerners who believe that pluralism and cultural diversity are in fact central values of our civilization (at least in its better moments).

On the other hand, there is a deeper level of historical irony at work here, one that Trump cannot possibly perceive. It’s possible that Steve Bannon, the supposed Svengali in his supposed doghouse, has some awareness of this irony, filtered through his discount-store, conspiracy-theory understanding of history. One could indeed perceive Donald Trump as the symbolic end point of Western civilization, or at least as the fulfillment of its most diminished and malicious tendencies. After Plato, Shakespeare and Descartes — after all the Dead White Males who did terrible things or magnificent things but were undeniably Important — we wind up here, with an orange reality-TV troll as the democratically elected leader of the most powerful nation in history.

It’s tempting to say that Donald Trump rose to his current position by way of a massive historical accident, despite the fact that he knows nothing and understands nothing. But I think that’s almost entirely upside down, and is another way of insisting that the current situation in the United States isn’t as bad as it looks, and can be remedied with a few replacement parts. Trump was elected president precisely because he is an arrogant ignoramus who spews out “politically incorrect” bigotry unsupported by any evidence. Furthermore, he has an unparalleled understanding of our culture’s most central elements: the marketing and branding of fame, the power of mass media, and the extent to which image and rhetoric can reshape or even replace reality.

I am reminded again of historian Joachim Fest’s famous discussion of whether it was acceptable to describe Adolf Hitler as a great figure in world history, despite all the obvious reasons one might not want to. Fest argued, in effect, that those in postwar Germany who sought to minimize Hitler’s importance were also trying to deny the extent to which Hitler had outwitted, manipulated and dominated them.

Hitler’s peculiar greatness is essentially linked to the quality of excess. It was a tremendous eruption of energy that shattered all existing standards. Granted, gigantic scale is not necessarily equivalent to historic greatness; there is power in triviality also. But he was not only gigantic and not only trivial. The eruption he unleashed was stamped throughout almost every one of its stages, down to its final collapse, by his guiding will. …

He also had an amazing instinct for what forces could be mobilized at all and did not allow prevailing trends to deceive him. The period of his entry into politics was wholly dominated by the liberal bourgeois system. But he grasped the latent oppositions to it and by bold and wayward combinations seized upon these factors and incorporated them into his program. His conduct seemed foolish to political minds, and for years the arrogant Zeitgeist did not take him seriously. The mockery he earned was justified by his appearance, his rhetorical flights, and the theatrical atmosphere he deliberately created. Yet in a manner difficult to describe he always stood above his banal and dull-witted aspects.

As I have previously observed, if you update the terminology here and there, Fest’s description appears to describe our current president with uncanny accuracy. (Although the “final collapse” of the Trump phenomenon remains in the unknown future, and further away than many wish-casting Democrats hope.)

Trump has never sounded more like Hitler than he did the other day in Warsaw, where the historical irony fell from the sky like a fluke summer snowstorm. Poland was of course the first nation invaded by Hitler’s troops in the opening chapter of World War II, and the home of the worst of Hitler’s death camps devoted to exterminating the Jewish people. Trump was supposedly there to celebrate the Poles’ resistance to Hitler, and the only fair thing to say about that is that some did and some definitely didn’t. Every moment of that peculiar spectacle had at least a double meaning, none of them salutary.

To be clear, drawing the rhetorical and ideological parallels is not to say that Trump is Hitler, or that he is like Hitler in the most important ways. At worst, Trump is a third-generation photocopy with the background washed out, or a bad actor playing a character he has glimpsed on TV but does not understand.

Hitler presented himself as the defender of Western civilization too, although the alien invaders who were said to be destroying it from within were of course not Muslims but members of another religious and cultural minority. As Frankfurt School cultural critics like Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued, Hitler could be understood to embody certain insidious tendencies that ran just below the surface of European civilization and were especially strong in Germany, which viewed itself (with some justification) as home to the finest poets, philosophers and musicians of the modern age.

In their landmark work “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer and Adorno suggested that the mythology of the Dark Ages had never been conquered by the supposed Enlightenment, only repressed, and that it had reappeared in spectacular fashion, circa 1932, in the personage of the little Austrian corporal with the ridiculous mustache. Our situation in America circa 2017 is not quite like that: We have no dialectic and no enlightenment, only myth.

Hitler and the Nazis claimed to be huge fans and defenders of Western high art and high culture, in a middlebrow, anti-modernist vein, as exemplified by their embrace of composer Richard Wagner. (Who was a vicious anti-Semite and a generally terrible person, but also died six years before Hitler was born and cannot be held responsible for the latter’s crimes.) No such branding maneuver is necessary today.

It is inconceivable that Donald Trump has ever willingly sat through a Wagner opera or any other taxing work of old-school high culture. For that matter, if he ingests anything from the cultural sphere at all except endless amounts of cable news and hilarious right-wing internet memes, we don’t hear about it. Even Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush felt obliged to express enthusiasm for various bland and deracinated forms of art, literature and music. (You know: The Gershwin songbook at the Kennedy Center; concerts by some old guys in Hawaiian shirts with a halfway plausible claim to be the Beach Boys.) Trump, perhaps to his credit, doesn’t even fake it.

So what exactly the president means when he praises the strength and resilience of Western civilization is deliberately left unclear. Since he self-evidently doesn’t give a crap about any of that tradition’s cultural, philosophical and artistic accomplishments — and would no doubt deem most of them to be fake news and/or pretentious bullshit — we are left with other possibilities. It’s all about consumer capitalism and white rage, pretty much. The president of the United States sending angry tweets from his gold-plated toilet seat, with an empty tub of Häagen-Dazs beside him. There’s Western civilization for you.

Trump offers nothing remotely close to the elaborate pseudo-scientific racism of the Nazis, under which the so-called Aryans would rule the world but various lesser grades of white folks with northern European backgrounds would also get a sweet deal. Maybe some of his alt-right nerd followers still obsess about that stuff — but who needs it? Trumpian racism is simply rooted in a dumbass, anti-historical vision of the past, a vaguely articulated fiction that until some relatively recent point (probably the 1960s) “our” countries were a certain way — i.e., overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Christian, culturally homogeneous and dominated by men — and had been that way forever.

It probably does no good to observe that while the fantasy of a lost “golden age” recurs throughout history, this dad-shorts, #MAGA iteration is beyond any serious doubt the dumbest version ever constructed. It is quintessentially American, in the sense that it is too naive and weak-minded to acknowledge its innate cruelty. The Nazis, who if they had nothing else had a theory of history, would have found it hilarious and childish.

To start with, there is no country in Europe or the Americas or anywhere else in the world that has not been shaped and reshaped by waves of migration and immigration, or by conflict, conquest, turmoil and change. The island nation where my grandparents were born provides a valuable case in point. Although Ireland is often presented, in the most simplistic variety of nationalism, as the home of an ancient, homogeneous and ethnically unitary civilization, that is more myth than history. (If the myth often seems like harmless tribal romance, it has also had darker consequences.) In reality, the people of modern Ireland largely resulted from centuries of violent collision between Celtic, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures, and the full story is considerably more complicated than that.

Traces of Iberian and North African DNA can be found to this day among people on the southwestern coast of Ireland. (Folk wisdom has long held that such influences accounted for the “black Irish” combination of dark hair and olive skin.) As for Celtic culture, the source of so many bad American tattoos, it isn’t as ancient as all that and did not originate in Ireland. The Celts first appear in the archaeological record around 3,000 years ago in central Europe, roughly in present-day Austria or Slovakia. Of course they had come from someplace else before that, and when they were driven west into France, Spain and the British Isles they conquered or displaced the people who lived in those places, about whom not much is known. Recent genetic research suggests there may in fact have been multiple waves of pre-Celtic people, some with roots in the southern Mediterranean and the Middle East, others who came from the steppes of Russia or Ukraine.

So if I describe myself as a white person of largely Irish ancestry, it’s a statement of fact with an extremely limited horizon of information. It does not connect me to some essential, pure and unchanging culture but to a little green island that has seen lots of turbulent history. Go back more than a few generations, and like everyone alive today I could have ancestors almost anywhere: Sardinia? Lebanon? Some village of mud huts on the Danube? If linguistics is any guide, everyone of European ancestry ultimately has roots on the Indian subcontinent — and, of course, you and I and everyone else on this planet evidently share an African foremother.

As Gandhi apparently did not say (but probably believed), Western civilization is something of a mixed bag. But if the term can be said to describe anything, it describes a process of constant change, of conflict, ferment, fusion, cross-pollination and evolution. It has never prospered by erecting barriers between itself and the rest of the world. Indeed, the fundamental nature of Western civilization — it is curious, acquisitive, voracious, questioning — means it can never really do that.

Donald Trump may pay lip service to Western civilization as a pallid, steady-state realm of Great Men writing Great Books he has not read and making Important Speeches he does not understand. But that’s no more than a thin veneer pasted on top of the version his followers really want, a racial fantasyland of full employment for white men and zero immigration. Neither of those things has ever existed in the past or will ever exist in the future. They have nothing to do with civilization, except insofar as they misinterpret it as a fortress rather than a process. They have nothing to do with history, except as an attempt to stop it from happening. That won’t work, of course. But this moment is likely to shape our history and our civilization, and not in a good way.

via Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture Salon

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

[fivestarglam]

This past Saturday I drove down to the local gun store in my quaint mountain town to pick up some bismuth shells, just in time for an early morning Sunday hunt. As I perused the impressive selection of bird bashers, a small fracas in my periphery began rising to a twangy crescendo. I rounded a rack of turkey calls to investigate, and found a few grizzled local woodsmen huddled around a fuzzy monitor bolted to the ceiling, barking the ghostly specter of Sean Hannity through its pixelated display. The men stirred.“Paid Protesters!” One grumbled.“George Soros!” Exclaimed another.

I winced and felt the hot flush of embarrassment creep across my face as the screen danced with black-clad anarchists, gleefully smashing windows and tossing trash cans. Overpowered with nostalgia, I thought back to the sparse coffee shops and dimly-lit dish pits where my comrades and I would plot our insidious coups, against the oppression of plate glass windows and aluminum trash cans, and couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that global billionaires were somehow tugging on the puppet strings. I’m afraid the truth is far more desperate.

I spent nearly a decade of my young life in ‘hard’ left movements. I spent my teens printing zines, organizing, squatting, and worshipping the ironically “bourgeois” intelligentsia that pandered to our leftist sensibilities. At the core of my ideology was a burning desire for liberty and an intense distrust of the state. In the beginning, I might saunter into the local cooperative and find an impassioned debate over the legitimacy of insurrectionary movements abroad, or the most practical way to pirate electricity without being discovered. Over time, the fiery rhetoric became dogma, penetrating my psyche right down to its id. I saw the state’s oppression in everything and everyone. I noticed behavioral patterns of violence and subjugation that seemed to reproduce to infinity. And through this new countenance, the changing face of leftism was obscured to me.

The New Social Justice

Social Justice was always a welcome addendum to anti-statist leftism for me. I gladly assumed the mantle and answered the call to march for police accountability, for women’s rights, for the ethical treatment of gays. The concept of ‘intersectional Social Justice’ was then a contentious one among many left-wing radicals, seen by many as a willful distraction from the core anti-statist message of our ideology, and worthy of only a small devotion. To focus too heavily on social issues was said to the be the resting place of sleepy liberals. And liberals, perhaps even as much as skinheads or the police, were the bane of the radical left. They meant to co-opt our movement and reacquaint us with their ineffective and self-aggrandizing brand of sedition and hoped to lasso a few of us back into the electoral process (abstaining from which was radical dharma at the time). They were, in short, a generally unwelcome addition to our ranks, and would usually turn their backs at the first mention of truly anti-statist politik.

I had more exposure than most to the left-wing radical “scene,” as it were, traveling to convergence spaces and conferences, worker-owned collectives and the like. I noticed a shift in the demographic makeup of the movement that became more pronounced with time. Character archetypes abound in the radical sphere, from crusty professors to dreadlocked primitivists, (and that leftist holy grail, the disaffected executive, living, perhaps, in a yurt or some otherwise subversive structure on some land that probably doesn’t belong to him), became more and more sparse. There was a new contingent of leftists, a new archetype that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. (The radical space was not exactly adept at coalition-building, keep in mind). These new figures were polished, soft-speaking, and shied away from the hardline agitprop of resistance. Gone were the ‘zines adorned with flaming police cars, replaced by new editorials that opined the importance of gender fluidity and other obtuse concepts. A new language began to congeal, an especially elitist dialectic that almost required translation to English.

The new language was accompanied by new tactics. Affinity meetings that were once hotbeds of dissent began to seem more like kangaroo courts. Arguments began to spring from the nascent well of discontent, and “accountability” hearings were the new norm, a process more often than not designed to elucidate the accused’s latent homophobia or racism. Arguments against the state were shelved more often than not in favor of presentations on a seemingly endless parade of ‘passive’ social injustices.

The old radical paradigm, in rudiment, went like this: “America was founded upon slavery, therefore America is racist, We are here because we disagree with racism.” The implied understanding was that because we had all found each other through our mutual disgust with what we had determined was a racist system that unfairly penalized minority populations, then we had already rejected a racist worldview. Thus our deliverance and rebirth occurred. It was understood to be innate to our shared ideology, and therefore our collective will could be focused and our mutual intent had been decided. This formed the basis for an arguably unified front that could be assembled and directed at will. But this mutual understanding was being corroded by a new, pernicious force that had infested every corner of the space. Anti-fascist organizers were no longer satisfied by directing their ire towards governmental institutions or hate groups and instead turned the looking glass inward. The toxic rancor of racism was found in our own ranks, by God!

Racism was found by the New Left to be inherent in all “whites.” (Racism is now said in the left to be a confluence of power and bigotry. Minorities, lacking the key ingredient of power, are exempt from this distinction.) Cis-gendered people (those of us who identify with our birth sex) were asked to “make space” for those that were not. Special privileges to be heard were conferred to the most oppressed within the group. This led to a bizarre new struggle within the movement over who might lay claim to being the most truly oppressed. The left was consumed by this new drive to expose the innate bigotry of the majority, especially within our own sphere. Where activists were once excommunicated over allegations of collusion with the authorities, they were now cast out frequently by accusations of complacent prejudice.

Friend and Foe in the New Left

Truth be told, I do not disagree with many of these indictments of mainstream culture. Inequities are certainly rampant in our society and must be illustrated and corrected. But the new face of the radical left seemed to be devouring itself. Where we had once in unison identified the state as the malevolent genesis of our oppression, our peers were now the true oppressors. The state apparently had not been oppressing us nearly as much as we had been oppressing one another. Anecdote became empirical, and experiences became the radical eucharist. Personal accounts of bigotry were now to be equivalent to universal and incontrovertible truth. A culture of martyrdom arose wherein victimhood was conflated with benevolence.

In the time before this new left, the directive was crystal clear: to illustrate the oppression of the state as it occurs to most everyone in the country, in the form of endemic poverty, uncorrected sickness, bankrupt free trade agreements, and the formation of a global police state. Organizers could mobilize radicals en masse to demonstrate against these societal evils, recalling the controlled chaos of the Seattle WTO demonstrations, or the significant uprising in Miami against the FTAA in 2003. The scene had now become almost entirely disjointed, and the former amalgamation of radicals ceased to exist. The radical left had become an especially tiresome arm of the progressive centrists, now content to lobby the state for greater societal controls rather than demand its abolishment.

There was only a small faction of anti-statist minded radicals left in the fray, and it was in them (and me) that the responsibility to carry on the tradition of rejecting the state and fighting for liberty. Instead, they clung to the antique tactics of property destruction and rock-tossing. The problem being, these tactics were complementary ones, meant only to supplement a coherent and organized radical left movement that had ceased to exist. They were to be an organ of outrage designed to counterbalance a cogent and heady vanguard of intellectual radicals. These radicals have become dinosaurs, defecting for the higher moral ground of the new left lest they fall victim to the witch hunt.

A Wayward Movement

The left has lost its traction by alienating average people and turning its intent towards social issues that are codified for inclusion. And of course, their argument is no longer to abolish the state, but to beg for benevolence at the feet of a corrupt government. I could not fathom how a group of people could move in a linear fashion from the idea that the central state was incorrigibly corrupt to the notion that we could somehow force it to provide for our interests. In a time of endemic poverty, I could no longer bear the guilt of selfishly aligning myself with a movement that seemed less concerned with exposing a secret war in the Middle East than it was with exposing my friends and peers as patriarchal villains.

In my last dark days with the left, I pleaded for objectivity, reason, rationale. These requests fell on deaf ears and nearly always resulted in a collective tongue lashing against my perceived ignorance. Why, they demanded, could I not accept that my perspective was being undermined by my ‘whiteness’? Why, if I was so committed to change and righteousness, could I not separate the evil archonic male desire from my true self? My positions, they would argue, had become tainted, infected by my hetero-ness, my maleness, my caucasian-ness. The whole world was a giant quagmire.

It occurs to me from time to time, usually in the throes of insomnia, that the state may have supplanted these contentious narratives within the space to misdirect and discredit the radical left, although this possibility has ceased to be relevant. The sad truth to behold is that the last actors in the space took to the streets to smash Starbucks’ windows and foolishly posture when they should have been pleading with their peers to reconsider a truly anti-statist perspective. In a last hurrah of hedonistic self-satisfaction, they have delivered the final blow to the radical left.

#regressive left #fee.org

[tropentarn-blog]

Into the Depths of the Left: The Start of my Journey

Since my blog’s purpose is to explore the differences between the two dominant political ideologies of America, I figure it is a good idea to write down my initial political beliefs as I explore the website notorious for extremely leftist views.

First of all, my initial impressions of this haven of social justice is exactly what I expected: basically all the right wing websites, but with far worse humor. I’ve encountered none of the familiar memes I saw on 8chan and funnyjunk. I’ll go ahead and guess that this is only from scratching the surface. I’d estimate the average age range of a tumblr user to be between 12-24 years old, slightly broader and somewhat younger than other similar sites. Politically liberal posts are just the opposite of conservative posts on other sites, with the same terrible sense of humor. This caught me off guard, I was always under the impression that liberal comedy was far superior, feeding into their recruitment efforts.

Now, onto my personal beliefs going into my journey...

Personal Responsibility. That is my core belief. Whatever happens to me happens because I did something to trigger it. If I make a mistake, I’m proud because at least I was the one to cause it. Success is always sweeter when it’s all because of you. There’s no feeling better than a plan coming together, or saving yourself from disaster through a Hail Mary attempt to rectify a situation. This is the driving force behind all my actions and beliefs. It is hardwired into me and is the one thing I won’t abandon, no matter what.

Political Bigotry

I believe this is the most pressing issue facing our society today. We get so caught up in our echo chambers, nobody wants to hear an opinion differing from theirs, even the most “level-headed” political commentators on the Right will break down into ad hominem when faced with a “wrong” opinion. The Left does not appear to be any better at this. This issue is the primary reason I’ve started this blog: so that I may perhaps convince others to do the same. Perhaps, if more people left their comfort zones, we could begin to mend the divide between us and focus on building a better society.

The 45th

I have actually looked up to Donald Trump since before he announced his candidacy. I read his books, and they do have legitimate merit to them in my opinion. His political positions, while sometimes radical and downright awful, can still be very appealing to me. I believe in a strong America with a limited government. An America fueled by its people’s dreams. I do not believe the more socialist ways of Europe have a place in America. I think that America’s ways (which are frequently attacked as “backwards”) keep it unique.  It keeps us from being another cookie-cutter western nation. If people wish to have a different culture like country X, they should move to country X. As for immigration, I believe we need to make it easier to gain citizenship, but we need to crack down on illegal immigration. Illegal immigration diminishes the value placed on gaining citizenship. Imagine working extremely hard, training in a sport until you make it to the Olympics, only to have to share a medal with someone who never trained a day and only got the award for showing up. Or, imagine becoming the world’s greatest artist, an amazing animator, but when your art is displayed, be it in a museum or on television, a shoddily put together show is also on the network, or is displayed within the same exhibit. I would feel completely insulted. Why put in the effort when you could’ve gotten the exact same outcome from simply participating? 

My Other Thoughts/Opinions

Guns- Firearms, to me, represent the ultimate form of individual responsibility. If you treat a weapon correctly, it will never do anything wrong. It will be yours to command until you or it wears out. Improperly handled, a weapon is extremely dangerous. Therefore, an extreme level of responsibility and discretion is needed when utilizing one. I have never been to a range and seen anything dangerous, in fact, “range Nazis,” as I so affectionately call the self-appointed range overlords, make sure to remind you of any wrongdoing you commit when handling a firearm. These are the people who act like you’re holding a grenade any time you so much as gesture near a weapon. It is known that roughly 60% of “gun violence” is attributable to suicide, and 80% of the gun violence left over is gang related.

The term “assault weapon,” to me, is incredibly insulting to the intelligence of every voter. It is not the weapon that makes a bullet deadly, but rather the caliber and type of projectile the weapon fires and the amount of powder behind it. Although many would have you believe that these “assault-style” weapons are incredibly deadly, there have been many reports calling the 5.56mm bullet fired by most AR-15s is inadequate for combat, as the caliber of bullet is only minutely larger than .22 LR, the common “starter” round for new shooters, the only difference being a much higher velocity and several unique effects the bullet produces under certain conditions.

Minority issues- I sympathize with those who are persecuted. I don’t believe racism is quite dead yet, but it’s certainly better than a hundred years ago. I don’t see anyone seriously promoting it. Most racism I encounter is in the form of jokes. I believe these jokes are fine and I actually encourage them. The more we laugh at our stereotypes, the less they start to exist. As long as we can differentiate between actual hate and ironic hate, I believe we can make racism effectively extinct as an ideology through our use of humor. Using slurs in a joking sense delegitimizes them, similar to how repeating a word makes it lose its meaning. 

Closing notes and TL;DR

Thanks for reading this far. I’ve worked on this one post for hours, it’ll probably be the longest one I post (for now, at least). If I retire this account, I’ll probably mirror this post with the issues of that day, and I’ll show my progress. I do request that you simply ignore this if you don’t have any legitimate criticisms (i.e. “You racist pig!” is not what I’d call constructive criticism). Please do give me any feedback and tell me if I’m wasting my time. I’d appreciate any support you could give me on my journey.

TL;DR: I’m beginning a blog exploring left-wing opinions and how they differ from my right-wing beliefs so that I may attempt to bridge the political gap in my mind. 

#us politics #conservative #liberal #no bulli pls #personal responsibility #journey #growth #politics #experiment

[nancyedimick]

The great anti-Semitism panic of 2017

A police officer blocks an entrance as officials respond to a bomb threat at the Jewish Community Center in Louisville, Ky., on March 8. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

I’m not insensitive to anti-Semitism. Despite growing up in Jew-friendly New York City, I experienced my share of it — kids throwing rocks at my Jewish Day School bus, anti-Semitic graffiti on our home’s fence, among other incidents. And as Volokh Conspiracy readers know, I’ve blogged quite a bit about anti-Semitism. I’ve mostly written about anti-Semitism coming from the far left, but I’m not at all naive about the existence and virulence of anti-Semitism on the far right.

Nevertheless, I’ve been rather taken aback by the panic in the Jewish community over American anti-Semitism since Donald Trump won the election. The recent spate of hoax bombing threats to Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions around the country has been a precipitating factor, but the fear is drastically out of proportion to the threat; no bombs have been found, and there are no indications that there is any real physical threat to Jews. By contrast, in the past decade or so there have been actual murders at a JCC and a Jewish federation office without precipitating such panic.

It seems that much of the panic is in fact due to Trump, with the JCC threats seen as a potential first sign of the deteriorating status of American Jews. While Jews are the most-liked religious group in the United Sates, some degree of trepidation is not unreasonable. As Andrew Silow-Carroll points out,

Most Jews didn’t vote for him, and regarded his campaign antics as particularly unsettling, from his appeal among white supremacists and ethno-nationalists to his willingness to exploit the country’s racial and ethnic divides.

In his embrace of a fiercely chauvinistic “economic nationalism,” White House strategist Steve Bannon represents something “unprecedented and inconceivable” in the minds of many Jews. Until Trump, resurgent nationalism seemed a problem for Europe, where economic malaise, fear of immigrants and the ghosts of the 20th century have combined into a particularly toxic brew on the right.

Yet, just looking at my Facebook feed, the origins of the fear bear only a tangential relationship to the actual Trump campaign. For example, I’ve lost track of how many times Jewish friends and acquaintances in my Facebook feed have asserted, as a matter of settled fact, that Bannon’s website Breitbart News is a white-supremacist, anti-Semitic site. I took the liberty of searching for every article published at Breitbart that has the words Jew, Jewish, Israel or anti-Semitism in it, and can vouch for the fact that the website is not only not anti-Semitic, but often criticizes anti-Semitism (though it is quite ideologically selective in which types of anti-Semitism it chooses to focus on). I’ve invited Bannon’s Facebook critics to actually look at Breitbart and do a similar search on the site, and each has declined, generally suggesting that it would be beneath them to look at such a site, when they already know it’s anti-Semitic.

There is also a general sense among Jews, at least liberal Jews, that Trump’s supporters are significantly more anti-Semitic than the public at large. I have many times asked for empirical evidence that supports this proposition, and have so far come up empty. I don’t rule out the possibility that it’s true, but there doesn’t seem to be any survey or other evidence supporting it. Given that American subgroups with the highest proportions of anti-Semites — African Americans, first-generation Hispanic immigrants, Muslims and high school dropouts — are strong Democratic constituencies (though the latter group appears to have gone narrowly for Trump this time), one certainly can’t simply presume that Trump has a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic supporters.

Often living in a blue bubble, liberal Jews easily can panic when they don’t know anyone who voted for the other side’s candidate(s), and can assume the worst about the other side’s supporters. Indeed, liberal Jews tend to panic whenever “the right” is doing well in American politics. Consider this Wall Street Journal headline from exactly 22 years ago: “Religious Fervor: Some Liberal Jews, To Their Own Surprise, See a Rise in Bigotry — And, Unlike Many Orthodox, They’re Concerned About The Right’s New Power.” The article elaborates:

These are anxious times for American Jews. Still reeling from the results of the November election, many liberal Jews are alarmed by the rise of the religious right. They are increasingly uncomfortable with verbal attacks by conservative commentators on the “cultural elite” and on “Hollywood,” both of which they believe are code words for Jews. And they are shaken by well-publicized reports of neo-Nazi groups and of anti-Semitic violence by teenage “skinheads.” Suddenly, secular Jews — for whom anti-Semitism was always something remote — are feeling a new vulnerability and wondering whether the political and religious tide is turning against them.

Remember the great anti-Semitic pogroms of 1995? Neither do I. To take another example, I’m not sure what, if anything, Philip Roth was trying to say with his 2004 book “The Plot Against America,” but I know liberal Jewish reviewers welcomed it as a warning of the ever-present threat of anti-Semitic right-wing fascism looming over the United States in Republican-dominated America.

Meanwhile, Jewish “defense” groups, most prominently the Anti-Defamation League, have stoked the panic with wildly exaggerated rhetoric. Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Democratic politico who now runs the ADL, stated in November that the “American Jewish community … has not seen this level of anti-Semitism in mainstream political and public discourse since the 1930s.” Among other omissions, Greenblatt must have slept through the George W. Bush administration, when mainstream “experts,” mostly on the left, were claiming that the small number of Jews in the Bush administration had somehow manipulated the Gentiles running the administration into leading the United States into a war against Iraq to benefit Israel. Unlike the current anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from the neo-Nazi fringes, these allegations were coming from places such as the Harvard University and the University of Chicago faculties.

The ADL, though, has a strong self-interest in such exaggerated complaints. When Greenblatt took over the ADL from the long-serving Abraham Foxman, he announced that the younger generation among ADL’s primary constituency, liberal, secular Jews, was no longer terribly interested in the issue of anti-Semitism, and instead wanted the ADL to focus on oppression more generally. The enthusiasm and fund-raising dollars were in supporting Black Lives Matter and transgender rights, not worrying about anti-Semitism on college campuses. One strongly suspects that this is because the threat of anti-Semitism was seen primarily as coming from the anti-Israel left. Trump created a wonderful entrepreneurial opportunity for the ADL to focus on what is naturally its core issue, anti-Semitism (and also to ensure that the more conservative Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose director was invited to give the invocation at Trump’s inauguration, doesn’t steal its thunder), by focusing on the threat from the right. The ADL’s reticent donors are no longer reticent in the age of Trump, with the media reporting that donations have been pouring in since Trump’s victory. It’s therefore hardly in the ADL’s interest to objectively assess the threat from Trump and his supporters. Indeed, I’m almost impressed that an ADL official managed just the other day to link the JCC bomb threats to emboldened white supremacists, even though the only suspect caught so far is an African American leftist. Meanwhile, Foxman has been a cooler head who has been telling people, “cool it, cool it.”

Another group that has had a strong incentive to exaggerate the present threat of right-wing anti-Semitism is Jewish progressive activists. For the past decade or so, leftist Jews have increasingly found themselves excluded from progressive coalitions that not only take very harsh anti-Israel lines, but also have refused to take seriously anti-Semitism in their midst, suggesting that allegations of such anti-Semitism are mere covers for the “privilege” of “white Zionists.” So long as the problem of American anti-Semitism was largely associated with anti-Zionism and far-left politics more generally, Jews were not permitted to be part of a coalition of the marginalized.

Lo and behold, along comes Trump, and left-wing Jewish activists are portraying Jews as one of the many groups threatened by him. Trump, and, more specifically, exaggerating the threat of anti-Semitism from Trump and his supporters, gives these Jews an opportunity to, for example, stand side by side with Muslim activists in opposing various “isms” and “phobias,” rather than quarreling with them over Israel.

The irony of all this is that if you talk privately to those who work in the Jewish organization world, many will confide that the greatest threat to the security of the American Jewish community is “changing demographics,” which is a euphemism for a growing population of Arab migrants to the United States. Anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world, with over 80 percent of the public holding strongly anti-Semitic views in many countries. The issue of whether and to what extent the United States should expand refugee admissions is a complex one, and a potential rise in (potentially violent) anti-Semitism, at least in the short term until refugees and their families assimilate, is hardly the only factor to be considered. But it’s surely a paradox that the groups and individuals who express the most public fear of potential anti-Semitism emanating from the Trump administration express little if any concern about the potential problems of admitting an untold number of refugees and immigrants from countries where extreme anti-Semitic sentiments are mundane.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/08/the-great-anti-semitism-panic-of-2017/

[theconservativebrief]

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”

That’s how President Donald Trump summed up his governing philosophy during his inaugural address last January. The phrase “America First” has been a feature of Trump’s rhetorical shtick since he began campaigning for the White House, but the phrase itself has a long and troubling backstory.

Sarah Churchwell is a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, and the author of new book titled Behold, America. It’s a timely survey of two of the most loaded phrases in the American lexicon: “America First” and “American dream,” and how they’ve evolved in opposition to each other.

In this interview, we discuss that evolution and what these century-old slogans have meant to the people who have co-opted them. Language matters, Churchwell argues, and the words we use carry their own historical baggage, whether we’re aware of it or not.

In the case of America First, that history is dark but also deeply instructive. And in the case of the American dream, it’s a history that needs to be understood afresh if we want to reclaim it’s original meaning.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Let’s start with “America First,” a phrase our current president has frequently used to sum up his worldview. Where does this phrase come from?

Sarah Churchwell

It was a Republican campaign slogan in the 1880s, which means it appeared much earlier than most people think. But it didn’t become a national catchphrase until President Woodrow Wilson used it in 1915. He was using it to try to keep America out of the first World War. But he was kind of doing a tap dance, because he wanted to placate the isolationists, although he was himself an internationalist.

So Wilson was using America First as a way to maneuver his way through a political minefield by saying America would be first to lead the world, and that it should stay neutral so it could pick up the pieces in Europe after the war. It was ostensibly about maintaining neutrality in the name of leadership.

But then the phrase gets taken up in the name of isolationism almost instantly, and it is quickly connected with other ideas that were also on the rise at the time, especially the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It became linked to anti-immigration movements, and sympathizers of fascism, and was popularized by Charles Lindbergh, the famous American pilot who lead the “America First Committee” — a group of some 800,000 Americans who wanted to keep us out of WWII.

“Trump represents a strain of American thinking that goes back a long, long way”

Sean Illing

So it began as an antiwar isolationist slogan, and then morphed into an explicitly xenophobic and fascist slogan?

Sarah Churchwell

Yeah, and it happened pretty predictably. If you’re in an anti-immigrant and xenophobic debate, then “America First” will kind of magnetically accrue those anti-immigrant sentiments. Put America first, native-born people first. It connects back to the nativism of the 1840s and 1850s, and it sounds broadly anti-immigrant. In a moment where people were very concerned about waves of immigration, which was a big motivating force for the KKK, it was only natural that America First would become a rallying cry for nativists and racists.

Sean llling

To be clear, who did the America First-ers want to keep out?

Sarah Churchwell

Anybody who’s not white, not Protestant, not what they saw as a native-born American, an old-style American. And that was their notion of what America was supposed to be.

So America First did have very strong resonances with ideals like “Make America Great Again,” which was a phrase that they nearly echoed as well. The idea then, as now, was that the true version of America is the America that looks like me, the American fantasy I imagine existed before it was diluted with other races and other people.

America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance. It was a way of saying me first, only my version of America should be allowed to have any sway here.

You have to remember, too, that there was this notion at the time of “100 percent American,” which meant 100 percent Anglo Saxon blood. And that coincided with the so-called one-drop rule, which was an old racist rule in America in which one drop of black blood made someone legally black and therefore subject to slavery or Jim Crow or miscegenation laws. So all of these ideas were used interchangeably, and they folded neatly into the America First movement.

Sean Illing

I want to pivot to this idea of the “American dream,” which intersects with the America First movement.

So the American dream, as initially conceived, was very much rooted in a working-class social democratic aspiration for equality and upward mobility, but you describe how this notion was gradually co-opted and turned upside down. What happened?

Sarah Churchwell

We associate this phrase with ideas of free market capitalism and with conversations on the right about individual opportunity and liberty and all this small government stuff.

But when you search for the origins of the phrase “American dream,” it turns out it emerged on the progressive left to argue the opposite side of the case — to say that unchecked capitalism and huge increases in private wealth would destroy the American dream of opportunity, because of inequality.

The meaning of the phrase started to change after WWII. The newfound emphasis on individual economic liberty was in tension with the idea of justice for all, and this became more of a problem as economic inequality increased and the spoils of capitalism were restricted to a privileged few later in the century.

So what we had was a series of debates as the country tried to keep liberty and justice in some kind of uneasy equilibrium, but ultimately the emphasis on individual liberty and free market capitalism trumped everything else.

Sean Illing

In the book, you talk about how these two phrases, “America First” and the “American dream,” naturally collided and came to represent the struggle between liberal democracy and authoritarian fascism.

Sarah Churchwell

Well, the collision was inevitable, especially when America First shifted from an isolationist slogan to an explicitly nativist, white nationalist slogan.

Early on, the American dream was being used all the way up to WWII as a way to describe not free market capitalism, but the rights of everybody within a democratic society, and the dreams of America for fairness and self-government. Those ideas were bound to collide with the America First movement.

What I found so interesting was that people were speaking of the American dream as a concept that had racial equality built into it, that was inimical to anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigotries or racial prejudices, as early as the 1930s.

Most people would say that we first started to have a conversation about social justice related to the American dream with Martin Luther King in 1963, but people were arguing this from at least as early as the 1930s, and saying if this anti-Semitic America First thing starts to take hold, it will be the death of the American dream. Racial injustice would be the death of the American dream.

Sean Illing

When you hear President Donald Trump declare the American dream dead and promise to put America first, what do you think?

Sarah Churchwell

I think it would be good if we all read more history. Trump’s version of the American dream is a cartoon version from the 1950s, when guys like him had it really good, even better than today. But other people are pushing back, and saying you can’t dominate everybody, and Trump feeds into this resentment and he has unleashed it as well as anyone.

And when he says he’s going to put America first, he specifically means this vision of America first. His advisors know this stuff. Steve Bannon knows this stuff. Bannon has read history, and he uses phrases like “economic nationalism” which were also associated with America First in the 1920s. It’s not a coincidence.

They chose the phrase “America First” pretty late in the campaign, and it seem pretty deliberate. Donald Trump didn’t stumble on it. One of the things I talk about in the book is that Trump was very well aware of what it meant, at least in the 1990s when he talked about it in relation to Pat Buchanan’s campaign, and called Buchanan an anti-Semite and said that he was using the phrase to curry favor with the right-wing wacko nut jobs, which he obviously decided was a good tactic in 2016.

“America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance”

Sean Illing

Trump personifies one side of the moral and political tension this book describes, and maybe that’s the most important fact about his political existence — that there is nothing new about him or what he represents, that he is simply the latest expression of a core feature of the American psyche.

Sarah Churchwell

I totally agree with that. Indeed, I wanted this book to make that very point. Trump represents a strain of American thinking that goes back a long, long way, and the debate we’re having now about what kind of country we want to live in, and who has the right to be here, is hardly new.

We’ve always been divided and we’ve also been divided along exactly these lines. And at that moment, the side that wants America to go backward, to include fewer people, is in the ascendancy, and it’s important that we recognize that and realize that we’ve been here before, and that nothing is inevitable.

Sean Illing

If knowledge of history is truly emancipatory, and I think it is, what does knowledge of this history — the history of America First and the American dream — emancipate us from?

Sarah Churchwell

Well, it emancipated me from the belief that the American dream was always what we say it is today. It used to be so much bigger, so much more inclusive, and the version we inherited isn’t the original version or the most inspiring or just version. It reminded me that our aspirations can be bigger and better, and that the story of America can always change.

Knowing history also has a way of clarifying the fight you’re in. It’s important to know what America First means and what it represents, because that’s what we’re up against right now, and it’s a very old fight. So in a way, it’s liberating to know that, to know that the struggle is ongoing and has to be continually waged.

Original Source -> How “America First” ruined the “American dream”

via The Conservative Brief

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