WELCOME TO REALITY - TRIVIA
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS
december 2021
ESSAYS
13. Black Catholics have a right to be frustrated with a church that ignores racism
12. TALIBAN’S RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY – DEOBANDI ISLAM – HAS ROOTS IN COLONIAL INDIA
11. OH, FUCK YOU, TRUMP VOTERS. JUST FUCK YOU
10. OP - ED: THE SLAVE TRADE USED TO BE LEGAL. LET’S NOT GLORIFY THE LAW.
9. PULITZER WINNER CHRIS HEDGES: THESE "ARE THE GOOD TIMES — COMPARED TO WHAT'S COMING NEXT"
8. GOVERNMENT DEBTS AS CLASS SWINDLES
7. YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF….
6. BONHOEFFER ON STUPIDITY - RELIGIOUS GROUNDS
4. Independent of everything: Is America too dumb for democracy?
3. TRUMP'S ELECTION WAS PERSONAL: IT'S WHITE AMERICA'S VICIOUS BACKLASH TO BLACK SUCCESS
2. WHITE PEOPLE ARE RIGHT: THEY BUILT THIS COUNTRY
1. COARD: NON-VOTING BLACKS GET NO THANKS, DESERVE NO BENEFITS
Black Catholics have a right to be frustrated with a church that ignores racism
Black Catholics push back against an archbishop's claim that social justice movements are "pseudo-religions."
Nov. 29, 2021, 2:35 AM PST
By Anthea Butler, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
November is Black Catholic History Month, but the faithful’s ignorance of the historical issues of race, racism and invisibility continue to strain Black Catholics' relationship with American Catholics and bishops. The insensitive and incendiary Nov. 4 speech by Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, helps explain why.
Gomez managed to offend Black Catholics, lay and clergy alike, with his ill-advised, ill-timed remarks about social justice movements being “pseudo-religions.” The speech, given online to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, obliquely referred to, but avoided explicitly naming, the Black Lives Matter movement. Calling social justice movements “a rival 'salvation' narrative,” Gomez went on to say social justice movements are political religious movements and "replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs."
Clearly the archbishop did not consider the Pew Research Center survey from February that showed 77 percent of Black Catholics consider opposing racism essential to their faith. This kind of white supremacist culture war talk from the head of the USCCB is, frankly, a disaster for the American church — if it wants Black Catholics to remain in the pews.
The negative reaction to the archbishop’s speech in America’s Black Catholic community and the larger Catholic community was swift. As of Wednesday, more than 13,000 people had signed a petition condemning the archbishop’s remarks, calling for him to apologize and to stand with social justice movements as Pope Francis has. The National Black Sisters' Conference, a group of Black nuns in religious orders across the United States, in a statement also called on the archbishop to apologize and reiterated the role of Catholics in the civil rights movement: “When African-American lives are systematically devalued in this country and in the Catholic Church, we must speak out. BLM is not a pseudo-religion; nor is it a ‘dangerous substitute for true religion.’ It is a movement very much in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.”
Racism within the American Catholic church has been a problem for far too long. In 2017, the USCCB formed an ad-hoc committee against racism in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since the 1980s, the USCCB has published a series of statements about racism. The most recent one, “Open Wide Our Hearts: the Enduring Call to Love,” was a pastoral letter issued after the events of Charlottesville. Yet the history of racism has plagued the Catholic church in America. That history includes the Jesuits at Georgetown selling off their slaves to save the institution.
To put it baldly, Black Catholics are tired. The Catholic church in America has time and time again claimed to be aware of the deep wound of slavery and racism in the church. Yet from the top of the bishops’ conference to the diocesan priest, it seems the need to identify with racism and white supremacy continues to destroy any progress the church has tried to make. Consider thesuspension of an Indiana priest over statements he made in summer 2020 about Black Lives Matter protesters being “maggots and parasites,” or the Michigan priest who compared Black Lives Matter protesters to terrorists.
Gomez’s comments are right at home with these priests. That’s scandalous.
The irony is that Gomez calls the Black Lives Matter movement and others like it “political religions,” but the USCCB’s continued favoritism of the Republican Party and the disdain some of its members have for Pope Francis is just as politically motivated as they believe Black Lives Matter to be. And their politics has more dire consequences for their churches.
The consequences include the alienation and departure of Black Catholics from the church. The Pew survey "Faith Among Black Americans" estimated that 6 percent of Black Americans are Catholic, but Religion News Service, which reported on the study, pointed out that "nearly half of those raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic (46%, compared to 39% of all Americans raised Catholic). About 1 in 5 Black adults who were raised Catholic have become unaffiliated (19%), and a quarter have become Protestant (24%).
That’s why the National Black Catholic Congress series “Black Catholics and the Millennial Gap” is important. With so many Black Catholics leaving the church, the archbishop might want to rethink his culture warrior stance to shore up an already dwindling flock.
For Black Catholics who have endured racism in the pews, in Catholic schools and from priests and bishops, it is becoming clear that statements about opposing racism are not enough. If the American Catholic church does not want to lose an important, vibrant part of Catholicism in America, it would behoove the head of the bishops’ conference to apologize for his ill-advised remarks, which threaten to make the Catholic church in America just another pseudo political movement.
Gomez managed to offend Black Catholics, lay and clergy alike, with his ill-advised, ill-timed remarks about social justice movements being “pseudo-religions.” The speech, given online to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, obliquely referred to, but avoided explicitly naming, the Black Lives Matter movement. Calling social justice movements “a rival 'salvation' narrative,” Gomez went on to say social justice movements are political religious movements and "replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs."
Clearly the archbishop did not consider the Pew Research Center survey from February that showed 77 percent of Black Catholics consider opposing racism essential to their faith. This kind of white supremacist culture war talk from the head of the USCCB is, frankly, a disaster for the American church — if it wants Black Catholics to remain in the pews.
The negative reaction to the archbishop’s speech in America’s Black Catholic community and the larger Catholic community was swift. As of Wednesday, more than 13,000 people had signed a petition condemning the archbishop’s remarks, calling for him to apologize and to stand with social justice movements as Pope Francis has. The National Black Sisters' Conference, a group of Black nuns in religious orders across the United States, in a statement also called on the archbishop to apologize and reiterated the role of Catholics in the civil rights movement: “When African-American lives are systematically devalued in this country and in the Catholic Church, we must speak out. BLM is not a pseudo-religion; nor is it a ‘dangerous substitute for true religion.’ It is a movement very much in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.”
Racism within the American Catholic church has been a problem for far too long. In 2017, the USCCB formed an ad-hoc committee against racism in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since the 1980s, the USCCB has published a series of statements about racism. The most recent one, “Open Wide Our Hearts: the Enduring Call to Love,” was a pastoral letter issued after the events of Charlottesville. Yet the history of racism has plagued the Catholic church in America. That history includes the Jesuits at Georgetown selling off their slaves to save the institution.
To put it baldly, Black Catholics are tired. The Catholic church in America has time and time again claimed to be aware of the deep wound of slavery and racism in the church. Yet from the top of the bishops’ conference to the diocesan priest, it seems the need to identify with racism and white supremacy continues to destroy any progress the church has tried to make. Consider thesuspension of an Indiana priest over statements he made in summer 2020 about Black Lives Matter protesters being “maggots and parasites,” or the Michigan priest who compared Black Lives Matter protesters to terrorists.
Gomez’s comments are right at home with these priests. That’s scandalous.
The irony is that Gomez calls the Black Lives Matter movement and others like it “political religions,” but the USCCB’s continued favoritism of the Republican Party and the disdain some of its members have for Pope Francis is just as politically motivated as they believe Black Lives Matter to be. And their politics has more dire consequences for their churches.
The consequences include the alienation and departure of Black Catholics from the church. The Pew survey "Faith Among Black Americans" estimated that 6 percent of Black Americans are Catholic, but Religion News Service, which reported on the study, pointed out that "nearly half of those raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic (46%, compared to 39% of all Americans raised Catholic). About 1 in 5 Black adults who were raised Catholic have become unaffiliated (19%), and a quarter have become Protestant (24%).
That’s why the National Black Catholic Congress series “Black Catholics and the Millennial Gap” is important. With so many Black Catholics leaving the church, the archbishop might want to rethink his culture warrior stance to shore up an already dwindling flock.
For Black Catholics who have endured racism in the pews, in Catholic schools and from priests and bishops, it is becoming clear that statements about opposing racism are not enough. If the American Catholic church does not want to lose an important, vibrant part of Catholicism in America, it would behoove the head of the bishops’ conference to apologize for his ill-advised remarks, which threaten to make the Catholic church in America just another pseudo political movement.
COLONIAL BLOWBACK!!!
Taliban’s religious ideology – Deobandi Islam – has roots in colonial India
THE CONVERSATION
August 25, 2021 8.28am EDT
Following the Taliban’s rapid taking of power in what it describes as a reestablished “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” fears of a certain kind of Islamist ideology being brought back have led a large number of Afghans to flee, or fear for their lives.
The Taliban were known for their oppressive rule. They ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, at which point they were pushed out of power by U.S. and British troops. Under the Taliban rule, religious minorities and other Muslims who did not share their fundamentalist understanding of Islam were not tolerated. The Taliban also severely restricted the rights of women and girls.
As scholars who research ethno-religious conflicts in South Asia, we have studied the origins of the Taliban’s religious beliefs. The roots of this ideology – Deobandi Islam – can be traced to 19th century colonial India.
Colonialism and Islam
Deobandi Islam emerged in India in 1867, 10 years after a major Indian nationalist uprising against the rule of the British East India Company.
Two Muslims clerics, Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Maulana Rashid Muhammad Gangohi, were behind the setting up of the Deobandi school. Their aim was to indoctrinate Muslim youth with an austere, rigid and pristine vision of Islam. At its heart, Deobandi Islam was an anti-colonial movement designed to revitalize Islam.
This school of Islamic thought had a very particular understanding of the faith. The Deobandi brand of Islam adheres to orthodox Islamism insisting that the adherence to Sunni Islamic law, or sharia, is the path of salvation.
It insists on the revival of Islamic practices that go back to the seventh century – the time of the Prophet Muhammad. It upholds the notion of global jihad as a sacred duty to protect Muslims across the world, and is opposed to any non-Islamic ideas.
The first madrassa – or Islamic school – to educate Muslim youth in the Deobandi tradition was set up in the north Indian state of present-day Uttar Pradesh toward the end of the 19th century.
The Deobandi school system spread over the next several decades and attracted Muslim youth in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. For instance, the Deobandi tradition became the most popular school of Islamic thought among the Pashtuns, an ethnic group living in an area on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Pashtun leaders played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding the Deobandi curriculum and tradition in the Pashtun belt across the Durand line, the colonial border separating British India from Afghanistan.
Funding and enrollments
After British India was partitioned in 1947 between India and Pakistan, many prominent Deobandi scholars migrated to Pakistan, setting up a large number of madrassas.
With the independence of India and Pakistan, the school placed its full attention on training the students within this fundamentalist Islamic tradition.
In the years and decades after the independence of Pakistan, Deobandi madrassas spread across Pakistan, and one of their principal causes of political activism became India’s treatment of Muslims in the Indian-controlled portion of Jammu and Kashmir.
According to one estimate, by 1967 there were as many as 8,000 Deobandi schools worldwide and thousands of Deobandi graduates mainly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Malaysia.
At first, the Deobandi madrassas tended to be poorly funded. One event that greatly boosted the growth of enrollment in Deobandi madrassas was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The CIA’s covert involvement in the war fueled Islamic militancy and inadvertently helped organize and orchestrate a resistance movement mostly composed of ardent religious fighters. A substantial number of these Afghan fighters were drawn from the Deobandi madrassas, especially the Pashtuns, who played a leading role in the resistance.
During that time, the Deobandi madrassas also gained financial assistance. This assistance, as scholar Thomas Hegghammer writes, came mainly through American aid dollars meant for Pakistan and money from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi leaders, in fact, used the influence of their money to push their own interpretation of Islam – Wahhabism – at the Deobandi madrassas. Wahhabism is a deeply conservative form of Islam that believes in a literal interpretation of the Quran. At this point, the Deobandi madrassas moved far away from their religious roots.
Ties of kinship
Following the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979, millions of Afghan refugees, in several waves, took shelter in Pakistan, especially in its Pashtun belt.
Keen on obtaining a strategic toehold in Afghanistan, Pakistan actively recruited young men in refugee camps, imbuing them further with religious zeal to fight the Soviets.
Driven out of their homes in Afghanistan, the dispossessed young Afghans thrived in the refugee camps, in part due to ties of ethnicity as Pashtuns. Drawn to a religiously based offensive against what they deemed to be an infidel, or foreign occupier, they became ready recruits to the anti-Soviet cause.
Many of the Taliban’s key leaders and fighters, including Mullah Omar, the founder of the organization, had studied in the Deobandi seminaries in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After the civil war
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the fighters continued to enjoy the support of Pakistan’s security establishment and private actors for financial assistance.
When Afghanistan plunged into a civil war in 1992, various factions of the anti-Soviet resistance vied for power. Among them was the Northern Alliance, a group that India and Russia had backed and was under the leadership of an ethnic Tajik, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who resisted the Taliban and acquired an almost mythic status.
However, as scholar Larry P. Goodson writes, with the crucial and substantial assistance of Pakistan’s security establishment, the Taliban emerged victorious and seized power in 1996.
Once in power, they imposed their distinctive brand of Islam on the country – far removed from its religious roots in colonial India.
The Taliban were known for their oppressive rule. They ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, at which point they were pushed out of power by U.S. and British troops. Under the Taliban rule, religious minorities and other Muslims who did not share their fundamentalist understanding of Islam were not tolerated. The Taliban also severely restricted the rights of women and girls.
As scholars who research ethno-religious conflicts in South Asia, we have studied the origins of the Taliban’s religious beliefs. The roots of this ideology – Deobandi Islam – can be traced to 19th century colonial India.
Colonialism and Islam
Deobandi Islam emerged in India in 1867, 10 years after a major Indian nationalist uprising against the rule of the British East India Company.
Two Muslims clerics, Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Maulana Rashid Muhammad Gangohi, were behind the setting up of the Deobandi school. Their aim was to indoctrinate Muslim youth with an austere, rigid and pristine vision of Islam. At its heart, Deobandi Islam was an anti-colonial movement designed to revitalize Islam.
This school of Islamic thought had a very particular understanding of the faith. The Deobandi brand of Islam adheres to orthodox Islamism insisting that the adherence to Sunni Islamic law, or sharia, is the path of salvation.
It insists on the revival of Islamic practices that go back to the seventh century – the time of the Prophet Muhammad. It upholds the notion of global jihad as a sacred duty to protect Muslims across the world, and is opposed to any non-Islamic ideas.
The first madrassa – or Islamic school – to educate Muslim youth in the Deobandi tradition was set up in the north Indian state of present-day Uttar Pradesh toward the end of the 19th century.
The Deobandi school system spread over the next several decades and attracted Muslim youth in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. For instance, the Deobandi tradition became the most popular school of Islamic thought among the Pashtuns, an ethnic group living in an area on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Pashtun leaders played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding the Deobandi curriculum and tradition in the Pashtun belt across the Durand line, the colonial border separating British India from Afghanistan.
Funding and enrollments
After British India was partitioned in 1947 between India and Pakistan, many prominent Deobandi scholars migrated to Pakistan, setting up a large number of madrassas.
With the independence of India and Pakistan, the school placed its full attention on training the students within this fundamentalist Islamic tradition.
In the years and decades after the independence of Pakistan, Deobandi madrassas spread across Pakistan, and one of their principal causes of political activism became India’s treatment of Muslims in the Indian-controlled portion of Jammu and Kashmir.
According to one estimate, by 1967 there were as many as 8,000 Deobandi schools worldwide and thousands of Deobandi graduates mainly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Malaysia.
At first, the Deobandi madrassas tended to be poorly funded. One event that greatly boosted the growth of enrollment in Deobandi madrassas was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The CIA’s covert involvement in the war fueled Islamic militancy and inadvertently helped organize and orchestrate a resistance movement mostly composed of ardent religious fighters. A substantial number of these Afghan fighters were drawn from the Deobandi madrassas, especially the Pashtuns, who played a leading role in the resistance.
During that time, the Deobandi madrassas also gained financial assistance. This assistance, as scholar Thomas Hegghammer writes, came mainly through American aid dollars meant for Pakistan and money from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi leaders, in fact, used the influence of their money to push their own interpretation of Islam – Wahhabism – at the Deobandi madrassas. Wahhabism is a deeply conservative form of Islam that believes in a literal interpretation of the Quran. At this point, the Deobandi madrassas moved far away from their religious roots.
Ties of kinship
Following the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979, millions of Afghan refugees, in several waves, took shelter in Pakistan, especially in its Pashtun belt.
Keen on obtaining a strategic toehold in Afghanistan, Pakistan actively recruited young men in refugee camps, imbuing them further with religious zeal to fight the Soviets.
Driven out of their homes in Afghanistan, the dispossessed young Afghans thrived in the refugee camps, in part due to ties of ethnicity as Pashtuns. Drawn to a religiously based offensive against what they deemed to be an infidel, or foreign occupier, they became ready recruits to the anti-Soviet cause.
Many of the Taliban’s key leaders and fighters, including Mullah Omar, the founder of the organization, had studied in the Deobandi seminaries in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After the civil war
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the fighters continued to enjoy the support of Pakistan’s security establishment and private actors for financial assistance.
When Afghanistan plunged into a civil war in 1992, various factions of the anti-Soviet resistance vied for power. Among them was the Northern Alliance, a group that India and Russia had backed and was under the leadership of an ethnic Tajik, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who resisted the Taliban and acquired an almost mythic status.
However, as scholar Larry P. Goodson writes, with the crucial and substantial assistance of Pakistan’s security establishment, the Taliban emerged victorious and seized power in 1996.
Once in power, they imposed their distinctive brand of Islam on the country – far removed from its religious roots in colonial India.
1. The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
5/10/2020
Oh, Fuck You, Trump Voters. Just Fuck You
Do you think they realize how fucking stupid they look, these man-children (and the occasional woman-child) playing soldier dress-up except with real guns who show up at these rallies to try to force states to open up while we're deep in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? It's just pathetic that they believe they seem strong when they just look like a bunch of people who have been rendered brainless from a toxic stew of oxy, Facebook conspiracy madness, and One America News. And when I say they look fucking stupid, I mean objectively stupid, as in anyone looking at them from outside the whole bullshit zeitgeist we're damned to live through would think, "That's hilarious and absurd, and, c'mon, they can't be serious."
Think about that for a second. Think of someone arriving here with no understanding of American gun culture or the fetishizing of militia chic or the condemnation of science and education or the really warped ideas of "liberty" and "tyranny," and then they see the protest yesterday in California or last week in Michigan. Think about informing that outside someone that the costume cavalry was protesting for the right to gather in large groups and go to stores and salons and they don't care if those actions end up causing mass death. Oh, and, by the way, the president of the whole goddamn country thinks they're awesome for doing it. Oh, and, by the way, that same president has refused to do anything to make the nation safer for supermarkets and salons during the two months the country was shut down.
Everything that Trump has done and is doing is fuckin' owned by his voters, and their utter refusal to believe that Trump has fucked up just about every aspect of the response to the COVID-19 crisis is on each and every one of them. They fucked up this country worse than it was already fucked up, and they will stand on a pile of corpses to bray their devotion to Trump while popping hydroxycholoroquine with bleach shooters. If that corpse pile happens to contain their family members, well, fuck, they died so the rest of us could go eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse by the highway because freedom or some such shit.
Story after story about what went wrong and what continues to go wrong with the federal coronavirus response shows that the Trump administration has screwed the pooch on it. Fuck, they screwed the pooch then turned the pooch over and screwed it again and then when that pooch was dead from all the screwing, they tossed it aside and took another pooch from the Strategic Pooch Reserve and screwed that one, going through all the pooches they could screw and then they imported pooches from China which were flawed but screwable so they screwed those. Alas, pooches. Alas, America.
See, it’s not just that you’ve been fooled, Trump voters. It’s that you stick by your foolishness. You listen to bloviating assholes loudly farting from their home studios about how you need to get out there for the good of the “economy.” You insist that everything Trump says is real, on the useless drugs, on the bullshit cures, on the supposedly fake death toll, on the masks, on the drive-thru testing centers, on the number of tests, on every fucking thing, despite the absolute proof, in a factual way, as in indisputably, that he's totally fucking lying or just making shit up.
Most contempt-worthy is the fact that you think we who haven’t drunk the tainted Diet Coke straight from Trump’s dangly nipples actually want to be in quarantine, that we want tens of millions of people out of work, that we want schools closed and restaurants closed and supermarket shelves bereft of toilet paper. No, you poor, dumb motherfuckers. We’ve lost jobs, too, and we’re sick of having nothing to do but post memes about how fucking stupid you look. But we know that the price of reopening is the likelihood of all the gains we’ve made being erased and far more death, and, well, I guess we’re just pro-life.
And it pains us, really, it pains us deep in our souls that you can’t be reasoned with. That Trump, by any measure, has failed and continues to fail at this monumental task and that the reason he has failed so enormously and tragically is because he thought the virus was just there to spoil his chances at reelection. He is going to toss out truth and reality and replace it with everything filtered through his selfishness, his avarice, and his unending, crazed belief in his own superiority. Yet you'll just go the fuck along with it. It's fucking sad, man. The deepest wells of Obama worship never even came close to the cultish, mindless Trump veneration. I mean, c'mon, Trump refuses to wear a mask, but his campaign is going to start selling official MAGA masks. That's how stupid he thinks you are. That's how cynical this whole thing is.
And you know what else pains us? It’s that it would have been so ludicrously easy for Trump to have been the big shot hero, ordering companies to produce swabs and masks, amping up testing far exceeding any other country (for real, not in his fantasy world), demanding Congress pass funding for salaries so everyone could keep their jobs, and telling people to stay home. He could have led a genuinely positive national reawakening of community and patriotic service. He's not actually capable of that, but he could have faked it, like he's faked being a successful businessman.
And what pains us even more? You credulous simpletons would have bought into it whole hog. And you would derided anyone telling you to go back to work as an unpatriotic dick who just wants Trump supporters to die. Your media would have said that Trump was the greatest man who cares so much about us that he's willing to sacrifice the economy for your lives. In other words, you have no beliefs. You only have Trump. Goddamn, how empty you must be to think that's all you need.
Trump has wrecked our alliances and degraded our country to the point that the world thinks we’re just a pathetic vestige of our former selves, worthy of pity and derision, and that’s because of you, and you’re so full up with gobbling his shit that you don’t even think that matters as long as he lets you be openly racist and keeps owning the libtards, which means “anyone who doesn’t gobble shit from the MAGA trough in Donald Trump’s pig pen." It’s too bad. We could have used the help of the world, which, even in good times, we do need to buy our goods or your job is in permanent jeopardy. (Which, to be fair, it already is.)
You just don't believe in what the country ever aspired to be, to the world and to itself. Instead of believing scientists and doctors, you believe TV bullshit artists like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Rush “How the fuck is he still a thing?” Limbaugh, agreeing with Trump that popularity somehow equals depth and knowledge. Instead of people qualified to lead an effort, you think that feckless pricks like Jared fuckin’ Kushner are true polymath visionaries and not just vile charlatans and egomaniacs. Instead of seeking those who have earned the right to lead you, you turn to Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., a devolved version of his devolved father, a pile of shit that has dried out.
This is all on you. You’re fucking adults, for fuck’s sake, and I just won’t treat you like children who need to be forgiven and hope you learned your lesson. You decided to overlook Trump’s blatant greed and corruption. You decided that someone accused of more than a dozen rapes and sexual assaults, including multiple under oath allegations, is just a jocular party guy you wanna hang with. You decided that it was better to spend money on his trips to golf and on tax cuts for the wealthy than on roads and health care and fucking pandemic preparation.
I know that we’re supposed to feel some kind of pity for you, that you’ve spent decades being inundated with talk radio and Fox “news” and YouTube videos and conspiracy mongers and politicians and preachers who either believe this shit or fake it because they know how easily you’re manipulated. You have been hit hard by the wealth disparity in the nation, with shitty jobs for shitty pay and shitty people telling you that your shitty job for shitty pay is somehow honorable and that it’s better that you suffer than government take care of your medical needs. You would rather walk around with your guns and your camo and pretend you're free than admit how much Trump has fucked you over. And when he's no longer president, you'll whine about how it's all rigged and unfair, echoes of his miserable voice. Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for you.
Fuck that. And fuck you. You are to blame for this madness and this death. You did this to our country. You made this decision. You won't see what's right before your eyes. You proudly refuse to take off your orange-tinted glasses with the sphincter-shaped lenses. So you're into it. You're good with it. You don't care how many people are hurt, how many people die, how many people suffer. You're good with it. As long as you can blame anyone but the wealthy in this country for every fucking misery, you're good with it. As long as the racism continues, you're good with it.
You decided that Trump isn’t evil. Or else you decided that he is evil and you just fuckin’ like being evil.
Think about that for a second. Think of someone arriving here with no understanding of American gun culture or the fetishizing of militia chic or the condemnation of science and education or the really warped ideas of "liberty" and "tyranny," and then they see the protest yesterday in California or last week in Michigan. Think about informing that outside someone that the costume cavalry was protesting for the right to gather in large groups and go to stores and salons and they don't care if those actions end up causing mass death. Oh, and, by the way, the president of the whole goddamn country thinks they're awesome for doing it. Oh, and, by the way, that same president has refused to do anything to make the nation safer for supermarkets and salons during the two months the country was shut down.
Everything that Trump has done and is doing is fuckin' owned by his voters, and their utter refusal to believe that Trump has fucked up just about every aspect of the response to the COVID-19 crisis is on each and every one of them. They fucked up this country worse than it was already fucked up, and they will stand on a pile of corpses to bray their devotion to Trump while popping hydroxycholoroquine with bleach shooters. If that corpse pile happens to contain their family members, well, fuck, they died so the rest of us could go eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse by the highway because freedom or some such shit.
Story after story about what went wrong and what continues to go wrong with the federal coronavirus response shows that the Trump administration has screwed the pooch on it. Fuck, they screwed the pooch then turned the pooch over and screwed it again and then when that pooch was dead from all the screwing, they tossed it aside and took another pooch from the Strategic Pooch Reserve and screwed that one, going through all the pooches they could screw and then they imported pooches from China which were flawed but screwable so they screwed those. Alas, pooches. Alas, America.
See, it’s not just that you’ve been fooled, Trump voters. It’s that you stick by your foolishness. You listen to bloviating assholes loudly farting from their home studios about how you need to get out there for the good of the “economy.” You insist that everything Trump says is real, on the useless drugs, on the bullshit cures, on the supposedly fake death toll, on the masks, on the drive-thru testing centers, on the number of tests, on every fucking thing, despite the absolute proof, in a factual way, as in indisputably, that he's totally fucking lying or just making shit up.
Most contempt-worthy is the fact that you think we who haven’t drunk the tainted Diet Coke straight from Trump’s dangly nipples actually want to be in quarantine, that we want tens of millions of people out of work, that we want schools closed and restaurants closed and supermarket shelves bereft of toilet paper. No, you poor, dumb motherfuckers. We’ve lost jobs, too, and we’re sick of having nothing to do but post memes about how fucking stupid you look. But we know that the price of reopening is the likelihood of all the gains we’ve made being erased and far more death, and, well, I guess we’re just pro-life.
And it pains us, really, it pains us deep in our souls that you can’t be reasoned with. That Trump, by any measure, has failed and continues to fail at this monumental task and that the reason he has failed so enormously and tragically is because he thought the virus was just there to spoil his chances at reelection. He is going to toss out truth and reality and replace it with everything filtered through his selfishness, his avarice, and his unending, crazed belief in his own superiority. Yet you'll just go the fuck along with it. It's fucking sad, man. The deepest wells of Obama worship never even came close to the cultish, mindless Trump veneration. I mean, c'mon, Trump refuses to wear a mask, but his campaign is going to start selling official MAGA masks. That's how stupid he thinks you are. That's how cynical this whole thing is.
And you know what else pains us? It’s that it would have been so ludicrously easy for Trump to have been the big shot hero, ordering companies to produce swabs and masks, amping up testing far exceeding any other country (for real, not in his fantasy world), demanding Congress pass funding for salaries so everyone could keep their jobs, and telling people to stay home. He could have led a genuinely positive national reawakening of community and patriotic service. He's not actually capable of that, but he could have faked it, like he's faked being a successful businessman.
And what pains us even more? You credulous simpletons would have bought into it whole hog. And you would derided anyone telling you to go back to work as an unpatriotic dick who just wants Trump supporters to die. Your media would have said that Trump was the greatest man who cares so much about us that he's willing to sacrifice the economy for your lives. In other words, you have no beliefs. You only have Trump. Goddamn, how empty you must be to think that's all you need.
Trump has wrecked our alliances and degraded our country to the point that the world thinks we’re just a pathetic vestige of our former selves, worthy of pity and derision, and that’s because of you, and you’re so full up with gobbling his shit that you don’t even think that matters as long as he lets you be openly racist and keeps owning the libtards, which means “anyone who doesn’t gobble shit from the MAGA trough in Donald Trump’s pig pen." It’s too bad. We could have used the help of the world, which, even in good times, we do need to buy our goods or your job is in permanent jeopardy. (Which, to be fair, it already is.)
You just don't believe in what the country ever aspired to be, to the world and to itself. Instead of believing scientists and doctors, you believe TV bullshit artists like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Rush “How the fuck is he still a thing?” Limbaugh, agreeing with Trump that popularity somehow equals depth and knowledge. Instead of people qualified to lead an effort, you think that feckless pricks like Jared fuckin’ Kushner are true polymath visionaries and not just vile charlatans and egomaniacs. Instead of seeking those who have earned the right to lead you, you turn to Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., a devolved version of his devolved father, a pile of shit that has dried out.
This is all on you. You’re fucking adults, for fuck’s sake, and I just won’t treat you like children who need to be forgiven and hope you learned your lesson. You decided to overlook Trump’s blatant greed and corruption. You decided that someone accused of more than a dozen rapes and sexual assaults, including multiple under oath allegations, is just a jocular party guy you wanna hang with. You decided that it was better to spend money on his trips to golf and on tax cuts for the wealthy than on roads and health care and fucking pandemic preparation.
I know that we’re supposed to feel some kind of pity for you, that you’ve spent decades being inundated with talk radio and Fox “news” and YouTube videos and conspiracy mongers and politicians and preachers who either believe this shit or fake it because they know how easily you’re manipulated. You have been hit hard by the wealth disparity in the nation, with shitty jobs for shitty pay and shitty people telling you that your shitty job for shitty pay is somehow honorable and that it’s better that you suffer than government take care of your medical needs. You would rather walk around with your guns and your camo and pretend you're free than admit how much Trump has fucked you over. And when he's no longer president, you'll whine about how it's all rigged and unfair, echoes of his miserable voice. Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for you.
Fuck that. And fuck you. You are to blame for this madness and this death. You did this to our country. You made this decision. You won't see what's right before your eyes. You proudly refuse to take off your orange-tinted glasses with the sphincter-shaped lenses. So you're into it. You're good with it. You don't care how many people are hurt, how many people die, how many people suffer. You're good with it. As long as you can blame anyone but the wealthy in this country for every fucking misery, you're good with it. As long as the racism continues, you're good with it.
You decided that Trump isn’t evil. Or else you decided that he is evil and you just fuckin’ like being evil.
2. op - ed: The Slave Trade Used to Be Legal. Let’s Not Glorify the Law.
BY William C. Anderson, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 18, 2020
Throughout the history of Black America, progress has often required breaking the law. For this reason, it’s worth questioning why, in sanitized mainstream narratives (for example, those shared in schools and government functions during Black History Month), the story of Black struggle is often divorced from incendiary, illegal acts. Most Black people in the United States are descended from enslaved Africans, and being Black in this country has never been wholly separated from that history. In fact, it still haunts us daily as we navigate its afterlife. This is a legacy that was demarcated by restrictions that continually pierced the everyday experience of living. For many Black people during the time of slavery, to be free was illegal itself — and in many ways, that reality has extended into every era following “emancipation.” Since then, the necessity of extralegal acts has continued for a people still constantly being ensnared by a society stacked against them.
Of course, Black people have often used U.S. law as a tool to make gains which often extended to many others. Activists have sued and otherwise challenged institutions in court throughout history to great effect. For example, thanks to the legal battles of the N.A.A.C.P., Black people saw significant gains on this front in cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Guinn v. United States. Landmark legislation has resulted in significant changes for Black Americans, thanks to the efforts of organizers. For instance, the victorious Brown v. Board of Education ruling laid important foundations for the civil rights movement that encouraged other organizing leading up to the passage of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act. Yet, racism is encoded in laws that criminalize poverty and other conditions Black people disproportionately experience. In a sense, that much remains like it always has been. The law is a shaky foundation to rest on, particularly for Black people and other marginalized communities.
However, we’re now in a historical moment when the racist and anti-Black president is, understandably, condemned as an affront to legality. Donald Trump’s first term saw the most lawsuits against a presidential administration in decades. “We’ll see you in court” has become a catchy utterance for organizations challenging Trump’s egregious attacks on the environment, immigration, civil and human rights. Witnessing the mockery of an impeachment trial during this presidency has exposed yet again that the law is unevenly applied, and that those with power are often able to break the law at will with no consequences. The law bends, twists and moves itself for many reasons.
As such, we’ve seen victorious attacks on landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act and a slew of other rollbacks over the past several years. These regressive legal developments should remind us that white supremacy is a constant within the legal institutions of the nation. That which is blatantly discriminatory has to go to court and be argued against because in the United States, it’s fair game to argue in court that those who are oppressed deserve their oppression.
The denial of pain and violence experienced by the oppressed is part of the dominant white supremacist culture. Were it not, we would never have had to go to court in the first place to plead for our human rights. The establishment has gradually eased the tensions of an ever-changing society so contentious issues didn’t turn into uncontrollable uprisings many times before. This is often the purpose of reform — to stave off revolution, to uphold the current legal system. An assumption that the courts will deliver “justice” — simply by upholding the law — regularly ignores the fact that Black people have never known such a thing, because our historic victories are perpetually under attack.
In fact, consider the fact that the Constitution of the United States, often viewed as the ultimate basis for meting out justice, is a racist document in its origins. The European Enlightenment values embedded in the Constitution did not extend to Black people at its inception and still struggle to do so completely now. The Constitution is embraced in a bipartisan fashion and used for whatever means either side hopes to gain from it. Like interpretations of a holy text in a religion, the definite meanings of these laws and prescriptions are continually up for debate based on who is interpreting them and what side they’re on. This debate goes on ad nauseum, and is increasingly disillusioning for a populace weary of slow gains via trickle-down legal changes.
As per this country’s first laws, Black people were not meant to be citizens and our continued disenfranchisement is a constant reminder. From the fugitive resistance to slavery to the civil rights sit-ins against Jim Crow and the armed self-defense of the Black Power movement, many of our causes have involved battling institutions — not uprooting illegality, but uprooting injustices embedded within the law itself. What Black people have had to do in order to confront those injustices has often been illegal, from defending against police brutality to stealing food to occupying living spaces. Many have died along the way, because the white supremacist institutions leave us with no choice but utter defiance.
Thus, we should be warned by history not to overemphasize legality — or condemn all “lawlessness” — in our arguments for justice and our work in fighting oppression. To be clear, if a cop can kill you because they feel like it and you always “fit the description” of their target, you are not protected by the law. Why invest ourselves in protecting what does not protect us?
The history of Black resistance has always meant breaking the law, because unjust laws do not deserve our respect or obedience. Knowing that our enslavement, deprivation and segregation were all legal should inform our current choices about when and how to engage with the law. In order to achieve what’s been gained, laws have had to be broken and they will continue to need to be broken. We have had to be intolerant of the systems that oppress us and strive for a new reality — a reality in which oppressive systems are abolished.
As we reflect during this Black History Month, never forget we have always had to rebel, revolt and rise up against the law itself — not simply rely on it.
Of course, Black people have often used U.S. law as a tool to make gains which often extended to many others. Activists have sued and otherwise challenged institutions in court throughout history to great effect. For example, thanks to the legal battles of the N.A.A.C.P., Black people saw significant gains on this front in cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Guinn v. United States. Landmark legislation has resulted in significant changes for Black Americans, thanks to the efforts of organizers. For instance, the victorious Brown v. Board of Education ruling laid important foundations for the civil rights movement that encouraged other organizing leading up to the passage of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act. Yet, racism is encoded in laws that criminalize poverty and other conditions Black people disproportionately experience. In a sense, that much remains like it always has been. The law is a shaky foundation to rest on, particularly for Black people and other marginalized communities.
However, we’re now in a historical moment when the racist and anti-Black president is, understandably, condemned as an affront to legality. Donald Trump’s first term saw the most lawsuits against a presidential administration in decades. “We’ll see you in court” has become a catchy utterance for organizations challenging Trump’s egregious attacks on the environment, immigration, civil and human rights. Witnessing the mockery of an impeachment trial during this presidency has exposed yet again that the law is unevenly applied, and that those with power are often able to break the law at will with no consequences. The law bends, twists and moves itself for many reasons.
As such, we’ve seen victorious attacks on landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act and a slew of other rollbacks over the past several years. These regressive legal developments should remind us that white supremacy is a constant within the legal institutions of the nation. That which is blatantly discriminatory has to go to court and be argued against because in the United States, it’s fair game to argue in court that those who are oppressed deserve their oppression.
The denial of pain and violence experienced by the oppressed is part of the dominant white supremacist culture. Were it not, we would never have had to go to court in the first place to plead for our human rights. The establishment has gradually eased the tensions of an ever-changing society so contentious issues didn’t turn into uncontrollable uprisings many times before. This is often the purpose of reform — to stave off revolution, to uphold the current legal system. An assumption that the courts will deliver “justice” — simply by upholding the law — regularly ignores the fact that Black people have never known such a thing, because our historic victories are perpetually under attack.
In fact, consider the fact that the Constitution of the United States, often viewed as the ultimate basis for meting out justice, is a racist document in its origins. The European Enlightenment values embedded in the Constitution did not extend to Black people at its inception and still struggle to do so completely now. The Constitution is embraced in a bipartisan fashion and used for whatever means either side hopes to gain from it. Like interpretations of a holy text in a religion, the definite meanings of these laws and prescriptions are continually up for debate based on who is interpreting them and what side they’re on. This debate goes on ad nauseum, and is increasingly disillusioning for a populace weary of slow gains via trickle-down legal changes.
As per this country’s first laws, Black people were not meant to be citizens and our continued disenfranchisement is a constant reminder. From the fugitive resistance to slavery to the civil rights sit-ins against Jim Crow and the armed self-defense of the Black Power movement, many of our causes have involved battling institutions — not uprooting illegality, but uprooting injustices embedded within the law itself. What Black people have had to do in order to confront those injustices has often been illegal, from defending against police brutality to stealing food to occupying living spaces. Many have died along the way, because the white supremacist institutions leave us with no choice but utter defiance.
Thus, we should be warned by history not to overemphasize legality — or condemn all “lawlessness” — in our arguments for justice and our work in fighting oppression. To be clear, if a cop can kill you because they feel like it and you always “fit the description” of their target, you are not protected by the law. Why invest ourselves in protecting what does not protect us?
The history of Black resistance has always meant breaking the law, because unjust laws do not deserve our respect or obedience. Knowing that our enslavement, deprivation and segregation were all legal should inform our current choices about when and how to engage with the law. In order to achieve what’s been gained, laws have had to be broken and they will continue to need to be broken. We have had to be intolerant of the systems that oppress us and strive for a new reality — a reality in which oppressive systems are abolished.
As we reflect during this Black History Month, never forget we have always had to rebel, revolt and rise up against the law itself — not simply rely on it.
3. Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times — compared to what's coming next"
Author of "America: The Farewell Tour": We're heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - salon
APRIL 28, 2020 11:00AM (UTC)
Empires fall a little bit at a time and then all at once. Over the last two decades, America has proven itself to be well along on that journey. The coronavirus pandemic has simply pushed our nation further along that downward spiral.
Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.
The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.
Writing at the Atlantic, George Packer described this woeful state of affairs:
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.
---
In this conversation, Hedges warns that the tumult and pain of Trump's coronavirus crisis is but a preview of far worse things in America's future, as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.
Hedges also explains how the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will likely not be able to respond to the Age of Trump and the economic and social destruction created by gangster capitalism, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic. Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.
---
How does a society change so fast?
A society can change so quickly because the underlying structures are rotten. There is the patina or the veneer of a functioning system, but the foundations of it are so decayed that they can't take the stress. That was true in the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the Nazis took full control. That was true in Yugoslavia before the civil war and ethnic violence. It is true here in the United States too. This country cannot withstand the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond the obviousness of what the Republicans are doing, the Democratic Party's response to this crisis exemplifies the problems America is facing as a whole.
Twelve hundred dollars to individuals suffering during this crisis is not sufficient. The Democrats were only really trying to block the equivalent of a $500 billion slush fund that is going into Mnuchin's hands, a man who acts like a criminal. That $1,200 is going to get vacuumed right up by the credit card companies and the banks who hold the mortgages.
This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves. What happened in 2008? The plutocrats and the corporations gave themselves massive stock bonuses and other income and returns. I do not see how the United States is going to avoid another Great Depression, which in turn will lead to a further consolidation of power by an authoritarian, oligarchic elite. Those elites are not really worried about the coronavirus pandemic because they will have their own ventilators and private medical staff and all the other things that they need to survive. The average person will be left to take care of themselves.
The president, his party, the corporate overlords and Trump's Christian nationalist cult are now telling the American people to go out and risk death from the novel coronavirus as an act of "patriotism" and "love" for the economy.
I would also add that huge numbers of people are going to die unnecessarily. Profit is always the most important thing for the oligarchs, and because of Fox News and other right-wing outlets a significant portion of the American public will downplay the severity and dangers of the coronavirus. Quite predictably, there is an accompanying spike in racist attacks against Chinese-Americans or any people of Asian descent.
I think the pandemic and the response to it could lead us into virtually uncharted territory within the United States because as things deteriorate, the violence against nonwhites and other groups who are demonized by Trump and the right wing will increase. The desire for an authoritarian solution will grow more pronounced. I remember speaking to Fritz Stern, the great scholar of fascism, who himself fled Nazi Germany as a teenager. He said that in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word "fascism" was invented. We already see that yearning in America. The coronavirus crisis will make that yearning even more pronounced.
---
Watching Trump stand before the country and speak about the coronavirus pandemic while he is flanked by corporate CEOs — never mind how Trump has filled the government with people from some of the world's largest corporations — really speaks to how the country is a naked plutocracy. The elites do not even try to hide it anymore.
The oligarchs don't care about democracy. They don't care about truth. They are not interested in the consent of the governed. They could care less about social and income inequality. They are not going to rein in the surveillance state. In fact, as things deteriorate, the surveillance state going to expand. The oligarchs do not care about job losses because, as Marx said, unemployment creates greater pools of desperate surplus labor. The oligarchs do not care about the climate. It's all about the primacy of profit and corporate power — and those values and systems are extinguishing our democracy.
And of course, they are all thrilled that nobody can go out in the streets because of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to win back an American democracy.
America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly. A person can either vote for nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists on one end, or a person can vote for people who speak in the language of tolerance and are willing to put gay people or women or people of color into positions of power as long as they serve the system. Of course, that is the role that Barack Obama fulfilled at the expense of the American people.
American society is in crisis, and in decline. As you point out, the coronavirus, in combination with Trump's authoritarian, neofascist movement are just symptoms of a deep societal rot. Where do we go from here?
Let's take Biden. What does it mean to vote for Joe Biden? He has this kind of goofy persona which some people find charming. What is Biden's record? What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?
The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal.
You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.
That's what you're voting for.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for more of the same. The ruling elites would prefer Joe Biden, just like they preferred Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is vulgar and an embarrassment. But the ruling elites also made it abundantly clear about their interests: Many of these people were quoted by name saying that if Bernie Sanders was the nominee — or even Elizabeth Warren — they would vote for Donald Trump.
---
My response has been that this is too hopeful and borders on the delusional. One, there is no guarantee that there will even be a presidential election in 2020. Trump and the Republican Party are experts at vote-rigging and other ways of cheating to steal elections and subvert democracy. After the coronavirus crisis recedes, I believe that Trump may very well be even more powerful because he leads a cult and will proclaim that he led the country to "victory" over the virus.
Liberal elites offer hope that is not grounded in an understanding of political reality. I do not believe that Joe Biden will necessarily be able to win against Trump. Biden is an extremely weak candidate because he represents the neoliberal gangster capitalist policies that the Democratic Party has embraced and that so many Americans are revolting against.
James Baldwin explained why black people don't have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children. By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs. That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.
Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.
The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.
Writing at the Atlantic, George Packer described this woeful state of affairs:
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.
---
In this conversation, Hedges warns that the tumult and pain of Trump's coronavirus crisis is but a preview of far worse things in America's future, as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.
Hedges also explains how the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will likely not be able to respond to the Age of Trump and the economic and social destruction created by gangster capitalism, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic. Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.
---
How does a society change so fast?
A society can change so quickly because the underlying structures are rotten. There is the patina or the veneer of a functioning system, but the foundations of it are so decayed that they can't take the stress. That was true in the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the Nazis took full control. That was true in Yugoslavia before the civil war and ethnic violence. It is true here in the United States too. This country cannot withstand the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond the obviousness of what the Republicans are doing, the Democratic Party's response to this crisis exemplifies the problems America is facing as a whole.
Twelve hundred dollars to individuals suffering during this crisis is not sufficient. The Democrats were only really trying to block the equivalent of a $500 billion slush fund that is going into Mnuchin's hands, a man who acts like a criminal. That $1,200 is going to get vacuumed right up by the credit card companies and the banks who hold the mortgages.
This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves. What happened in 2008? The plutocrats and the corporations gave themselves massive stock bonuses and other income and returns. I do not see how the United States is going to avoid another Great Depression, which in turn will lead to a further consolidation of power by an authoritarian, oligarchic elite. Those elites are not really worried about the coronavirus pandemic because they will have their own ventilators and private medical staff and all the other things that they need to survive. The average person will be left to take care of themselves.
The president, his party, the corporate overlords and Trump's Christian nationalist cult are now telling the American people to go out and risk death from the novel coronavirus as an act of "patriotism" and "love" for the economy.
I would also add that huge numbers of people are going to die unnecessarily. Profit is always the most important thing for the oligarchs, and because of Fox News and other right-wing outlets a significant portion of the American public will downplay the severity and dangers of the coronavirus. Quite predictably, there is an accompanying spike in racist attacks against Chinese-Americans or any people of Asian descent.
I think the pandemic and the response to it could lead us into virtually uncharted territory within the United States because as things deteriorate, the violence against nonwhites and other groups who are demonized by Trump and the right wing will increase. The desire for an authoritarian solution will grow more pronounced. I remember speaking to Fritz Stern, the great scholar of fascism, who himself fled Nazi Germany as a teenager. He said that in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word "fascism" was invented. We already see that yearning in America. The coronavirus crisis will make that yearning even more pronounced.
---
Watching Trump stand before the country and speak about the coronavirus pandemic while he is flanked by corporate CEOs — never mind how Trump has filled the government with people from some of the world's largest corporations — really speaks to how the country is a naked plutocracy. The elites do not even try to hide it anymore.
The oligarchs don't care about democracy. They don't care about truth. They are not interested in the consent of the governed. They could care less about social and income inequality. They are not going to rein in the surveillance state. In fact, as things deteriorate, the surveillance state going to expand. The oligarchs do not care about job losses because, as Marx said, unemployment creates greater pools of desperate surplus labor. The oligarchs do not care about the climate. It's all about the primacy of profit and corporate power — and those values and systems are extinguishing our democracy.
And of course, they are all thrilled that nobody can go out in the streets because of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to win back an American democracy.
America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly. A person can either vote for nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists on one end, or a person can vote for people who speak in the language of tolerance and are willing to put gay people or women or people of color into positions of power as long as they serve the system. Of course, that is the role that Barack Obama fulfilled at the expense of the American people.
American society is in crisis, and in decline. As you point out, the coronavirus, in combination with Trump's authoritarian, neofascist movement are just symptoms of a deep societal rot. Where do we go from here?
Let's take Biden. What does it mean to vote for Joe Biden? He has this kind of goofy persona which some people find charming. What is Biden's record? What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?
The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal.
You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.
That's what you're voting for.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for more of the same. The ruling elites would prefer Joe Biden, just like they preferred Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is vulgar and an embarrassment. But the ruling elites also made it abundantly clear about their interests: Many of these people were quoted by name saying that if Bernie Sanders was the nominee — or even Elizabeth Warren — they would vote for Donald Trump.
---
My response has been that this is too hopeful and borders on the delusional. One, there is no guarantee that there will even be a presidential election in 2020. Trump and the Republican Party are experts at vote-rigging and other ways of cheating to steal elections and subvert democracy. After the coronavirus crisis recedes, I believe that Trump may very well be even more powerful because he leads a cult and will proclaim that he led the country to "victory" over the virus.
Liberal elites offer hope that is not grounded in an understanding of political reality. I do not believe that Joe Biden will necessarily be able to win against Trump. Biden is an extremely weak candidate because he represents the neoliberal gangster capitalist policies that the Democratic Party has embraced and that so many Americans are revolting against.
James Baldwin explained why black people don't have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children. By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs. That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.
4. Government Debts as Class Swindles
by Richard Wolff | the smirking chimp
February 1, 2020 - 6:21am
In modern capitalism, governments routinely borrow money. They do this to finance budget deficits that occur when governments raise less in taxes than they spend. Governments also borrow to invest in long-term projects of economic development. The swindling occurs when the lenders and borrowers—usually private financiers and career politicians—negotiate loans that serve their own particular interests at the expense of the taxpayers who eventually cover the costs of repaying the government’s loans plus interest on them.
If governments raised enough taxes to cover their desired levels of spending, they would not need to borrow. Taxes imposed on the wealthiest corporations and individuals would be the most equitable strategy. The corporate wealthy protest, of course, threatening that if taxed, they might reduce their contributions to the economy (investing less, etc.). Most government politicians sympathize with those protests. Many come from the ranks of the wealthiest corporations and individuals (or aspire to join them). They share similar ideologies and depend on campaign donations from them. Compliant politicians typically exaggerate the negative aspects of taxing corporations and the rich. They rarely compare them to the negative effects of the alternatives: taxing middle and lower income people more or cutting government spending.
Government borrowing to cover budget deficits has its own negative effects on the economy. Many variables influence the impacts of taxes and deficit borrowing. Because those variables’ effects cannot be known or measured for years into the future, no one can know which is better or worse for the economy in the long run. When the corporate rich and their political allies stress the negative effects of taxes on the rich they usually carefully neglect the other side of the story as when advertisers mention only the positive side of whatever they are paid to promote. Their goals are simply more profits and less taxes.
The class swindle goes deeper than one-sided untruths about taxes. This becomes clear when we identify who lends to borrowing governments. Banks, big corporations, the 5% wealthiest individuals and other governments are the chief lenders. They are the same economic groups (excepting foreign governments) that press for and get tax cuts such as the Trump/GOP tax reduction of December 2017. That particular tax cut increased the federal budget deficit to over $ 1 trillion in 2019. The same politicians who facilitate tax reductions for banks, big corporations, and the wealthiest individuals likewise then facilitate government borrowing money from them.
The class swindle embedded in government borrowing is the none-too-subtle mechanism whereby the richest sectors of modern capitalism avoid or replace taxes levied on them with interest-bearing loans to the same government. What a deal for the rich who thus exchange taxes (assets lost) for loans (assets and income gained)! And what a deal for their political servants: leaders who can spend more to buy votes and secure donations without having to tax anybody because they can borrow instead. And by the time the mass of taxpayers watching all this grasps the swindle perpetrated on them, those leaders have moved up their political ladders. Their replacements will then respond to popular anger by ostentatiously raising taxes less or maybe even cutting them in favor of, yet again, borrowing. As this can gets kicked down the road, its explosive potential builds.
Deficit finance—the polite veneer for this swindle—deepens inequality in the United States and everywhere else it is practiced. It redistributes wealth from the mass of people (taxpayers) to the richest who “save” by means of lower taxes and then “invest” those “savings” in government loans. In transferring money from the many to a few, deficit finance operates like a lottery.
A different but parallel sort of swindle occurs when governments, especially in “emerging economies” (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and so on), borrow from banks and other lenders in the “advanced industrial economies.” Here the perpetrators are, on the one side, bankers and other lenders eager to make profitable loans to foreign governments. On the other side are government politicians eager to borrow. The latters’ eagerness flows from two sources. The first is the need to secure their political careers by funding economic development projects that could not otherwise occur because those politicians fear the electoral results of using taxes to pay for the projects. The second is their ability to divert, legally or otherwise, sizable portions of the loans they procure to finance themselves and their parties in addition to (or even instead of) their development projects.
These lenders and borrowers gather easily in expensive hotels to negotiate wondrous “development loans” nicely serving both their needs. The loans are backed, of course, by the borrowing country’s ability to tax its citizens and/or sell its natural resources and/or sell its government operations to pay off the loans and the interest on them. Given such loans’ high profitability, they can and often do run for years before outraged local citizens revolt and refuse to keep paying. Then the country declares bankruptcy amid threats and lamentations on all sides. Eventually, what remains of the loan is partly or wholly forgiven. No problem: the lenders’ profits were already reaped, the career benefits achieved. Soon the whole process begins again.
The organization and manipulation of government debts (to finance budget deficits and development projects) have been core components of world capitalism’s real history for centuries. The system fosters those swindles. The system also rejects or ignores the critics of those swindles including Modern Monetary Theorists, Marxists, and “populists” of varying persuasions. Change comes when finally the swindle’s critics and its victims merge to end it.
If governments raised enough taxes to cover their desired levels of spending, they would not need to borrow. Taxes imposed on the wealthiest corporations and individuals would be the most equitable strategy. The corporate wealthy protest, of course, threatening that if taxed, they might reduce their contributions to the economy (investing less, etc.). Most government politicians sympathize with those protests. Many come from the ranks of the wealthiest corporations and individuals (or aspire to join them). They share similar ideologies and depend on campaign donations from them. Compliant politicians typically exaggerate the negative aspects of taxing corporations and the rich. They rarely compare them to the negative effects of the alternatives: taxing middle and lower income people more or cutting government spending.
Government borrowing to cover budget deficits has its own negative effects on the economy. Many variables influence the impacts of taxes and deficit borrowing. Because those variables’ effects cannot be known or measured for years into the future, no one can know which is better or worse for the economy in the long run. When the corporate rich and their political allies stress the negative effects of taxes on the rich they usually carefully neglect the other side of the story as when advertisers mention only the positive side of whatever they are paid to promote. Their goals are simply more profits and less taxes.
The class swindle goes deeper than one-sided untruths about taxes. This becomes clear when we identify who lends to borrowing governments. Banks, big corporations, the 5% wealthiest individuals and other governments are the chief lenders. They are the same economic groups (excepting foreign governments) that press for and get tax cuts such as the Trump/GOP tax reduction of December 2017. That particular tax cut increased the federal budget deficit to over $ 1 trillion in 2019. The same politicians who facilitate tax reductions for banks, big corporations, and the wealthiest individuals likewise then facilitate government borrowing money from them.
The class swindle embedded in government borrowing is the none-too-subtle mechanism whereby the richest sectors of modern capitalism avoid or replace taxes levied on them with interest-bearing loans to the same government. What a deal for the rich who thus exchange taxes (assets lost) for loans (assets and income gained)! And what a deal for their political servants: leaders who can spend more to buy votes and secure donations without having to tax anybody because they can borrow instead. And by the time the mass of taxpayers watching all this grasps the swindle perpetrated on them, those leaders have moved up their political ladders. Their replacements will then respond to popular anger by ostentatiously raising taxes less or maybe even cutting them in favor of, yet again, borrowing. As this can gets kicked down the road, its explosive potential builds.
Deficit finance—the polite veneer for this swindle—deepens inequality in the United States and everywhere else it is practiced. It redistributes wealth from the mass of people (taxpayers) to the richest who “save” by means of lower taxes and then “invest” those “savings” in government loans. In transferring money from the many to a few, deficit finance operates like a lottery.
A different but parallel sort of swindle occurs when governments, especially in “emerging economies” (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and so on), borrow from banks and other lenders in the “advanced industrial economies.” Here the perpetrators are, on the one side, bankers and other lenders eager to make profitable loans to foreign governments. On the other side are government politicians eager to borrow. The latters’ eagerness flows from two sources. The first is the need to secure their political careers by funding economic development projects that could not otherwise occur because those politicians fear the electoral results of using taxes to pay for the projects. The second is their ability to divert, legally or otherwise, sizable portions of the loans they procure to finance themselves and their parties in addition to (or even instead of) their development projects.
These lenders and borrowers gather easily in expensive hotels to negotiate wondrous “development loans” nicely serving both their needs. The loans are backed, of course, by the borrowing country’s ability to tax its citizens and/or sell its natural resources and/or sell its government operations to pay off the loans and the interest on them. Given such loans’ high profitability, they can and often do run for years before outraged local citizens revolt and refuse to keep paying. Then the country declares bankruptcy amid threats and lamentations on all sides. Eventually, what remains of the loan is partly or wholly forgiven. No problem: the lenders’ profits were already reaped, the career benefits achieved. Soon the whole process begins again.
The organization and manipulation of government debts (to finance budget deficits and development projects) have been core components of world capitalism’s real history for centuries. The system fosters those swindles. The system also rejects or ignores the critics of those swindles including Modern Monetary Theorists, Marxists, and “populists” of varying persuasions. Change comes when finally the swindle’s critics and its victims merge to end it.
5. You Might Be a Racist if….
by Jaime O'Neill | THE SMIRKING CHIMP
May 18, 2020
Younger people won't remember, but several decades back, there was a comedian named Jeff Foxworthy who made a splash and no small amount of change with a series of books and other merch predicated on different punchlines for the same joke. His schtick was (and is) built on jokes that are set up with the words: You Might Be a Redneck If…
For example.
You might be a redneck if…you ever mow your lawn and find a car.
You might be a redneck if… you ever took out a loan to finance a tattoo.
You may be a redneck if… you have spent more on your pickup truck than on your education.
You might be a redneck if…you ever got too drunk to fish.
And so on, in that vein. Interminably. You might be a redneck yourself if you went to the comedy shows where this stuff was dispensed because you just couldn't get enough of that joke, in Indian casinos around the country, for instance, or in venues like those found in Branson, Missouri. Yucks for yokels.
Foxworthy found a comedy niche. He was later joined by Ron White and others who pandered to the rednecks who took pride in the stereotypes about how loutish, lazy, and stupid they were. You may or may not be surprised that there was a big overlap between the audience for this stuff and the yahoos who attended Trump rallies, cheering every Obama slur or chanting "Lock her up" on cue. They mostly laughed at the shock of recognition. How does this guy, they wondered, know Bubba, that guy who lives down the road from me? You know, the one that bought meth from ma a time or two?
Just for the hell of it, how about we change the word "redneck" to "racist." And yeah, I know those two words are virtual synonyms. But not exactly. There are racists who aren't rednecks and rednecks who aren't racists.
So let's just see who we are, shall we?
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST If…President Obama's wife had posed naked in lots of soft porn pics and you were outraged by it because it wasn't First-Lady like.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…President Obama had had sex with a porn star, then paid her off to silence her, then denied having paid her off, lied about all of it, and that upset you because it just seemed really, really unpresidential to you…
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF …President Obama had refused to disclose his income tax returns, said he would after he was elected, then didn't, and you were really, really pissed off about that.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…President Obama had made a practice of holding rallies attended almost exclusively by angry black men wearing black power symbols, carrying torches, and shouting slogans expressing hatred for people of other ethnic groups and you found that to be divisive, un-presidential, and dangerously irresponsible.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF …you would have gotten really upset if President Obama had given the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Colin Kaepernick.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…you would have been freaked out if President Obama had called upon Russia (or any other foreign nation) to look into a political opponent's emails on national TV.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…you had gone apeshit ifPresident Obama or any black politician sucked up to the Saudis even after the Saudis were found to have killed and dismembered a Washington Post journalist.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…Obama had spent a roughly a third of his days in office playing golf, profiting from those golfing trips by booking lots of rooms at his own resorts for his security detail and entourage in a pattern that made you mad as hell at the abuse of his office.
YOU SURELY COULD BE A RACIST IF…it would have really pissed you off ifObama had seen to it that lots of his relatives were given government jobs for which they had no expertise or experience.
YOU ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY A RACIST IF…it would have made you pretty damn mad if Obama had told tens of thousands of readily verifiable lies during press briefings consisting almost entirely of a) self praise, b) whining, and c) insults to selected reporters.
And so on, ad nauseum.
Wouldn't you have to be a balls-out racist to embrace or accept damn near anything Trump has said or done? Wouldn't even one news cycle of Trump offenses to the dignity of his office have created a reaction that would have brought down the Obama administration? What if Obama had fired damn near every official charged with overseeing the administration of his office? What if he'd been accused of sexual abuse crimes ranging from harassment to pedophilia? What if Obama had mocked a reporter with a disability? What if he had blamed any perceived or real failure on George W. Bush? What if Obama had spent hours each day tweeting inane nonsense to his base and spent an equal amount of his time watching his favorite news commentaors, or calling Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and nattering on until even she was struggling to find a way to get him off the phone?
And wouldn't the racists be marching on the White House by now if Obama was in the White House doing virtually nothing, bupkis, nada. In fact, what if Obama was in office now and was doing harm on a daily basis, dividing the nation, pointing fingers, sowing confusion, and dispensing ridiculously stupid and dangerous medical advice?
Unless you're a racist yourself, you could probably have written this column yourself. So why didn't ya? Most of us know that if Barack Obama, or any other person or politician of color, had said or done damn near anything Trump has said and done, the right wingers and the racists would have had conniptions. Become apoplectic. Freaked out. Or worse. Their dreams would have turned to nightmares. They would have had to buy more guns and ammo. Their already undersized sexual organs would have shrunk and shriveled. They would have taken out their sense of shortcomings on their long suffering wives. And who knows how many young black men walking home from work or from buying Skittles at a convenience store would have to pay for all that, in blood or harassment.
Check back tomorrow when we'll play You Might Be a Misognyist If…
Or, if I don't get around to it, you could write that one for yourself, too, because we all know that if a woman had been elected POTUS and had pulled ANY of this Trump shit, heads would have exploded in every stronghold of male privilege from Wall Street to Main Street, from city council meetings to state legislatures, from country clubs to redneck bars.
For example.
You might be a redneck if…you ever mow your lawn and find a car.
You might be a redneck if… you ever took out a loan to finance a tattoo.
You may be a redneck if… you have spent more on your pickup truck than on your education.
You might be a redneck if…you ever got too drunk to fish.
And so on, in that vein. Interminably. You might be a redneck yourself if you went to the comedy shows where this stuff was dispensed because you just couldn't get enough of that joke, in Indian casinos around the country, for instance, or in venues like those found in Branson, Missouri. Yucks for yokels.
Foxworthy found a comedy niche. He was later joined by Ron White and others who pandered to the rednecks who took pride in the stereotypes about how loutish, lazy, and stupid they were. You may or may not be surprised that there was a big overlap between the audience for this stuff and the yahoos who attended Trump rallies, cheering every Obama slur or chanting "Lock her up" on cue. They mostly laughed at the shock of recognition. How does this guy, they wondered, know Bubba, that guy who lives down the road from me? You know, the one that bought meth from ma a time or two?
Just for the hell of it, how about we change the word "redneck" to "racist." And yeah, I know those two words are virtual synonyms. But not exactly. There are racists who aren't rednecks and rednecks who aren't racists.
So let's just see who we are, shall we?
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST If…President Obama's wife had posed naked in lots of soft porn pics and you were outraged by it because it wasn't First-Lady like.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…President Obama had had sex with a porn star, then paid her off to silence her, then denied having paid her off, lied about all of it, and that upset you because it just seemed really, really unpresidential to you…
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF …President Obama had refused to disclose his income tax returns, said he would after he was elected, then didn't, and you were really, really pissed off about that.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…President Obama had made a practice of holding rallies attended almost exclusively by angry black men wearing black power symbols, carrying torches, and shouting slogans expressing hatred for people of other ethnic groups and you found that to be divisive, un-presidential, and dangerously irresponsible.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF …you would have gotten really upset if President Obama had given the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Colin Kaepernick.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…you would have been freaked out if President Obama had called upon Russia (or any other foreign nation) to look into a political opponent's emails on national TV.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…you had gone apeshit ifPresident Obama or any black politician sucked up to the Saudis even after the Saudis were found to have killed and dismembered a Washington Post journalist.
YOU MIGHT BE A RACIST IF…Obama had spent a roughly a third of his days in office playing golf, profiting from those golfing trips by booking lots of rooms at his own resorts for his security detail and entourage in a pattern that made you mad as hell at the abuse of his office.
YOU SURELY COULD BE A RACIST IF…it would have really pissed you off ifObama had seen to it that lots of his relatives were given government jobs for which they had no expertise or experience.
YOU ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY A RACIST IF…it would have made you pretty damn mad if Obama had told tens of thousands of readily verifiable lies during press briefings consisting almost entirely of a) self praise, b) whining, and c) insults to selected reporters.
And so on, ad nauseum.
Wouldn't you have to be a balls-out racist to embrace or accept damn near anything Trump has said or done? Wouldn't even one news cycle of Trump offenses to the dignity of his office have created a reaction that would have brought down the Obama administration? What if Obama had fired damn near every official charged with overseeing the administration of his office? What if he'd been accused of sexual abuse crimes ranging from harassment to pedophilia? What if Obama had mocked a reporter with a disability? What if he had blamed any perceived or real failure on George W. Bush? What if Obama had spent hours each day tweeting inane nonsense to his base and spent an equal amount of his time watching his favorite news commentaors, or calling Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and nattering on until even she was struggling to find a way to get him off the phone?
And wouldn't the racists be marching on the White House by now if Obama was in the White House doing virtually nothing, bupkis, nada. In fact, what if Obama was in office now and was doing harm on a daily basis, dividing the nation, pointing fingers, sowing confusion, and dispensing ridiculously stupid and dangerous medical advice?
Unless you're a racist yourself, you could probably have written this column yourself. So why didn't ya? Most of us know that if Barack Obama, or any other person or politician of color, had said or done damn near anything Trump has said and done, the right wingers and the racists would have had conniptions. Become apoplectic. Freaked out. Or worse. Their dreams would have turned to nightmares. They would have had to buy more guns and ammo. Their already undersized sexual organs would have shrunk and shriveled. They would have taken out their sense of shortcomings on their long suffering wives. And who knows how many young black men walking home from work or from buying Skittles at a convenience store would have to pay for all that, in blood or harassment.
Check back tomorrow when we'll play You Might Be a Misognyist If…
Or, if I don't get around to it, you could write that one for yourself, too, because we all know that if a woman had been elected POTUS and had pulled ANY of this Trump shit, heads would have exploded in every stronghold of male privilege from Wall Street to Main Street, from city council meetings to state legislatures, from country clubs to redneck bars.
6. BONHOEFFER ON STUPIDITY - RELIGIOUS GROUNDS
‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
‘If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who lives in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
‘Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in must cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really thing are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
‘But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.’
8. Independent of everything: Is America too dumb for democracy?
Our nation's massive ignorance and lack of curiosity have led us into crisis. Are we smart enough to survive it?
DAVID MASCIOTRA - Salon
JULY 4, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
Independence Day presents a good opportunity to consider that many Americans act as if their young country is independent from the rest of the world. The former popularity of the mindless slogan, “My country right or wrong,” offers a perfect summary of America’s suicidal self-absorption. When the fireworks no longer illuminate the sky, the barbecue is down to bones, and the hangovers begin to commence, a genuine act of patriotism would insist on the widespread realization that small-minded chauvinism is not virtuous. One need to look no further than the early stages of the presidential campaign to survey the damage of a country’s inability to look beyond its own borders.
The provincialism of American culture renders its politics both farcical and dangerous. While it is encouraging to see previously “extreme” and “radical” ideas, such as socialized medicine, paid family leave and debt-free higher education, become mainstream in the Democratic Party, it is also amusing to imagine a French or Canadian observer watching American politicians debate a national health care program as if it were a novel concept.
Much credit goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is fond of reminding his interlocutors and audiences, in a wonderful tone of exhaustion, that the United States is the “only country in the developed world” that does not achieve universal health care coverage through public funding. Sanders, and his fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination, have strenuous labor to complete considering that most Americans know and care little about the world beyond its borders.
In 2003, when Americans still had the minimal interest in international affairs necessary to understand who we were bombing, a U.S. strategic task force of Education Abroad concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security.
The specific details only sharpen the image of American obliviousness. A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States. If you are among the 6 percent, and you are reading this, that’s where you live.
Derek Alderman, president of the American Association of Geographers, argues for the urgency of a “radical geographic literacy” in the United States, expressing grave concern that President Trump’s denigration of African nations as “shithole countries” will resonate with too many citizens for comfort. He reports that the answers on advanced placement geography exams from high school students are often littered with racist stereotypes regarding Africa and Asia.
The American perspective on history is as sophisticated as one would expect in a country where Donald Trump can even run for president without eliciting of universal laughter and disgust. Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”
America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.
Historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed “anti-intellectualism” in American life in his seminal 1963 Pulitzer-winning book. Decades of of compounding fatuity have created a culture where leisure reading, according to several reports, is at an all time low.
It seems unlikely that those Americans who do crack open a book are studying comparative politics or international relations. For the full picture of how pitiful American culture has become, consider that for many recent years the bestselling “historian” in the country was Bill O’Reilly.
To bemoan the spectacular incuriosity of Americans is not an exercise in snobbery, but a red alarm warning of an impending crisis. The consequences of American ignorance are not academic.
A Washington Post survey, two years after American forces invaded Iraq, revealed that 70 percent of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp,” you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.
The qualities of Donald Trump, and the zealotry of his worshipful supporters, resemble the images of nearly every authoritarian movement in European, Asian and Latin American history. If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal. When it came to providing basic services for its own people, it would not allow intellectual titans like Chuck Todd to ask Democrats, “How are you going to pay for it?” — as if countries with far less wealth have not already managed to do so.
A friend of mine whose father recently died told me that her brother, who lives in London, took one month off with full pay to travel to Texas, make some final memories with his dad, and attend the funeral service. Britain, contrary to popular belief, is not a mythical, far-off universe from a fantasy novel.
If one wants to drift off entirely into dreamland, envision an America where its federal government invites consultants from countries with better performing health care systems, affordable universities and more effective poverty relief policies to assist in the expansion of the social welfare state.
Instead of seeking outside advice, we will continue to display the symptoms of national solipsism, bumbling along as if there is no reality outside what we can see right in front of us.
The United States of America is one year older today. Only time will tell if it is also wiser.
The provincialism of American culture renders its politics both farcical and dangerous. While it is encouraging to see previously “extreme” and “radical” ideas, such as socialized medicine, paid family leave and debt-free higher education, become mainstream in the Democratic Party, it is also amusing to imagine a French or Canadian observer watching American politicians debate a national health care program as if it were a novel concept.
Much credit goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is fond of reminding his interlocutors and audiences, in a wonderful tone of exhaustion, that the United States is the “only country in the developed world” that does not achieve universal health care coverage through public funding. Sanders, and his fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination, have strenuous labor to complete considering that most Americans know and care little about the world beyond its borders.
In 2003, when Americans still had the minimal interest in international affairs necessary to understand who we were bombing, a U.S. strategic task force of Education Abroad concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security.
The specific details only sharpen the image of American obliviousness. A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States. If you are among the 6 percent, and you are reading this, that’s where you live.
Derek Alderman, president of the American Association of Geographers, argues for the urgency of a “radical geographic literacy” in the United States, expressing grave concern that President Trump’s denigration of African nations as “shithole countries” will resonate with too many citizens for comfort. He reports that the answers on advanced placement geography exams from high school students are often littered with racist stereotypes regarding Africa and Asia.
The American perspective on history is as sophisticated as one would expect in a country where Donald Trump can even run for president without eliciting of universal laughter and disgust. Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”
America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.
Historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed “anti-intellectualism” in American life in his seminal 1963 Pulitzer-winning book. Decades of of compounding fatuity have created a culture where leisure reading, according to several reports, is at an all time low.
It seems unlikely that those Americans who do crack open a book are studying comparative politics or international relations. For the full picture of how pitiful American culture has become, consider that for many recent years the bestselling “historian” in the country was Bill O’Reilly.
To bemoan the spectacular incuriosity of Americans is not an exercise in snobbery, but a red alarm warning of an impending crisis. The consequences of American ignorance are not academic.
A Washington Post survey, two years after American forces invaded Iraq, revealed that 70 percent of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp,” you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.
The qualities of Donald Trump, and the zealotry of his worshipful supporters, resemble the images of nearly every authoritarian movement in European, Asian and Latin American history. If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal. When it came to providing basic services for its own people, it would not allow intellectual titans like Chuck Todd to ask Democrats, “How are you going to pay for it?” — as if countries with far less wealth have not already managed to do so.
A friend of mine whose father recently died told me that her brother, who lives in London, took one month off with full pay to travel to Texas, make some final memories with his dad, and attend the funeral service. Britain, contrary to popular belief, is not a mythical, far-off universe from a fantasy novel.
If one wants to drift off entirely into dreamland, envision an America where its federal government invites consultants from countries with better performing health care systems, affordable universities and more effective poverty relief policies to assist in the expansion of the social welfare state.
Instead of seeking outside advice, we will continue to display the symptoms of national solipsism, bumbling along as if there is no reality outside what we can see right in front of us.
The United States of America is one year older today. Only time will tell if it is also wiser.
9. Trump's election was personal: It's white America's vicious backlash to black success
Trump's election felt like a repudiation of a half century of black assimilation and aspiration to integration
HOWARD BRYANT - salon
JANUARY 20, 2020 1:00PM (UTC)
Once, appearing on ESPN to discuss the controversy of Colin Kaepernick not voting, I suggested that instead of his abstinence disqualifying his say on the American situation, perhaps he had gone "full dissident" and recognized the accepted framework of sociopolitical involvement—the ride-alongs with cops, the listening to candidates owned by money, the insistence that deliberate, institutional racism is just a misunderstanding still unsorted—and found them useless. I further argued that if he saw an unredeemed, corrupt system as the problem, there was no reason for him to trust in it and even less reason to expect him to participate in it.
Full dissidence may or may not have applied to Kaepernick, but it certainly felt personal. The thoughts were neither new nor revelatory, certainly not to me or any black person who reaches a certain age, a certain rage or breaking point, but they were nevertheless true: Donald Trump's installation as president was a proud and unhidden repudiation of the nation's first black president, and no matter how many attempts at misdirection toward economic anxiety or some other, greater complex phenomenon, some element of taking back proprietorship of the country had appealed to an overwhelming number of white people who voted for him. With Trump's lies and distortions normalized by an overmatched, often complicit free press, the writer Michiko Kakutani referred to his presence as "the death of truth." Dozens of books followed along similar themes regarding the decline of standards and accountability, but underneath so much of the apparent discontent, from Charleston to Charlottesville, is an anti-blackness, a reminder of to whom the country belongs. This was a reclaiming.
I do not say this hyperbolically, but Trump's election felt like a repudiation of a half century of black assimilation and aspiration to integration, of lifetimes of relationships, and of strategies and choices to better navigate the maze of white America. It didn't feel personal. It was personal. Something was dying, though at first I could scarcely pinpoint what, since I did not possess previously any great belief in this country's commitment to black equality, either on a state or personal level. In other words, I was already down following the election but I did not have far to fall.
But whatever lack of faith I may have possessed in the colorblind, Utopian future, millions of black families did believe in it, and they risked their children to the aspirational pathways, whether rooted in the Christian ethics of kindness and compassion or in the possibilities of education. Central to that belief was the strategy of moving their families away into hostile white communities of Milwaukee and Long Island, placing their children into hostile school systems in Boston or Denver, for the purpose of better. Acceptance. Citizenship. This was the endgame to the faith, and the twin acts of the triumph of the Obama presidency, the Trump corrective, and the proud amorality that followed killed it.
Black success, those who choose to listen know, has always led to white retribution, whether that success was something as revolutionary as Barack Obama addressing the crowd at Grant Park that night in 2008 or the unremarkable victory of an average black person scoring a decent job. What died was the belief that a day without white retribution was ever possible, replaced by the more immediate sentiment that it no longer mattered.
None of this, it should be noted, was theoretical. Some of my longtime white friends had already revealed themselves and decades-long friendships turned to dust. Skirmishes began as bee stings: the female friend I had known since seventh grade who told me in October 2008 that Sarah Palin was smarter and more qualified to be president than Obama; the thirty-year friend who before Trump's inauguration told me how "disappointed" he was in the civil rights icon John Lewis for calling out Trump's weakly coded racism. There were the progressive friends who, wounded and horrified by the election's outcome,had threatened to move to Canada, then in the next sentence dreaded the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner where they would have to listen to relatives revel in Trump's victory. It was as if all they had lost was a Super Bowl bet, but the decision to no longer sit at the table was rarely a consideration. These were no longer exchanges to be survived but telegrams urging a goodbye that needed to be listened to. Instead of anxiety, these departures were welcome, ballast being dropped.
Trump's election ended relationships and friendships, with family and romantic, and the referendum was not on him but on the dozens of millions people who voted for him, people whose lives, whether directly or indirectly would become part of mine. That the racism Trump promoted and condoned was occurring simultaneously with the ongoing demand that black people embrace postracialism as America's new reality represented an even greater insult for those sprinklings of black families living in predominately white communities.
That such reconsiderations were occurring nationwide, I had no doubt. I also had no doubt that the relationships it did not end made me more skeptical of the people involved, for both he and his election signified to me a stark and nonnegotiable collision of belief systems. For fleeting moments I even felt envious of those whites who could afford the luxury of being "apolitical"—of the world just not mattering that much—until I focused on the potential explanations: only whiteness and fealty to it could be strong enough to bond people of such disparate values, or those people really did not possess any values at all.
I, and the black people around me who were equally weary of this dance, did not have that luxury, and even if the number of friends who voted for Trump could be counted on one hand (at least the ones who volunteered their candidate honestly), they were not the only people who constituted my life, for they were connected by friendship, blood, and marriage to some of the sixty-two million other people who did vote for him. It was finally clear: what had died was negotiation.
By electing Trump they showed us who they were, just as the violent reaction in the 1970s by whites to black children desegregating Boston schools reminded my aunts and uncles exactly what white people had thought of them. "How much," my uncle would tell me, "they hated us." For the black families who lived in the white world, had bought the house and integrated the white community and its schools, had bought into the dream, the questions now stood even taller and more imposing. How many more Thanksgiving dinners could one be expected to sit through with one's white friends under the realization that not nearly enough questions had ever been asked of them? How, then, could one assess the people who have stayed by your side, the ones expected to attend your funeral? The ones with whom you have shared your holidays and your home and your bed and who, at any moment, could and would retreat—because, for white people, race is and always will be just a topic to either be addressed or ignored. Was it possible to trust the complicated relationships with white women, whose attitudes regarding interracial relationships seemed to be rooted in the attitude "If you're OK with me, everything's OK," yet who could always return to the comfort of whiteness when life with you got too tough?
What was being said in these relationships, in effect, was that white people wanted the benefit of loving someone black without confronting the conditions that make life difficult for black people. When white people would say to me, "I don't care if you're black," they were not being generous. They were not being progressive. They literally meant what they said. They did not care, and even if they did not mean it cruelly, they meant to say the historical, overwhelming conspiracy on the part of their country—by government, the judiciary, the financial and educational institutions, and by law enforcement—to ensure a black underclass was not enough (or was too much) for them. They might be sympathetic. They might not, but it was life, and however terrible they may have felt individually, they would do nothing more about it.
Doing nothing more about it did not only mean a willful misunderstanding of the black journey but an abandonment of the white people who were willing to risk their lives because they knew exactly the depth of the conspiracy and its inevitable destructiveness. The Andrew Goodmans and Michael Schwerners, William Lewis Moores and James Reebs, Viola Liuzzos, Bruce Klunders, and Heather Heyers on a national level and the few committed, important people of our anonymous lives were equally betrayed by this daily cynicism as much as any black person.
These friends and lovers, especially the lovers, sought to absolve themselves of guilt for their systemic advantages by loving the black person in their life—without risking anything to keep that person safe. They wanted to save themselves by appearing to save me, and as any black man who has dated a white woman knows, white women believe they can have both—all the preferential treatments and patriarchy of whiteness while believing in their inherent innocence. They could expose their black friends or lovers to their family's casual racism at Thanksgiving with no intention of risking their comfort, for the minority is always expected to willingly absorb humiliation as part of the privilege of the invite—but by doing this, the very people who pledged love for you with their words were sending another message by their lack of deed: they were always willing to sacrifice you.
Full dissidence may or may not have applied to Kaepernick, but it certainly felt personal. The thoughts were neither new nor revelatory, certainly not to me or any black person who reaches a certain age, a certain rage or breaking point, but they were nevertheless true: Donald Trump's installation as president was a proud and unhidden repudiation of the nation's first black president, and no matter how many attempts at misdirection toward economic anxiety or some other, greater complex phenomenon, some element of taking back proprietorship of the country had appealed to an overwhelming number of white people who voted for him. With Trump's lies and distortions normalized by an overmatched, often complicit free press, the writer Michiko Kakutani referred to his presence as "the death of truth." Dozens of books followed along similar themes regarding the decline of standards and accountability, but underneath so much of the apparent discontent, from Charleston to Charlottesville, is an anti-blackness, a reminder of to whom the country belongs. This was a reclaiming.
I do not say this hyperbolically, but Trump's election felt like a repudiation of a half century of black assimilation and aspiration to integration, of lifetimes of relationships, and of strategies and choices to better navigate the maze of white America. It didn't feel personal. It was personal. Something was dying, though at first I could scarcely pinpoint what, since I did not possess previously any great belief in this country's commitment to black equality, either on a state or personal level. In other words, I was already down following the election but I did not have far to fall.
But whatever lack of faith I may have possessed in the colorblind, Utopian future, millions of black families did believe in it, and they risked their children to the aspirational pathways, whether rooted in the Christian ethics of kindness and compassion or in the possibilities of education. Central to that belief was the strategy of moving their families away into hostile white communities of Milwaukee and Long Island, placing their children into hostile school systems in Boston or Denver, for the purpose of better. Acceptance. Citizenship. This was the endgame to the faith, and the twin acts of the triumph of the Obama presidency, the Trump corrective, and the proud amorality that followed killed it.
Black success, those who choose to listen know, has always led to white retribution, whether that success was something as revolutionary as Barack Obama addressing the crowd at Grant Park that night in 2008 or the unremarkable victory of an average black person scoring a decent job. What died was the belief that a day without white retribution was ever possible, replaced by the more immediate sentiment that it no longer mattered.
None of this, it should be noted, was theoretical. Some of my longtime white friends had already revealed themselves and decades-long friendships turned to dust. Skirmishes began as bee stings: the female friend I had known since seventh grade who told me in October 2008 that Sarah Palin was smarter and more qualified to be president than Obama; the thirty-year friend who before Trump's inauguration told me how "disappointed" he was in the civil rights icon John Lewis for calling out Trump's weakly coded racism. There were the progressive friends who, wounded and horrified by the election's outcome,had threatened to move to Canada, then in the next sentence dreaded the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner where they would have to listen to relatives revel in Trump's victory. It was as if all they had lost was a Super Bowl bet, but the decision to no longer sit at the table was rarely a consideration. These were no longer exchanges to be survived but telegrams urging a goodbye that needed to be listened to. Instead of anxiety, these departures were welcome, ballast being dropped.
Trump's election ended relationships and friendships, with family and romantic, and the referendum was not on him but on the dozens of millions people who voted for him, people whose lives, whether directly or indirectly would become part of mine. That the racism Trump promoted and condoned was occurring simultaneously with the ongoing demand that black people embrace postracialism as America's new reality represented an even greater insult for those sprinklings of black families living in predominately white communities.
That such reconsiderations were occurring nationwide, I had no doubt. I also had no doubt that the relationships it did not end made me more skeptical of the people involved, for both he and his election signified to me a stark and nonnegotiable collision of belief systems. For fleeting moments I even felt envious of those whites who could afford the luxury of being "apolitical"—of the world just not mattering that much—until I focused on the potential explanations: only whiteness and fealty to it could be strong enough to bond people of such disparate values, or those people really did not possess any values at all.
I, and the black people around me who were equally weary of this dance, did not have that luxury, and even if the number of friends who voted for Trump could be counted on one hand (at least the ones who volunteered their candidate honestly), they were not the only people who constituted my life, for they were connected by friendship, blood, and marriage to some of the sixty-two million other people who did vote for him. It was finally clear: what had died was negotiation.
By electing Trump they showed us who they were, just as the violent reaction in the 1970s by whites to black children desegregating Boston schools reminded my aunts and uncles exactly what white people had thought of them. "How much," my uncle would tell me, "they hated us." For the black families who lived in the white world, had bought the house and integrated the white community and its schools, had bought into the dream, the questions now stood even taller and more imposing. How many more Thanksgiving dinners could one be expected to sit through with one's white friends under the realization that not nearly enough questions had ever been asked of them? How, then, could one assess the people who have stayed by your side, the ones expected to attend your funeral? The ones with whom you have shared your holidays and your home and your bed and who, at any moment, could and would retreat—because, for white people, race is and always will be just a topic to either be addressed or ignored. Was it possible to trust the complicated relationships with white women, whose attitudes regarding interracial relationships seemed to be rooted in the attitude "If you're OK with me, everything's OK," yet who could always return to the comfort of whiteness when life with you got too tough?
What was being said in these relationships, in effect, was that white people wanted the benefit of loving someone black without confronting the conditions that make life difficult for black people. When white people would say to me, "I don't care if you're black," they were not being generous. They were not being progressive. They literally meant what they said. They did not care, and even if they did not mean it cruelly, they meant to say the historical, overwhelming conspiracy on the part of their country—by government, the judiciary, the financial and educational institutions, and by law enforcement—to ensure a black underclass was not enough (or was too much) for them. They might be sympathetic. They might not, but it was life, and however terrible they may have felt individually, they would do nothing more about it.
Doing nothing more about it did not only mean a willful misunderstanding of the black journey but an abandonment of the white people who were willing to risk their lives because they knew exactly the depth of the conspiracy and its inevitable destructiveness. The Andrew Goodmans and Michael Schwerners, William Lewis Moores and James Reebs, Viola Liuzzos, Bruce Klunders, and Heather Heyers on a national level and the few committed, important people of our anonymous lives were equally betrayed by this daily cynicism as much as any black person.
These friends and lovers, especially the lovers, sought to absolve themselves of guilt for their systemic advantages by loving the black person in their life—without risking anything to keep that person safe. They wanted to save themselves by appearing to save me, and as any black man who has dated a white woman knows, white women believe they can have both—all the preferential treatments and patriarchy of whiteness while believing in their inherent innocence. They could expose their black friends or lovers to their family's casual racism at Thanksgiving with no intention of risking their comfort, for the minority is always expected to willingly absorb humiliation as part of the privilege of the invite—but by doing this, the very people who pledged love for you with their words were sending another message by their lack of deed: they were always willing to sacrifice you.
10. White People Are Right: They Built This Country
Michael Harriot - the root
7/19/18
America is angry.
Conservatives are mad for the same reasons they wanted to oust Obama, Muslims, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t support the Russia-fellating, rust-colored dotard in chief: They want their county back.
Progressives believe Trump is destroying “their country” and the only thing that can save us are safety pins, pink pussy hats or politely resisting (not like that belligerent Maxine Waters). All of the outrage on the left and right both stem from one fact:
White people built this country.
People who purchase their mayonnaise, jeans and running shoes all from one store have no reservations about reminding the world of their ownership of the country regardless of which side of the aisle they stand.
---
Many white people believe their forefathers and whatever values they now hold are what built this country. Some of them (the liberals, the allies and the Democrats) are more than willing to share their inheritance but only if they can act as administrators of the estate.
They will acknowledge that white supremacy still exists and then try to convince you that the only person who can move America forward is an old white man (Bernie Sanders) or an old white woman (Hillary Clinton).
They will tell you the only way to change a 400-year-old system of oppression is to do the same things they did to create a the 400-year-old-system of oppression. They have faith in the American democracy because they have seen it work for them. Only for them. They place their trust and loyalty in the American values because America was built to work for them. Only for them.
Because they built it that way.
I live in a house.
I love my house. After viewing dozens of prospective residences, I finally settled on a home that had one previous owner. After I moved in, I noticed that there was a leak in the kitchen sink. I replaced the white wall-to-wall carpet with wood floors. I ripped out the puke green Formica countertops that matched the green and white wallpaper. I remodeled the bathrooms. I finished the attic and turned it into a studio for my daughter. I turned the basement into a mancave.
Although it was not perfect, I chose to live here.
One day, the previous owners of the home came to pick up some mail. They marveled at the remodeling and proudly explained how the house was built to his own specifications. I knew he hadn’t hammered the nails, installed the drywall and laid the carpet.
But it was my house now. Thanks to cousins and uncles who taught me how to build things, I had actually done the work with my own hands and I was proud of it. So I showed him what I had done with the house he built.
“Damn,” he said half-jokingly as he looked around. “I think I want my house back.”
America is a house.
To live in a house constructed from one’s own imagination must be a beautiful thing. Unlike every other segment of this nation’s population, black people in America are the only ones who didn’t choose to live in this house. We were unwilling participants in this construction project. But more than any other group in America, we have been responsible for its upkeep because we live here, too.
It is our blood and sweat that is mixed into America’s foundation. It is our bodies that have served disproportionately in America’s armed forces. We took the first bullet in the Revolutionary War. We picked the cotton that made America an economic superpower. It is our bodies that give this country its military might.
We fought the Nazis that kept us free and scored the touchdowns that make America cheer. We gave America civil rights and every single form of American music. White women want black women’s lips, hips and resilience. The whole country wants our soul. We taught this country how to dance, sing, run, jump and win. We gave America Prince, a President and a King.
And we did it for free.
Yes, they may have built it. But this is our country.
Even though we poured the foundation and hammered the nails, America is constructed from a white dream. They were the original owners of this flawed house and black people have been trying to fix it ever since. We were the workers whose hands constructed this country.
When they say they “built this” country, they are totally oblivious to the design flaws. White people telling black people, Muslims and immigrants how “white people built this country” is like Ford screaming “We built this Pinto!” while blaming the shitty engine and terrible design on the workers in the factory.
If we made a list of everything that needed fixing in America, we’d have to go all away to the back to when 50 white men declared their independence and proclaimed that they would build a new land based on the fact that every single human being deserved life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
41 of those 50 men owned slaves.
George Washington pushed for abolition but still beat, whipped and hunted down escaped slaves until the day he died owning 123 slaves. Thomas Jefferson called slavery a “moral depravity” and “hideous blot.” When he left this earth, he owned 130 slaves.
They believed slavery was morally wrong but still participated. They never intended for women to vote. They slaughtered the native Americans. They raped our great grandmothers. They lynched our grandfathers. The men who built this country believed in “liberty and justice” but ignored the part that said, “for all.”
The whole of America was never free until white people lost the deadliest war in American history in an attempt to hold on to slavery. They bombed buses, children and churches so their kids wouldn’t sit next to black children in the schools they built, eat next to us in their diners or watch movies alongside negroes in their theaters.
Although America is the richest country in the world, poverty remains because the American dream rests on the foundation that greed is a necessary motivation for success. Half of this country would rather watch an infant starve than give it food stamps or welfare. They want their paychecks. Their money.
America wades in the blood of mass shootings and gunfire in social studies class because they refuse to deviate from their 200-year old original blueprint. This country tolerates abhorrent gun violence because the second amendment gave them the right to own their guns and you will have to take them from their cold, dead hands.
The injustice that feeds mass incarceration comes from a flawed Constitution they wrote. The education gap persists because of the history of segregated school systems built to their specifications. Wage inequality is due to their adherence to free-market capitalism, sexism and racism.
They built it that way.
Yet, they would have you believe that immigrants, blacks and non-Christians are what is wrong with America and getting rid of us—whether through deportation, travel bans, prisons or police bullets—would make this country great again.
But the flaw is in the design. This is the house they wanted. They were the architects. We were simply the ones who changed the blueprint and did all the remodeling. We are still trying to fix the leaks and undo their shoddy handiwork.
If white people want credit for building this country, then they also have to take the blame for constructing a system of oppression and white supremacy. They don’t get praise for their forefathers’ accomplishments without accountability for their ancestors’ atrocities.
The inequality is theirs alone. They built racism in the foundation. Inequality is in the structure. Poverty is part of their plan. They want it all back because they are afraid we will tear down the parts that have always worked for them. Only them.
White people built this country.
But this is our country.
It does not belong to them anymore. We are the ones who made it valuable. We paid the price in blood. In sweat. In tears. In bruised backs and calloused hands.
Black people have no more affinity for America than I do for my house or my car. If white people want their country back, give us reparations. Pay us for our work, our time, our lynched bodies, our stolen art, our enslaved ancestors, our murdered children and our kidnapped cousins.
Or go back to Wypipostan and get the fuck out of our country.
See? We fixed it for you.
Conservatives are mad for the same reasons they wanted to oust Obama, Muslims, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t support the Russia-fellating, rust-colored dotard in chief: They want their county back.
Progressives believe Trump is destroying “their country” and the only thing that can save us are safety pins, pink pussy hats or politely resisting (not like that belligerent Maxine Waters). All of the outrage on the left and right both stem from one fact:
White people built this country.
People who purchase their mayonnaise, jeans and running shoes all from one store have no reservations about reminding the world of their ownership of the country regardless of which side of the aisle they stand.
---
Many white people believe their forefathers and whatever values they now hold are what built this country. Some of them (the liberals, the allies and the Democrats) are more than willing to share their inheritance but only if they can act as administrators of the estate.
They will acknowledge that white supremacy still exists and then try to convince you that the only person who can move America forward is an old white man (Bernie Sanders) or an old white woman (Hillary Clinton).
They will tell you the only way to change a 400-year-old system of oppression is to do the same things they did to create a the 400-year-old-system of oppression. They have faith in the American democracy because they have seen it work for them. Only for them. They place their trust and loyalty in the American values because America was built to work for them. Only for them.
Because they built it that way.
I live in a house.
I love my house. After viewing dozens of prospective residences, I finally settled on a home that had one previous owner. After I moved in, I noticed that there was a leak in the kitchen sink. I replaced the white wall-to-wall carpet with wood floors. I ripped out the puke green Formica countertops that matched the green and white wallpaper. I remodeled the bathrooms. I finished the attic and turned it into a studio for my daughter. I turned the basement into a mancave.
Although it was not perfect, I chose to live here.
One day, the previous owners of the home came to pick up some mail. They marveled at the remodeling and proudly explained how the house was built to his own specifications. I knew he hadn’t hammered the nails, installed the drywall and laid the carpet.
But it was my house now. Thanks to cousins and uncles who taught me how to build things, I had actually done the work with my own hands and I was proud of it. So I showed him what I had done with the house he built.
“Damn,” he said half-jokingly as he looked around. “I think I want my house back.”
America is a house.
To live in a house constructed from one’s own imagination must be a beautiful thing. Unlike every other segment of this nation’s population, black people in America are the only ones who didn’t choose to live in this house. We were unwilling participants in this construction project. But more than any other group in America, we have been responsible for its upkeep because we live here, too.
It is our blood and sweat that is mixed into America’s foundation. It is our bodies that have served disproportionately in America’s armed forces. We took the first bullet in the Revolutionary War. We picked the cotton that made America an economic superpower. It is our bodies that give this country its military might.
We fought the Nazis that kept us free and scored the touchdowns that make America cheer. We gave America civil rights and every single form of American music. White women want black women’s lips, hips and resilience. The whole country wants our soul. We taught this country how to dance, sing, run, jump and win. We gave America Prince, a President and a King.
And we did it for free.
Yes, they may have built it. But this is our country.
Even though we poured the foundation and hammered the nails, America is constructed from a white dream. They were the original owners of this flawed house and black people have been trying to fix it ever since. We were the workers whose hands constructed this country.
When they say they “built this” country, they are totally oblivious to the design flaws. White people telling black people, Muslims and immigrants how “white people built this country” is like Ford screaming “We built this Pinto!” while blaming the shitty engine and terrible design on the workers in the factory.
If we made a list of everything that needed fixing in America, we’d have to go all away to the back to when 50 white men declared their independence and proclaimed that they would build a new land based on the fact that every single human being deserved life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
41 of those 50 men owned slaves.
George Washington pushed for abolition but still beat, whipped and hunted down escaped slaves until the day he died owning 123 slaves. Thomas Jefferson called slavery a “moral depravity” and “hideous blot.” When he left this earth, he owned 130 slaves.
They believed slavery was morally wrong but still participated. They never intended for women to vote. They slaughtered the native Americans. They raped our great grandmothers. They lynched our grandfathers. The men who built this country believed in “liberty and justice” but ignored the part that said, “for all.”
The whole of America was never free until white people lost the deadliest war in American history in an attempt to hold on to slavery. They bombed buses, children and churches so their kids wouldn’t sit next to black children in the schools they built, eat next to us in their diners or watch movies alongside negroes in their theaters.
Although America is the richest country in the world, poverty remains because the American dream rests on the foundation that greed is a necessary motivation for success. Half of this country would rather watch an infant starve than give it food stamps or welfare. They want their paychecks. Their money.
America wades in the blood of mass shootings and gunfire in social studies class because they refuse to deviate from their 200-year old original blueprint. This country tolerates abhorrent gun violence because the second amendment gave them the right to own their guns and you will have to take them from their cold, dead hands.
The injustice that feeds mass incarceration comes from a flawed Constitution they wrote. The education gap persists because of the history of segregated school systems built to their specifications. Wage inequality is due to their adherence to free-market capitalism, sexism and racism.
They built it that way.
Yet, they would have you believe that immigrants, blacks and non-Christians are what is wrong with America and getting rid of us—whether through deportation, travel bans, prisons or police bullets—would make this country great again.
But the flaw is in the design. This is the house they wanted. They were the architects. We were simply the ones who changed the blueprint and did all the remodeling. We are still trying to fix the leaks and undo their shoddy handiwork.
If white people want credit for building this country, then they also have to take the blame for constructing a system of oppression and white supremacy. They don’t get praise for their forefathers’ accomplishments without accountability for their ancestors’ atrocities.
The inequality is theirs alone. They built racism in the foundation. Inequality is in the structure. Poverty is part of their plan. They want it all back because they are afraid we will tear down the parts that have always worked for them. Only them.
White people built this country.
But this is our country.
It does not belong to them anymore. We are the ones who made it valuable. We paid the price in blood. In sweat. In tears. In bruised backs and calloused hands.
Black people have no more affinity for America than I do for my house or my car. If white people want their country back, give us reparations. Pay us for our work, our time, our lynched bodies, our stolen art, our enslaved ancestors, our murdered children and our kidnapped cousins.
Or go back to Wypipostan and get the fuck out of our country.
See? We fixed it for you.
11. COARD: NON-VOTING BLACKS GET NO THANKS, DESERVE NO BENEFITS
MICHAEL COARD - PHILLY TRIBUNE
11/10/18
If you’re Black, 18 or older, and don’t vote- or, even worse, are Black, 18 or older, and tell other Blacks not to vote- I have two things to say to you.
One- Thanks for nothing. Black presidential voting participation decreased from 17.2 million, equaling 66.7 percent of eligible Blacks, in 2012 to 16.4 million, equaling 59.6 percent, in 2016. You’re a key reason why Donald Trump “won” in 2016. You’re a key reason why racist Republicans controlled the House and Senate during Trump’s first two years. You’re a key reason why the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeal, and the federal district courts have become more anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Latinx, anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-poor people beginning in 2016.
Two- Since you’re too indifferent or too “woke” to vote, then you’re too indifferent or too “woke” to reap the benefits of what voting has provided for Blacks and others. Therefore, you must now reject every benefit you’re offered that has resulted from the work of Black voters of the present and Black voters of the past.
For example, stop being a greedy hypocrite and immediately start rejecting the following (and all other) governmental benefits:
1. The Social Security Act of 1935 (with amendments in 1939, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1965), which in Title I provides for you if you’re elderly, Title III for you if you’re unemployed, Title IV for you and your household members if you and they are in need of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (e.g., food stamps), Title V for your children’s welfare, Title VI for your public health services, and Title X for you if you’re vision-impaired. By the way, it was the 1939 amendment that provides your non-voting ass with that check you rush to cash on the first of every month.
2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides you with the ability to work at white-owned businesses, ride on public transportation, eat at restaurants, shop at department stores, and stay at hotels- all without getting your head bashed in by white cops enforcing Jim Crow laws.
3. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended whites-only primaries, whites-only grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes imposed upon your recently emancipated ancestors following passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870.
4. Medicare and Medicaid Services, which began in 1966 and provide for you medically if you’re 65 or older and had paid into the services through your payroll taxes.
5. Minimum Wage Laws, which- after coming into effect in 1912 in Massachusetts after activist women in New York began relentless protests against sweatshop labor in 1890- provide you with at least some modicum of relatively fair payment.
6. The Workers Compensation Laws, which began in 1911 in Wisconsin and provide for you financially when you’re injured on the job.
7. Everything you use from libraries to recreation centers provided by candidates elected to city councils, from traffic lights to driver licenses provided by candidates elected to state legislatures, and from federal tax laws to affirmative action policies provided by candidates elected to Congress.
8. The elections during the past few years of progressive District Attorneys throughout the country who make sure you and especially your 15-30 year-old Black sons, nephews, and cousins are no longer judicially lynched by the racist and mass-incarcerating so-called criminal justice system.
9. The hopeful- and likely- election of progressive Stacey Abrams in Georgia as the first Black and the first woman governor of that state.
10. The hopeful- and likely- election of progressive Andrew Gillum in Florida as the first Black governor of that state.
Colloquially speaking, you non-voting Blacks better not accept no benefits or take no credit regarding any of the ten items listed above (or anything else) because you ain’t done nothing to help.
In fact, you remind me of the type of people the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey was referring to when he said, “I have no desire to take all Black people back to Africa. There are Blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.”
In conclusion, the photo in this week’s column is that of ex-Tennessee cop Clayton Hickey wearing his Confederate lynching T-shirt while voting in Mississippi on November 6. Now tell me again why you didn’t vote.
One- Thanks for nothing. Black presidential voting participation decreased from 17.2 million, equaling 66.7 percent of eligible Blacks, in 2012 to 16.4 million, equaling 59.6 percent, in 2016. You’re a key reason why Donald Trump “won” in 2016. You’re a key reason why racist Republicans controlled the House and Senate during Trump’s first two years. You’re a key reason why the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeal, and the federal district courts have become more anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Latinx, anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-poor people beginning in 2016.
Two- Since you’re too indifferent or too “woke” to vote, then you’re too indifferent or too “woke” to reap the benefits of what voting has provided for Blacks and others. Therefore, you must now reject every benefit you’re offered that has resulted from the work of Black voters of the present and Black voters of the past.
For example, stop being a greedy hypocrite and immediately start rejecting the following (and all other) governmental benefits:
1. The Social Security Act of 1935 (with amendments in 1939, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1965), which in Title I provides for you if you’re elderly, Title III for you if you’re unemployed, Title IV for you and your household members if you and they are in need of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (e.g., food stamps), Title V for your children’s welfare, Title VI for your public health services, and Title X for you if you’re vision-impaired. By the way, it was the 1939 amendment that provides your non-voting ass with that check you rush to cash on the first of every month.
2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides you with the ability to work at white-owned businesses, ride on public transportation, eat at restaurants, shop at department stores, and stay at hotels- all without getting your head bashed in by white cops enforcing Jim Crow laws.
3. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended whites-only primaries, whites-only grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes imposed upon your recently emancipated ancestors following passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870.
4. Medicare and Medicaid Services, which began in 1966 and provide for you medically if you’re 65 or older and had paid into the services through your payroll taxes.
5. Minimum Wage Laws, which- after coming into effect in 1912 in Massachusetts after activist women in New York began relentless protests against sweatshop labor in 1890- provide you with at least some modicum of relatively fair payment.
6. The Workers Compensation Laws, which began in 1911 in Wisconsin and provide for you financially when you’re injured on the job.
7. Everything you use from libraries to recreation centers provided by candidates elected to city councils, from traffic lights to driver licenses provided by candidates elected to state legislatures, and from federal tax laws to affirmative action policies provided by candidates elected to Congress.
8. The elections during the past few years of progressive District Attorneys throughout the country who make sure you and especially your 15-30 year-old Black sons, nephews, and cousins are no longer judicially lynched by the racist and mass-incarcerating so-called criminal justice system.
9. The hopeful- and likely- election of progressive Stacey Abrams in Georgia as the first Black and the first woman governor of that state.
10. The hopeful- and likely- election of progressive Andrew Gillum in Florida as the first Black governor of that state.
Colloquially speaking, you non-voting Blacks better not accept no benefits or take no credit regarding any of the ten items listed above (or anything else) because you ain’t done nothing to help.
In fact, you remind me of the type of people the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey was referring to when he said, “I have no desire to take all Black people back to Africa. There are Blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.”
In conclusion, the photo in this week’s column is that of ex-Tennessee cop Clayton Hickey wearing his Confederate lynching T-shirt while voting in Mississippi on November 6. Now tell me again why you didn’t vote.