"... And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
Donald Trump is the poster child for the new Gilded Age of Robber Barons - The Resurgence of the American Plutocracy.
And the kind of ugly claim to entitlement that Trump embodies goes way back.
Droit du seigneur ('right of the lord'), also known as jus primae noctis ('right of the first night'), sometimes referred to as prima nocta, was a supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with any female subject, particularly on her wedding night.
If you've got the money, you've got the power. And with enough money and power, you can do whatever the fuck you want.
I don't know how many old westerns I've seen where the local cattle baron buys up water rights, or builds a dam upstream from the farmers to force them off their land, so he can snap up more for himself.
"Entitlement" is popularly taken to mean some uncomplimentary things. Republicans like to use that word to shit on people who've worked their entire lives making other people rich, and end up just squeaking by on a small stipend from Social Security, and hoping they don't get sick enough to need more than the bare minimum of coverage provided by Medicare.
In that case, "entitlement" means exactly what it implies. ie: people are in fact entitled to the rewards after a lifetime of effort. Because they fucking earned it.
What we less often apply that word to is the behavior of over-privileged assholes like Lauren Boebert, who do shitty inconsiderate things, and then threaten people with "Don't you know who I am? I have friends who can make your puny little life even more miserable than assholes like me have made it already."
Entitlement is when some dick acts like a dick, and then pretends to be the victim when they get called on it.
Rep. Lauren Boebert booted from ‘Beetlejuice’ musical for disturbance
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was ejected from the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver this week after she was accused of vaping, singing, recording the show and being disruptive during the performance.
An incident report obtained by the Colorado Sun says that two patrons were reprimanded and then escorted from the premises for “causing a disturbance” during the musical Sunday night at the city-owned Buell Theatre. The incident report, which does not name the people involved, says the patrons were “issued a warning” during intermission after three complaints were made by other patrons about their behavior.
Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays. Surveillance footage from the theater published by KUSA, an NBC affiliate in Denver, appears to show Boebert and a man being escorted from their seats. In the hall, Boebert is seen rebuking an usher, at one point giving him the middle finger.
As they were being escorted from the premises, according to the incident report, the pair made statements such as: “Do you know who I am?” and “I am on the board” and “I will be contacting the mayor.” Officers with the Denver Police Department responded to the incident and stayed in the lobby until the pair left the venue, the report says.
Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign manager, confirmed to The Washington Post that the congresswoman was escorted out of the performance, but he disputed the alleged behavior cited by the venue.
“I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumors: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of Beetlejuice,” he said in a statement. Sexton noted that the Denver Post, the first to report the story, has reviewed the show as “zany,” “outrageous” and a “lusty riot.”
Sexton denied that Boebert was vaping during “Beetlejuice,” saying that heavy fog machines and electronic cigarettes were used during the show, so there might have been “a misunderstanding from someone sitting near her.”
Boebert said on X, formerly Twitter, that she “did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!”
“Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!” she wrote.
Denver Police Sgt. David Abeyta told The Post that the venue’s private security handled the situation, “so we actually never had any interaction with that incident.”
“It was resolved before we got involved,” he said.
Brian Kitts, director of marketing and communications for Denver Arts and Venues, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning. Kitts told the Denver Gazette that Boebert and her guest were booted after “numerous complaints” from fellow patrons about inappropriate behavior.
Before she came to Congress in 2020, Boebert was arrested or summoned at least four times, according to the Denver Post. Boebert, who represents a rural and heavily conservative part of western Colorado, was reelected last year after a recount confirmed she had won the closer-than-expected election. Her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, had argued that Boebert’s controversial comments and reputation as a firebrand Republican — she compared the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol to 1776, when the United States declared its independence — were a distraction for her district. She won by 546 votes.
Frisch is challenging Boebert again for her seat in 2024.
“Beetlejuice,” a Broadway adaptation of the 1988 Tim Burton film, is showing at the Buell Theatre until Sept. 17. The venue cautions that the musical “contains strong language, mature references, and a lot of the crazy, inappropriate stuff you would expect from a deranged demon.”
On Sunday, staff received three complaints about the couple sitting in Row E of the orchestra section, the report says. Multiple officials waited until the pair returned to their seats to give them a warning.
“I informed them that our usher team had noticed vaping and also that they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cellphone, and that they need to be respectful to their neighbors,” an official wrote in the report. “Since, there was already multiple complaints, I informed the patrons that if there was another issue that they would be asked to leave.”
That’s when Boebert and her guest became “argumentative,” saying that “they were in concert with everyone around them,” the report says. Five minutes later, theater officials got another report that the pair were being loud and recording the performance, according to the report. That’s when officials told Boebert and the man to leave.
“They told me they would not leave,” a venue official wrote. “I told them that they need to leave the theatre and if they do not, they will be trespassing. The patrons said they would not leave. I told them I would [be] going to get Denver Police. They said go get them.”
Minutes later, Boebert and her guest left. After they exited the theater, Boebert was seen twirling on the promenade while holding the man’s hand, according to surveillance video.
The man did not appear to be her husband, and his identity is unclear. Boebert announced in May that she was filing for divorce from her husband of two decades. Her husband reportedly threatened their neighbors last year in what authorities described as a neighborhood disturbance. No arrests were made in that case.
Sexton, the Boebert campaign manager, told The Post that Boebert appreciates the venue’s strict enforcement of its no-photo policy. The congresswoman “strongly encourages everyone to go see Beetlejuice.” encourages people to see “Beetlejuice,” he added. “But with a gentle reminder to leave their phones outside of the venue.”
Rich white and over-privileged. HuffPo: A federal judge on Friday dismissed a $250 million lawsuit against The Washington Post from the attorneys of Nick Sandmann, the MAGA hat-wearing teen captured in a viral video with Native American activist Nathan Phillips in January.
A student at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, Sandmann was part of a group of teens filmed surrounding Phillips while he performed an American Indian Movement song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial early this year. Rich white people who're looking for a nice fat payday at the expense of other rich white people have to stop making shit up about "lazy brown people always looking for a handout at the expense of rich white people."
Stacey Patton, Dame Magazine: There’s a scene in the film The Color Purple—based on Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-winning novel set in 1930s-era rural Georgia—that has been coming to mind far too often lately with all the BBQ Beckys and Permit Pattys having their moment. In it, the town mayor’s wife Miss Millie, a white woman, walks up to Sofia, a Black woman who is out enjoying life with her children while her husband is pumping gas. Miss Millie, in a moment of peak caucasity, walks up to these Black children, squeezes their faces and kisses them, and compliments Sofia on how clean they are. Then she asks if Sofia would like to become her maid.
- and - I think of Miss Millie every time I hear another story about one of these white women who has been accosting or calling cops on Black people for simply living and breathing, whether it’s mowing lawns, or selling candy, or families having barbecues, or an Ivy League student napping in the library. These Permit Pattys are living archetypes of white females lording their privilege over Black people.
- and -
These hashtagged Beckys are contemporary versions of the plantation mistress and Miss Millie from the Jim Crow era. The growing list of white women calling the police today reminds us that they feel entitled to have a say in and control over Black people’s lives, reinforcing their entitlement by calling in the law when they feel offended. While a few police officers are exhibiting a rare common sense by not attacking or arresting the Black victims, they remain the exception to the rule. The risk of danger is ever-present when a white woman takes out her entitled fingers to dial 911.
If white women decide that they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened—again, without any cause or provocation—they know they can always call in the white patriarchal soldiers to back up their racist suspicions. They make those calls with the expectation that they will be believed and the Black person will be “put back in his or her place.”
We’ve seen a lot of think pieces about the “angry white man” in the era of Trump. But what do these stories tells us about white women’s state of mind?
- and - As Tommy J. Curry, author of The Man-Not explains: “Historically, white women have acted as the triggers of white male patriarchal violence. They establish the racial proxemics within societies. For centuries, the alleged hyper-vulnerability white women have had to racialized men and their discomfort around raced bodies has served as the justification for segregation and apartheid in colonized spaces the world over.”
Curry also asserts that the discrimination white women face limits their individual aspirations and controls their bodies in exchange for the safety from and superiority to racialized groups. This gives white women an extraordinary managerial power over Black lives.
But because white women today are also in this place where they don’t feel privileged because of a combination of sexism and general economic crap affecting all but the one percent, they flex what power they do have in weird ways, so they’re less inclined to imagine themselves as oppressors. Their sense of trumped-up fear and vulnerability against people of color, especially Black people, has been historically validated—rarely if ever challenged or questioned—and so if and when they call the police or the mobs to exact violence, they know they will rush to their defense.
In times of national distress, white women need Black people, especially Black women. They are longing for someone to take care of them and they resent that they can’t command that any more. These police calls are tied up with them missing their sense of power.
When you raise the expectations of marginalized people, and you don't deliver, you can expect an explosion.
If you take people who have always had high expectations, and you don't deliver what they're absolutely sure they're entitled to - the explosion can look a lot like Cult45.
Wanna look at the rather frightening mortality trend among Non-College-Educated Working Class White People?
The 3 most often cited causes of 500,000 excess premature deaths in that cohort over a period of 14 years (1999-2013) were Opioids, Suicide, and Alcohol-Related Liver Disease.
We now have some new terminology - Deaths of Despair.
What's driving that trend is not the convenient and intellectually lazy concept of Economic Anxiety.
The hate mail - 😂
The pain is real, but we have to insist on a diagnosis that's not bullshit.
Nobody's saying she isn't allowed to feel good while others are suffering. The problem is that she does this kinda shit on a fairly consistent basis - the problem is she's fucking tone deaf.
WaPo: There is, of course, no official manual on how to use an official government position to get officers to tear up a ticket, but for any enterprising self-help author looking to write one, a dash-cam video featuring a purple-vest-wearing, recently resigned Caren Z. Turner might prove insightful.
During an Easter weekend traffic stop that involved her daughter, Turner flashed her gold “Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” badge and demanded that the law officers call her by her title: “Don’t call me ‘Miss.’ It’s ‘Commissioner.’ ”
She said, early and often, that she is a friend of the Tenafly, N.J., mayor and also happens to be a personal acquaintance of the police chief. She may have even been invited to attend the officers’ police academy graduation, she told them.
She made sure the officers knew they were dealing with the cream of Tenafly society, not riffraff. She is an attorney, she told them. Her daughter, she said, is a student at Yale, and the younger woman’s friends attend MIT — and the officers were ruining what had been a nice Easter weekend hike.
And when all that failed, she cursed at the officers and told them to shut up. (actually, she told 'em to "shut the fuck up", but WaPo is still trying to get us to think the world of politics is somehow marked by decorum, and inhabited by well-mannered people)
But anyway:
We can't know exactly what was going on inside her head of course, but this looks an awful lot like Privilege Working Overtime.
And the kicker? In the public statement she released to The Englewood Daily Voice, she shifts the blame, suggesting it's the cops who need to "...review best practices with respect to tone and de-escalation, so that incidents like this do not recur." Fake lord, have mercy. hat tip = FB pal Vicki W-E
I'm not crazy about the goddie stuff at the end, but it's definitely relevant to a reasonable expectation for The Christian Right to start behaving like Christians, and actually doing - you know - what's right.
A little more on the protests going on during the anthem before football games. Here's Mike Ditka providing further proof of the latent manifestation of brain injury symptoms a player can display after nearly a lifetime of taking blows to the head. “All of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression,” Ditka told Jim Gray on Westwood One’s pregame show ahead of the Bears’ “Monday Night Football” loss to the Vikings. “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.” Or maybe he's showing the inner workings of the average GOP rube's mind, but that requires me to ask: How am I supposed to tell the difference? So let's hear Tim Wise again as he tries to explain some of these things to us:
Timeless response to "not all white people are racist". When the entire system is rotten, seeking solace in a few good apples is no solution pic.twitter.com/V8tG5SCTK0
Blacks and whites will have different perspectives on their entwined history. War victory for my white great-great-great grandfather, Jeremiah H. Dial, who enlisted in the 31st Arkansas infantry regiment and was wounded in the battle of Stone River, Tenn., in December 1862, would have meant defeat for my great-great-great-grandmother Lavinia Fulton and their daughter, Mary Ellen. Instead, Lavinia died a free woman, living to play with her grandchildren and give thanks to God every Sunday in church in Birmingham, Ala. I thank God my great-great-great-grandfather lost. Every right-thinking person should be glad he lost.
Yet the monuments debate isn’t really about the past. It’s about a present-day assertion of white supremacy and whether our nation is going to stop making excuses and stare it down. Most of the statues, as has been widely discussed, were erected long after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. They were hoisted into view to assert white dominance at specific points in time when African Americans gained a measure of political influence — during Reconstruction and the civil rights era. With the bronzes came domestic terrorism, lynchings, bombings and cross burnings. The current uptick in neo-Nazi and white supremacist activity was entirely predictable. With clockwork precision it surged at the time of the nation’s first African American president.
So why do some people treat modern icons as if they were ancient relics, like marbles from the Parthenon?
Fear. History isn’t being erased, but it is being corrected. Relocating a Confederate statue to, say, a museum, is an acknowledgment that we see the naked emperor; we see through the contorted logic that it is possible to separate the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, that it’s a whites-only story and slavery is blacks-only, and that treason is the same as patriotism.
- and -
To all the bronze Confederate soldiers, in whom I see the image of my great-great-great-grandfather, I would extend this grace. Without resentment or rancor, I would move them into museums and there tell the story of their lives. I would end their utility as flashpoints for racism and division, and, once and for all, allow them to retire from their long service as sentries over a whitewashed history.
The only problem is in that last graf: "once and for all". It doesn't happen that way.
This is the weirdness of politics, as practiced by very clever people who can be devious and cynically manipulative. There's no such thing as once and for all.
We are at what Lisa Hickey rightly calls an inflection point in the United States. White Supremacists and White Nationalists are marching around the nation, ostensibly to protest things like the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. It is time for every white person in this country to decide where they stand. It is far too easy to describe the torch-carrying Supremacists as some other sort of species, as monsters and not as humans.
We can create mental walls: They are them, and we are us. We’re not like them. But this is intellectually dishonest. These people are our co-workers, our family, and our friends. They’re people we pass on the street.
Whooo yeah - sure glad I chose to be born white, and middle class, in the American suburbs. Best decision I ever made. I realize folks who post this crap on social media aren't consciously going outa their way to be shitty. This is not intended to be mean-spirited. Indeed, it's supposed to be a good Life Lesson for all those mopey little pity puppies out there who just need to buck up and put on their big-girl panties and lace 'em up and get in there and blah blah blah. But the lack of intent to be shitty doesn't make it less shitty for someone not born to the dominant demographic. We start with a (mostly) appropriate feeling of pride and gratitude where our own situations are concerned, but we end up with the kind of bullshit attitude that poor people are poor - and they have all those poor people problems - because they're somehow morally deficient. And that ends up making us say some of the stoopidest fucking things:
I am a black man who has, for the vast majority of my life, been proud to be an American. Lee Greenwood’s ballad always makes me emotional. I am also proud to be the boys’ basketball coach at West Lafayette High School.
Monday afternoon, two of my players, both of whom are black, were verbally assaulted by three young men in a black SUV. The men in the vehicle stopped to call them “n-----s.” I have been relatively silent about what has happened in our country since the election, but I can be silent no longer.
Eight years ago, we elected a black man president of the United States. I never thought that would happen in my lifetime, but it did. I believe that President Barack Obama’s election empowered black people in our country. I certainly felt that way.
Now I believe that we have empowered white bigots by electing a white bigot to the highest office in our country. Since the election, there have been far too many instances of bigots who feel that they can be who they are without fear of consequences.
Rushdie makes the point that the bigots are always on about how everybody's treating them oh so very badly. You may notice, btw, that this is the standard play that so many "conservatives" pull all the fucking time.
Calling them out for being intolerant means you're being intolerant.
Call them out for some racist shit they say, and it means you're the real racist.
Tell them to stop using their religious beliefs to rationalize discrimination against LGBT, and you're discriminating against them because of their faith.
Smack down a bully, and that just means you're bullying the bully.
But the killer point comes (starting at about 2:00) when Linda Chavez demonstrates perfectly that she's way past her freshness date. She launches into the same old crap about how (paraphrasing) "people need time to be brought along slowly". Bullshit. Comfortable white people said exactly the same thing in the 50s and 60s when asked about Segregation and "Black Rights". Comfortable owners and managers said exactly the same thing when union organizers were demanding fair labor practices.
US history is chock full of examples of foot-dragging on issues that basically have centered on getting this country to start living up to the promises it made to itself. You know - "all men are created equal" and that silly old notion of "a more perfect union" thing. Go back as far as you feel like going, and you'll find another Linda Chavez telling us that "they want too much too soon - it's all moving too fast - people need time to get used to it - it's all so new, these ideas of equality and fairness".
Stay with this Tim Wise thing til about the 4:00 mark:
If I plug in the word "gay" when I hear "black" or "people of color", and substitute "straight" for "white", suddenly it seems as if some of these concepts are in fact kinda universal - oooh, maybe that's what Mr Jefferson meant by "we hold these truths to be self-evident"(?).
Change can be a scary thing, but we're supposed to treat people right - and we can't afford to continue not treating people right just because it's inconvenient; or because we think we need our families and our friends and our neighbors to agree with us first.
I think ya gotta be careful with the whole 2-Minute Daily Hate thing, but there's something pretty satisfying about it once in a while. Especially when you can point it in the right direction.
