Lessons

YouTuber Shar Henley breaks down some of the recent FAFO thing - White Women Edition.

Snoop Brings It

@julie.9626 #duet with @theleftduck #politics @Snoop Dogg for the win. #hesaidwhathesaid #drawtheline ♬ original sound - Bear Politics

Today's Reddit

Hopefully, everybody's heard about it by now, but I feel the need to document it for myself.

Yes - they're bigoted exclusionist assholes, and they're not even trying to hide it now.

They've gone from dog whistle to klaxon to fog horn to skywriting and fireworks. What more do we need?

Tony Hinchcliffe at the Trump rally today in New York City, he plays it off as a joke but it’s what they all want to hear
byu/Odlavso inPublicFreakout

Coach D Speaks

How do we hide our bigotry and make white supremacy seem OK?

Put a brown face on it.

Coach D explains:

Trump: The Meltdown

Be like these guys - especially EG Marshall.

Remember

He took the tweeXt down, but not before he'd spread the poison.

"...get their mind right..." Jeezus H Fuq on toast.

Don't ever forget who these assholes are -

they're telling us who they are, and

they're telling us in a loud clear voice.

REMEMBER

Hear What They Say

... and watch what they do.

What's New, MAGA?

Nothing. Not one fuckin' thing.

Because they never come up with anything new. It's always cycled and recycled.

I remember rumors from back in the 70s and 80s about immigrant populations - back then it was almost exclusively SE Asian - prowling the suburbs looking for white people's family pets to serve up as the latest delicacy to all the unwitting Americans.

It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now, and JD Vance keeps showing us he's exactly the kind of asshole who's willing to do anything to find a wedge "issue" so he can use it to pit one American against the other.

One thing I'd like to see:

Let's stop spending time debunking this bullshit, and concentrate on calling out the racist assholes who put it out.

Vance pushes false accusations of Haitians eating pets

GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) on Monday amplified a false claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, despite the city’s police department denying any such incidents.

In a post on the social platform X, Vance published a video of him at a July Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing, reading a letter from Springfield city manager Bryan Heck detailing the city’s challenges in keeping up with housing for a growing Haitian immigrant population.

Vance added a reference to a now-debunked social media post.

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote.

Those reports are largely based on social media postings that were picked up by national figures including Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk over the weekend.

But Heck, whose letter Vance read in the committee room, said false allegations against immigrants were distracting from the real issues faced by Springfield.

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community. Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic,” Heck told The Hill in an email.

“Yes this clearly takes away from the letter’s point that we are struggling with housing, resources for our schools, and an overwhelmed healthcare system.”

The Springfield Police Division told the Springfield News-Sun on Monday that it has received no reports about anyone stealing or eating pets.

At an Aug. 27 Springfield City Commission meeting, local resident Anthony Harris alleged, among other things, that Haitian immigrants were slaughtering park ducks for food. Video of his speech has been widely shared on social media.

“Senator Vance has received a high volume of calls and emails over the past several weeks from concerned citizens in Springfield: his tweet is based on what he is hearing from them. The city has faced an influx of 15,000-20,000 Haitian migrants over the past four years, stressing public resources and leading to housing shortages, all thanks to Kamala Harris’s policy of extending temporary protected status designations,” a Vance spokesperson said.

“Many residents have contacted Senator Vance to share their concerns over crime and traffic accidents, and to express that they no longer feel safe in their own homes. Unlike the liberal media, JD takes his constituents’ concerns seriously.”

According to a frequently asked questions page managed by the Springfield police, between 12,000 and 15,000 Haitians live in the midwestern city legally, under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. Heck’s letter estimated that population to be between 15,000 and 20,000.

“This is the same old anti-Black playbook that we’ve seen for hundreds of years in Ohio being rolled out to divide and create hate, especially around election times,” said Erik Crew, staff attorney at the Haitian Bridge Alliance and a Cincinnati native with Springfield roots.

“White supremacist and antidemocratic movements have always used the claim that so-called Black savages are coming to destroy, especially when political power is up for grabs. This is no different. This time they are saying it is Haitians, and this time it is being used to try to score political points around immigration as well.”

In June, the Biden administration expanded the TPS designation for Haiti, allowing an estimated 309,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation.

“The fact is Haitian immigrants have been coming to Springfield seeking to come and contribute to U.S. democracy and the economy, and Springfield and Ohio will benefit from that like U.S. communities have benefited in the past from Black immigrants contributions,” Crew said.

“The fact is the rumors about Haitians in Springfield and pets have already been debunked, but we won’t stop hearing them because certain people will want to keep spreading them as the election nears.”

The accusations were widely picked up on right-wing social media on both personal and official channels.

The House Judiciary Committee Republicans X account on Monday posted an AI image of former President Trump hugging a duck and a cat — animals at the center of the social media allegations — with the caption “protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

Vance has recent experience in cat-related controversies since becoming the GOP vice presidential nominee.

He has been widely criticized for unearthed old comments and postings criticizing “cat ladies” and childless people, though he has since tried to downplay those remarks as remarks as sarcasm.

Today's Vic

Worth repeating:

MAGA is freaking out because they're being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

All Talk And No Walk

Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020

Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s “the least racist person.”

His history suggests otherwise.

If you ask President Donald Trump, he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

The trend has continued into his presidency. From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped with racist acts after his 2016 election.

Most recently, Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2016 presidential campaign; Trump’s own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, previously called “kung flu” a “highly offensive” term. And Trump insinuated that Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s Black, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to run for vice president — a repeat of the birther conspiracy theory that he perpetuated about former President Barack Obama.

This is nothing new for Trump. In fact, the very first time Trump appeared in the pages of the New York Times, back in the 1970s, was when the US Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination. Since then, he has repeatedly appeared in newspaper pages across the world as he inspired more similar controversies.

This long history is important. It would be one thing if Trump misspoke one or two times. But when you take all of his actions and comments together, a clear pattern emerges — one that suggests that bigotry is not just political opportunism on Trump’s part but a real element of his personality, character, and career.

Trump has a long history of racist controversies

Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s history, taken largely from Dara Lind’s list for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to previous discrimination.

1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”

1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.

1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a Black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.

1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”

2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”

2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a Black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”

2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”

2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy out one of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”

2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first Black president — was not born in the US. He claimed to send investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a “carnival barker.” The research has found a strong correlation between birtherism, as the conspiracy theory is called, and racism. But Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.

2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

For many people, none of these incidents, individually, may be damning: One of these alone might suggest that Trump is simply a bad speaker and perhaps racially insensitive (“politically incorrect,” as he would put it), but not overtly racist.

RELATED:Donald Trump’s history of encouraging hate groups and violence, from 2015 to 2020

But when you put all these events together, a clear pattern emerges. At the very least, Trump has a history of playing into people’s racism to bolster himself — and that likely says something about him, too.

And, of course, there’s everything that’s happened through and since his presidential campaign.

As a candidate and president, Trump has made many more racist comments

On top of all that history, Trump has repeatedly made racist — often explicitly so — remarks on the campaign trail and as president:

• Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime” and “bringing drugs” to the US. His campaign was largely built on building a wall to keep these immigrants out of the US.
• As a candidate in 2015, Trump called for a ban on all Muslims coming into the US. His administration eventually implemented a significantly watered-down version of the policy.
• When asked at a 2016 Republican debate whether all 1.6 billion Muslims hate the US, Trump said, “I mean a lot of them. I mean a lot of them.”
• He argued in 2016 that Judge Gonzalo Curiel — who was overseeing the Trump University lawsuit — should recuse himself from the case because of his Mexican heritage and membership in a Latino lawyers association. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who endorsed Trump, later called such comments “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
• Trump has been repeatedly slow to condemn white supremacists who endorse him, and he regularly retweeted messages from white supremacists and neo-Nazis during his presidential campaign.
• He tweeted and later deleted an image that showed Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of money and by a Jewish Star of David that said, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” The tweet had some very obvious anti-Semitic imagery, but Trump insisted that the star was a sheriff’s badge, and said his campaign shouldn’t have deleted it.
• Trump has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as “Pocahontas,” using her controversial — and later walked-back — claims to Native American heritage as a punchline.
• At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump officially seized the mantle of the “law and order” candidate — an obvious dog whistle playing to white fears of Black crime, even though crime in the US is historically low. His speeches, comments, and executive actions after he took office have continued this line of messaging.
• In a pitch to Black voters in 2016, Trump said, “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
• Trump stereotyped a Black reporter at a press conference in February 2017. When April Ryan asked him if he plans to meet and work with the Congressional Black Caucus, he repeatedly asked her to set up the meeting — even as she insisted that she’s “just a reporter.”
• In the week after white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump repeatedly said that “many sides” and “both sides” were to blame for the violence and chaos that ensued — suggesting that the white supremacist protesters were morally equivalent to counterprotesters who stood against racism. He also said that there were “some very fine people” among the white supremacists. All of this seemed like a dog whistle to white supremacists — and many of them took it as one, with white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Trump for “defending the truth.”
• Throughout 2017, Trump repeatedly attacked NFL players who, by kneeling or otherwise silently protesting during the national anthem, demonstrated against systemic racism in America.
• Trump reportedly said in 2017 that people who came to the US from Haiti “all have AIDS,” and he lamented that people who came to the US from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts” once they saw America. The White House denied that Trump ever made these comments.
• Speaking about immigration in a bipartisan meeting in January 2018, Trump reportedly asked, in reference to Haiti and African countries, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He then reportedly suggested that the US should take more people from countries like Norway. The implication: Immigrants from predominantly white countries are good, while immigrants from predominantly Black countries are bad.
• Trump denied making the “shithole” comments, although some senators present at the meeting said they happened. The White House, meanwhile, suggested that the comments, like Trump’s remarks about the NFL protests, will play well to his base. The only connection between Trump’s remarks about the NFL protests and his “shithole” comments is race.
• Trump mocked Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, again calling her “Pocahontas” in a 2019 tweet before adding, “See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!” The capitalized “TRAIL” is seemingly a reference to the Trail of Tears — a horrific act of ethnic cleansing in the 19th century in which Native Americans were forcibly relocated, causing thousands of deaths.
• Trump tweeted later that year that several Black and brown members of Congress — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — are “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” and that they should “go back” to those countries. It’s a common racist trope to say that Black and brown people, particularly immigrants, should go back to their countries of origin. Three of the four members of Congress whom Trump targeted were born in the US.
• Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” The World Health Organization advises against linking a virus to any particular region, since it can lead to stigma. Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, previously described the term “kung flu” as “highly offensive.” Meanwhile, Asian Americans have reported hateful incidents targeting them due to the spread of the coronavirus.
• Trump suggested that Kamala Harris, who’s Black and South Asian, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate — yet another example of birtherism.

This list is not comprehensive, instead relying on some of the major examples since Trump announced his candidacy. But once again, there’s a pattern of racism and bigotry here that suggests Trump isn’t just misspeaking; it is who he is.

Are Trump’s actions and comments “racist”? Or are they “bigoted”?

One of the common defenses for Trump is that he’s not necessarily racist, because the Muslim and Mexican people he often targets don’t actually comprise a race.

Disgraced journalist Mark Halperin, for example, said as much when Trump argued Judge Curiel should recuse himself from the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage, making the astute observation that “Mexico isn’t a race.”

Kristof made a similar point in the New York Times: “My view is that ‘racist’ can be a loaded word, a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.”

This critique misses the point on two levels.

For one, the argument is tremendously semantic. It’s essentially probing the question: Is Trump racist or is he bigoted? But who cares? Neither is a trait that anyone should want in a president — and either label essentially communicates the same criticism.

Another issue is that race is socially malleable. Over the years, Americans considered Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, and Spaniards as nonwhite people of different races. That’s changed. Similarly, some Americans today consider Latinos and, to a lesser degree, some people with Muslim and Jewish backgrounds as part of a nonwhite race too. (As a Latin man, I certainly consider myself to be of a different race, and the treatment I’ve received in the course of my life validates that.) So under current definitions, comments against these groups are, indeed, racist.

This is all possible because, as Jenée Desmond-Harris explained for Vox, race is entirely a social construct with no biological basis. This doesn’t mean race and people’s views of race don’t have real effects on many people — of course they do — but it means that people’s definitions of race can change over time.

But really, whatever you want to call it, Trump has made racist and bigoted comments in the past. That much should be clear in the long lists above.

Trump’s bigotry was a key part of his campaign

Regardless of how one labels it, Trump’s racism or bigotry was a big part of his campaign — by giving a candidate to the many white Americans who harbor racial resentment.

One paper, published in January 2017 by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction, after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.

Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the 2016 election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.

And a study, published in November 2017 by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then they were asked about views on housing policy.

The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a Black man. After the exposure, they were not only less supportive of housing assistance programs, but they also expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance, and they were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their situation.

In contrast, favorability toward Hillary Clinton did not significantly change respondents’ views on any of these issues when primed with racial cues.

“These findings indicate that responses to the racial cue varied as a function of feelings about Donald Trump — but not feelings about Hillary Clinton — during the 2016 presidential election,” the researchers concluded.

There is also a lot of other research showing that people’s racial attitudes can change their views on politics and policy, as Dylan Matthews and researchers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel previously explained for Vox.

Simply put, racial attitudes were a big driver of Trump’s election — just as they long have been for general beliefs about politics and policy. (Much more on all the research in Vox’s explainer.)

Meanwhile, white supremacist groups have openly embraced Trump. As Sarah Posner and David Neiwert reported at Mother Jones, what the media largely treated as gaffes — Trump retweeting white nationalists, Trump describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals — were to white supremacists real signals approving of their racist causes. One white supremacist wrote, “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters.”

I can't say for sure that you're a straight up racist asshole, Mr Trump - but people who self-identify as straight up racist assholes are among your most enthusiastic supporters.

Some of them even argued that Trump has softened the greater public to their racist messaging. “The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions,” said Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, which succeeded David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.”

And at the 2017 white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, said that the rally was meant “to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

So while Trump may deny his racism and bigotry, at some level his supporters seem to get it. As much as his history of racism shows that he’s racist, perhaps who supported him and why is just as revealing — and it doesn’t paint a favorable picture for Trump.

A Parallel

Meet the "New Right"

same as the old right.

Project 2025 in a nutshell:

"We must secure the existence of our people

and a future for white children"

Today's TweeXt

Wanna a little glimpse at racism in America - and the total fucking sewer TriXter has become?

Check out the replies

What invention would you miss the most? pic.twitter.com/4r1unFBAkY

— AlphaFo𝕏 (@Alphafox78) April 12, 2024

Here are a few: 

This African concept car pic.twitter.com/15lUWFrsYX

— Entertain Me HQ (@EntertainMeHQ) April 12, 2024

Great news! The boat is ready to go pic.twitter.com/RFtaHCwkKt

— Bravo Sierra 🇺🇸 (@BSmi2030) April 13, 2024

Not the watermelonium! pic.twitter.com/36bRQuV09I

— Bad AI (@Bad_AI_) April 12, 2024

America, you are nine kinds of fucked up.

I'm Not Racist But...

... I think the Dems are the racists because they blame white people who're just trying to keep the brown people from ruining this country.

It's Not - But It Is - What We Tho't

In spite of this nerd's maddening difficulty landing the fucking plane, he does finally get around to the point:

The idiots who fucked up the Capitol trying to shitcan American democracy are racist assholes who are scared to death of brown people.

Soak that one in. All these hyper-macho faux-big-dick "alpha" males can't stand the competition, so they'll burn down their own shit rather than see it shared with people they can't admit are out-working them.

Meritocracy my dyin' ass.

Tell Me About It, Marge

Marge The Impaler Greene is a piece of work.

Tell me you’re racist without telling me you’re racist.

MTG: “I know a ton of white people that are as lazy and sorry and probably worse than Black people.”pic.twitter.com/zlEcxa3hAl

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 3, 2023

Smart Money

The guy had to be smart in a particular way, at a particular thing, and at a particular time.

Coupla things though, Elmo:

• You did not make it all by yourself - you had - and continue to have - a metric fuck ton of help from people who deserve credit, but never even get mentioned when you talk
• Being smart in one way, doing one thing, doesn't mean you're smart in any other way, doing anything else
• You had to be smart to make the money, but the money does not make you smart

Elon Musk Has Crossed a Line

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men who is now most famous for running the website X, formerly known as Twitter, has a new excuse for the company’s shaky performance since he bought it last year. The problem, according to Mr. Musk, is the Jews.

In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence — that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”

While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.

Mr. Musk also blamed a collapse in the company’s value — estimates place the company’s current worth at roughly one-third the $44 billion Mr. Musk paid for it — on the ADL, saying that he was considering legal action against the ADL and signaling that he supported banning the organization from X.

Mr. Musk insists that his claims are not antisemitic and that he harbors no animus toward the Jews; still, over the past week he has repeatedly launched personal attacks against the ADL head, Jonathan Greenblatt, accusing him of lying about the ADL’s political influence.

There is a long history of far-right groups attacking the ADL for its alleged “smears.” In the late 1950s Russell Maguire, the owner of the right-wing American Mercury magazine, claimed Jewish groups were falsely smearing him and his publication as antisemitic — and, like Mr. Musk, suggested they were organizing a boycott against him. A few years later, in the mid-1960s, Robert Welch, the leader of the far-right John Birch Society, similarly claimed that the ADL was unfairly smearing his organization’s reputation by alleging it was harboring anti-Semites in its ranks.

The ADL was certainly critical of both men — but for good reasons. Mr. Maguire was, in fact, a committed antisemite. He endorsed the authenticity of the infamous antisemitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his magazine. Mr. Welch, in large part due to pressure from the ADL, was forced to purge the John Birch Society of its most outspoken antisemites in 1966. Considering that Mr. Musk has reinstated and retweeted a number of openly antisemitic and white nationalist accounts since acquiring the website, his attacks on the ADL are very much in keeping with this tradition.

The Anti-Defamation League is not the only organization that monitors far-right speech, nor has it been alone in drawing Mr. Musk’s ire and that of the online far right on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by civil rights activists in the 1970s, employs a bevy of researchers to monitor and catalog right-wing extremism and has long been the target of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and yet the S.P.L.C., a nonsectarian organization, has not been singled out by Mr. Musk.

Part of the reason is that the ADL, until relatively recently, was ambivalent — even supportive — of Mr. Musk. In 2022 Mr. Greenblatt of the ADL praised the billionaire entrepreneur. In comments on CNBC, Mr. Greenblatt called Mr. Musk an “amazing entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time.”

Henry Ford, of course, became famous as the creative genius behind the Ford Motor Company. And, like Mr. Musk, Mr. Ford was a veritable celebrity. In the same way that Mr. Musk’s fanboys on Twitter gush about how his company SpaceX will lead humanity into a cosmic future, Mr. Ford was seen as the apostle of industrial modernity. Joseph Stalin sought out experts from the Ford Motor Company to help industrialize the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Aldous Huxley dated the calendar in his 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World” “A.F.” — “After Ford.”

Mr. Ford was also — next to Charles Lindbergh — one of America’s most infamous antisemites of the 20th century, and Mr. Greenblatt was pilloried by liberal and left-wing critics for failing to note this.

Despite Mr. Greenblatt’s tone-deaf lauding of Mr. Musk as the second coming of Henry Ford, the ADL has been justifiably concerned with monitoring Twitter as one of the major global forums for antisemitism since Mr. Musk’s takeover. Twitter’s historical free-for-all approach to speech, while it has allowed for previously marginalized voices to be major players in media narratives, has also allowed for new platforming opportunities for open antisemites and racists, hitherto confined to websites for true believers. Twitter was not the only social media platform to flirt with extremism — Facebook infamously became a vector of disinformation during the 2016 election — but it was unique in its power to shape media narratives.

What explains Mr. Musk’s questionable decision making? It does not take much of a leap to imagine that an immensely wealthy businessman — one who strongly believes in his own messianic mission to uplift humanity and who is facing intense and sustained public criticism over his politics and business acumen for the first time in decades — might conclude that nefarious forces are at work to undermine him. What separates this simple scapegoating from full-blown conspiracism is the sense one gets from Mr. Musk and his acolytes that criticism of him imperils the utopian future of mankind. That, combined with the fact that Mr. Musk has been consistently boosting far-right, white nationalist, and antisemitic accounts on Twitter since the beginning of his tenure, effectively melds his sense of victimhood with the conspiratorial antisemitism of the most toxic elements of the right.

X, née Twitter, despite losing significant value due to Mr. Musk’s incompetence and having to contend with rivals like Meta’s Threads, is still the most influential social media platform in shaping the national news narrative. As Kanye West, himself no stranger to making unhinged antisemitic statements, has said, “No one man should have all that power.”

The Republican Party already has a serious problem with some campaign staffers openly trafficking in antisemitic and white nationalist speech. Mr. Musk scapegoating the Jews for his own catastrophic business decisions regarding his management of one of the most influential social media platforms in the world will only add fuel to the fire.

Praising By Faint Damnation

Tommy Tuberville may be dumb as a mud fence, but his handlers aren't.

And Tommy Tuberville may not be the racist asshole he seems to be, but there're lots of people who wear the label "Racist Asshole" like a merit badge, and they all think he's one of their own.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville refuses to agree white nationalists are racist

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that the definition of a “white nationalist” is a matter of “opinion” during a television interview Monday night in which he was given the opportunity to clarify remarks from this spring, when he appeared to be advocating for white nationalists to serve in the U.S. military.

During the CNN interview, Tuberville repeatedly said that he rejects racism but pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins when she told him that by definition white nationalists are racist because they believe their race is superior to others. Tuberville at one point in the back and forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”

The interview resurrected another controversy for the first-term senator, who has been in the news mostly for stalling scores of senior military nominations in an attempt to stop a Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members and their families.

Asked to clarify his comments on white nationalists in the military, Sen. Tommy Tuberville's response: pic.twitter.com/deTfS4XKnR

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 11, 2023

In a May interview with a local public radio station in Alabama, Tuberville, a former football coach, criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his efforts “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military. Tuberville said it was part of an effort to politicize the armed services and accused Pentagon leaders of “ruining our military” and driving away supporters of former president Donald Trump.

Tuberville subsequently told reporters that he looks “at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” adding: “That’s what we’re called all the time.”

Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’

On Monday night, Collins pressed Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, offering a definition of a white nationalist as someone who “believes that the white race is superior to other races.”

“Well that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.

Asked for his opinion, Tuberville said: “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”

Tuberville then accused Democrats of using the term to push “identity politics,” which he said is “ruining this country.”

Collins continued to press Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be able to serve in the military, saying they are people who believe “horrific things.”

“Well that’s just a name that has been given,” Tuberville said of white nationalism.

Collins told him, “it’s a real definition.”

“If you’re going to do away with most White people in this country out the military, we’ve got huge problems,” Tuberville responded.

“It’s not people who are White. It’s white nationalists,” Collins said.

“That have a few probably different beliefs, they have different beliefs,” Tuberville said. “Now if racism is one of those beliefs, I’m totally against it. I’m totally against racism.”

Earlier in the interview, Tuberville cited his coaching experience at Auburn University and elsewhere.

“I was a football coach for 40 years and had the opportunity to be around more minorities than anybody up on this Hill,” Tuberville said.

“A white nationalist is racist, senator,” Collins said.

“Well that’s your opinion, that’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.

He added: “I’m totally against any type of racism.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “[w]hite nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhite persons.”

“Their primary goal is to create a white ethnostate,” the group says on its website. “Groups listed in a variety of other categories, including Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity, could also be fairly described as white nationalist.”

Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks.

A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.

The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021.

BTW, WaPo - maybe you could ask the Senator to name a kind of politics that isn't "identity politics".

Disparities

"In America, we value each and every individual."

The NYT piece is an example of how racism manifests itself at the level of 'systemic', without much conscious effort to be racist.

There was undoubtedly some racial consideration on the part of some of the decision-makers, but even without it, this shit would still have just grown naturally out of the policies that put major traffic carriers thru poorer (ie: brown) neighborhoods because the richer (ie: white) neighborhoods had the political power to influence the decisions.

American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap
Why dangerous streets are concentrated in minority neighborhoods, and what to do about it.

An estimated 19 pedestrians a day, on average, were struck and killed by automobiles in this country in 2022. The year before, pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high.

While these deaths spiked across the board during the pandemic, the fatalities follow a clear and consistent pattern: Across the country, Black and Hispanic pedestrians are killed at significantly higher rates than white pedestrians.

A study published last year by Harvard and Boston University deepened our understanding of this phenomenon by controlling for the distance traveled by different racial groups when driving, walking or riding a bicycle. It found that Black people were more than twice as likely, for each mile walked, to be struck and killed by a vehicle as white pedestrians. For Black cyclists, the fatality risk per mile was 4.5 times as high as that for white cyclists. For Hispanic walkers and bikers, the death rates were 1.5 and 1.7 times as high as those for white Americans using the same modes of transportation.

The design of our cities is partly to blame for these troubling disparities. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods that have a larger share of Black and Hispanic residents. These neighborhoods share a history of under-investment in basic traffic safety measures such as streetlights, crosswalks and sidewalks, and an over-investment in automobile infrastructure meant to speed through people who do not live there. Recent research from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that formerly redlined neighborhoods — often the targets of mid-century “slum clearance” projects that destroyed residences and businesses to allow for new arterial roads and highways — had a strong statistical association with increased pedestrian deaths. The neighborhoods graded D for lending risk by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had more than double the pedestrian fatality rate than neighborhoods graded A.

Decades of civic neglect, collapsing property values and white flight took a further toll on pedestrian safety. Sidewalks — which many cities rely on property owners to maintain — were left to crumble along with vacant buildings, turning a simple walk down the street to a bus stop or store into a perilous journey. One study of Florida roads found that the likelihood of a crash involving a pedestrian was three times as great per mile on roadways with no sidewalks.

The broken streetscape is only part of the problem. These neighborhoods are “much more likely to contain major arterial roads built for high speeds and higher traffic volumes at intersections, exacerbating dangerous conditions for people walking,” according to a recent report from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit focusing on urban planning and sustainability. These roads and highways, designed in the middle of the last century to provide convenient access to the city from the ever-sprawling suburbs, often brought misery to the minority communities they hurtled through.

In Los Angeles, for instance, a 2020 analysis by U.C.L.A. researchers found that although Black residents made up 8.6 percent of the city’s population, they represented more than 18 percent of all pedestrians killed and around 15 percent of all cyclists. From 2016 to 2020, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had more pedestrian deaths than any other metro area in the United States and a pedestrian death rate higher than the metropolitan areas around New York, Philadelphia or Washington.

As a society, we have been laying the blame for pedestrian traffic injuries on the victims ever since the 1920s, when pro-car groups backed by the automobile industry coined the term “jaywalking” to suggest that pedestrians were at fault when hit by drivers. But an emphasis on individual responsibility for road safety doesn’t seem to help, even when it’s shifted back to drivers. In its most recent report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave driver training an effectiveness rating of one star out of five as a strategy to increase pedestrian safety, noting, “There is no evidence indicating that this countermeasure is effective.”

Engineering solutions like speed humps, lane narrowing, better lighting, the installation of sidewalks and “complete street” designs are far more effective at reducing pedestrian deaths. The ubiquity of speeding is not necessarily because people are bad drivers, but because the design of our roads — wide, straight stretches of asphalt meant for high speeds above all else — encourages them to do so.

Many American cities have already introduced what are known as “Vision Zero” campaigns based on the idea that even a single pedestrian death is one too many.

Vision Zero can be remarkably effective. Death rates have dropped in many cities properly carrying out the program. Oslo and Helsinki, which adopted Vision Zero in the 1990s, recorded zero traffic deaths in 2019, and Helsinki had just two pedestrian deaths in 2021. But it requires a committed redesign of city streets and bikeways, not just rhetoric and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

In the United States, minimal funding, political inertia and a lack of state and federal participation have limited the effectiveness of these programs. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, pedestrian deaths have actually risen since the adoption of Vision Zero. “All these safety efforts come to die in the United States,” said Beth Osborne, the director of the transportation arm for Smart Growth America. “All of these could be incredibly effective, but we have to be willing to change our approach, not just make plans and talk about changing our approach.”

Last year, 312 people died in traffic accidents in Los Angeles, the majority of them pedestrians and cyclists. “If 300 people died of something in the city, whether it was something violent or whether it was something else like Covid, the resources were put behind it to try to prevent those things, to respond to those things,” said Eunisses Hernandez, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We have not seen that same urgency with people dying in traffic accidents as pedestrians and as cyclists.”

The United States can reverse the trend of rising traffic deaths, a trend that disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic communities, by investing in safer road design: narrowing streets, reducing the amount of space devoted to cars, enforcing speed limits and adding trees to provide visual cues for drivers to slow down. While these interventions may seem simplistic compared to the scale of the problem, other countries have proved that they can work. City planners must recognize that we all should be able to walk or ride a bicycle through our own neighborhood without fearing for our life.

For Councilmember Hernandez, it is a matter of justice. “I have pictures of bike racks that are full inside of these high schools, yet there are no bike lanes around the high schools,” she said. More than one high school in her district is bordered by busy four-lane streets. And at least two pedestrians in the district have already been killed by vehicles this year.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently said that “every infrastructure choice is a safety choice,” and in 2022 launched a $1 billion pilot program to redesign roads with a focus on racial equity. Whether this federal action will be able to bend the statistics remains to be seen. For decades, the United States has prioritized the needs of people driving through cities over the well-being of the people living in them, and largely at the expense of communities with the least political clout. Adopting the framing of Vision Zero without finding sufficient funding and political will for road redesign is simply not good enough. Our elected officials must be willing to face an unpleasant set of facts: that the appalling racial disparity in road deaths continues on their watch, and that nearly every killing of a cyclist or pedestrian by a car is preventable.

Seemingly Simple

Meltdown In Dixie - Trailer

P is for public, but apparently, an awful lot of the content on our "public" broadcast system is buried so deeply behind pay walls, that it's practically impossible to find a link to the shit that airs on "my publicly-funded local PBS station".

You're on your own. Good luck.

Free, my dyin' ass.

Odd Quotes

Google "this day in history" = 9.4 billion hits

Google "this day in black history" = 5.6 billion hits

So now all I need is a bot that will look to see how many "black history" events are included in the "history" results.

A cursory, randomly-clicking sampling is not encouraging.

• White people living today are not to blame for the shitty things black people have had done to them - since even before 1619 - by WASPy white people in the past.
• That doesn't mean we have no responsibility for what's going on now, and it has to be obvious that some shitty things are still happening to black people.