May 3, 2023
No more business as usual
April 11, 2022
When Donald Trump was elected seven years ago, Dr. Henry Louis Gates solemnly predicted that “it was the end of the second Reconstruction.” During the four years of his presidency, the country endured an endless assault on democracy and the Rule of Law, while those of us with marginalized identities also endured an endless assault on our very humanity.
We were all relieved when Trump was defeated in 2020 and relished his arraignment last week on 34 felony counts as a sign that he might finally be held accountable. Yet it was clear after January 6th that Trump left 1000 malignant seeds in his wake, prepared to sow chaos in his absence. In every corner of the country, the hoods have come off, with hundreds of politicians seeking to ride a wave of hatred to power.
These people are hellbent on getting and keeping power in order to control and oppress anyone who is not like them and they react to any challenge with blind fury. Witness this past week. In the hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race, when Judge Janet Protasiewicz bested election-denying, anti-abortion zealot, Dan Kelly, he called her a “serial liar” and an unworthy opponent, (Source: “What others are saying on Dan Kelly’s Supreme Court concession speech,” by Hunter Turpin,The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 4/7/23). Not to be outdone, newly elected Republican Dan Knodl, vowed to impeach Protasiewicz, presumably for the high crime of winning the election by double digits.
The egregiously racist ouster of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee may be the high profile horror show, but it is far from the only one in the past week. Around the country, Republican officials are tripping over themselves in their race to outdo each other in ostentatious displays of racism, misogyny and transphobia. Last Wednesday, the Kansas state legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto to ban transgender girls from competing in women’s sports. The bill currently impacts a mere three students, a move that Taryn Jones, head of Equality Kansas said, “has to feel like bullying and erasure,” (Source: “Kansas bans women’s sports as Legislature overrides Kelly’s veto,” by Katie Bernard and Jenna Barackman, The Kansas City Star, 4/5/23).
On Friday, Texas federal “Judge” Matthew Kacamaryk issued a nationwide injunction suspending FDA approval of mifepristone, the widely used “abortion-inducing drug that has been on the market for more than 20 years,” (Source: “Federal judge in Texas suspends FDA approval of abortion pill,” by Eleanor Klebanoff, The Texas Tribune, 4/7/23).
On Saturday, one day after a jury convicted Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murdering Garrett Foster at an Austin Black Lives Matter protest, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would seek to pardon Perry, (Source: “Governor Greg Abbott backs call for pardon for Daniel Perry, who killed Austin protester in 2020,” by William Melhadi, The Texas Tribune, 4/8/23).
Yesterday, we were unable to savor the swift and unanimous Nashville Metro Council vote reinstating Justin Jones because we were reeling from the news of yet another mass shooting in Louisville, KY that left 5 people dead and 8 seriously injured, (Source: “Gunman Kills 5 Co-Workers at Louisville Bank on Livestream, Police Say,” by Kevin Williams, Amanda Holpuch and Campbell Robertson, The New York Times, 4/10/23).
It is long past time for us to confront the fact that Republicans are waging an undeclared holy war against the rest of us. That is the thread uniting their attacks on women’s autonomy, Black history, and trans lives. They reject gun control not just because they are bought and paid for by the gun lobby, but because they know that a vitriolic minority cannot control a majority without weapons of war. Yes, we need to vote and overwhelm them at the ballot box, but that will not be enough. We have to become ungovernable. Don’t let them hide behind “decorum” to silence us. We need to clog the halls of state capitals and the streets. We need to disrupt “business as usual,” because business as usual is killing us.
E Pluribus Unum
April 1, 2023
While Trump’s indictment yesterday is a decisive step towards accountability for an irredeemably corrupt, dissembling racist, we should not mistake circulating memes of Trump in prison garb for action. With the indictment, Trump’s fate, at least on the New York charges, is out of his hands and out of ours and we should not confuse our armchair advocacy for activism.
In the rest of the world, ordinary people are taking to the streets in massive numbers to protest authoritarianism and exploitation. In Israel, thousands of people took to the street to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial “overhaul” that would dramatically weaken the country’s supreme court and allow the Knesset to overturn any of the court’s rulings by a simple majority vote, (Source: “What are the Israeli protests about and what happens next?” by Bethan McKernan, TheGuardian.com, 3/27/23).
France has seen two weeks of escalating protests and labor action since French President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a pension rescue plan that would raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64. On Tuesday, “740,000 protestors joined 240 rallies throughout the country,” and as many as 1.3 million people protested on March 7th (Source: “France wracked by more pension protests amid rising violence,” by Pauline Lockwood, Hannah Ritchie, Pierre Bairin, Oliver Briscoe and Sara Noor Haq, CNN.com, 3/29/23).
Yet here in the United States, where elected officials have waged an unceasing attack on women’s bodily autonomy, Black people’s history and the right of LGBTQ people to exist, we are strangely passive. Have we been lulled into complacency by the endless parade of distractions in our culture, from March Madness to Taylor Swift Tours? Or have we been driven to despondency by the ubiquity of the challenges to our liberty and humanity?
Tuesday’s grim news that another school shooting with an AR-15 at Covenant Christian School in Nashville left three precious nine year old children and three caring adults dead was met with numb inaction outside of Tennessee. We sit on our hands as people we elected not only do nothing to stop the carnage, but actively make it easier for gun violence to escalate, passing permitless carry legislation and refusing to entertain common sense provisions like red flag laws or magazine capacity limits that enjoy widespread support and might have prevented this tragedy.
Instead, hate mongering politicians and pundits have exploited the shooter’s gender identity to double down on vile rhetoric with the goal of making trans people even more vulnerable to violence. They claim that transgender people are a threat to public safety, despite the fact that “96% of the mass killings involving a single shooter were committed by men,”(Source: “Nashville shooting exploited by right to escalate anti-trans rhetoric,” by Finit Nirrapil, The Washington Post, 3/30/23).
Far from being a threat, transgender people are targets, disproportionately the victims of both state and individual violence. 38 trans people were murdered in 2022 (ibid) and 435 bills have been introduced in virtually every state in the union aimed at criminalizing gender affirming healthcare and prohibiting trans kids from participating in school sports, (Source: “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights innU.S. State Legislatures,” aclu.org, 3/28/23).
This is nothing less than attempted genocide. It is entirely consistent for the people who viciously attack trans children to be indifferent to the brutal and capricious slaughter of cisgender children. Is there any doubt that the zeal to suppress Black history is motivated by the determination to prevent schools from cultivating empathy in white children and pride in Black ones? Protecting white children has nothing to do with it.
Why aren’t we in the streets like the people of Israel or France? Is it because we don’t see threats to trans people as affecting us? Do we not care about the literal whitewashing of history? Do we feel powerless?
If anything, Trump’s indictment should show us that the institutions we have long pointed to as evidence of “American exceptionalism” are not dead yet, despite the determination of an army of autocratic wannabes to kill them off. It’s time to get off the couch and remember what our country’s motto, “e pluribus unum” means — out of many, one. Let’s act like we mean it.
Black History Month
February 16, 2023
Tuesday, on the fifth anniversary of the Parkland mass shooting, we awakened to another blood soaked Valentine’s Day. Monday night, with an active shooter loose on their campus, Michigan State students were told that their only options were to “Run. Hide. Fight,” underscoring just how badly we failed them. Again and again, in places where they should be learning, laughing, studying and flirting, they are barricading doors and hiding in closets. When they finally received word from adults messaging from a safe distance that the crisis was over, they told us that they don’t know what to feel.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that this country is addicted to hatred and violence. We repeatedly watch our children slaughtered with weapons of war and do nothing to stop the carnage. There are those in our midst so dedicated to cultivating cruelty and so determined to keep Black people at the bottom of our societal hierarchy that they ban books about baseball greats Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente. In the Florida statehouse, DeSantis plots to ride a wave of anti-Blackness and homophobia to the White House and The New York Times helpfully describes his attacks as “building his brand.”
Meanwhile, we mistake the presence of two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl for “progress”, glossing over the fact that the game itself is the spectacle where the brains and bodies of predominantly Black men are pummeled for our entertainment. We conveniently forget that there are only four Black head coaches in a sport where 70% of the players are men of color (Source: “Where are all the Black NFL coaches?” by James Brown, USAToday.com, 2/5/23).
The chickens have finally come home to roost. A country built on the myth of white superiority is on a foundation of ashes that is crumbling beneath us. Behind the book bans and the hard right turn to fascism are a group of people terrified that they might be exposed. They know that every story of Black achievement, no matter how anodyne, features the irrational antipathy and capricious violence of white people as a backdrop.
Their fragile egos cannot bear for people to learn the truth—that Black people resisted enslavement and Jim Crow and achieved over and over again, in spite of unspeakable odds placed against us. We achieved not simply in sports and culture, but in medicine, engineering, and most foundationally, democracy.
As The 1619 Project demonstrates persuasively, more than any other group of citizens, it is Black people who forced this country to begin to live up to its ideals for all people. Fascists know that their power is dependent on keeping people ignorant and hateful. They can’t risk having white children develop empathy and Black children develop pride. Let’s be clear about the endgame. American fascists know that if you feed people poison and arm them with guns, they will destroy themselves.
#BlackhistoryisAmericanhistory
#Thetruthwillsetyoufree
#Guncontrolnow
Justice for Tyre
January 29, 2023
Like Groundhog Day in Hell, we braced Friday night for the release of another snuff film of a young Black man being brutally murdered by the police. Tyre Nichols— a gifted photographer, a skilled skateboarder, a father, a son— died needlessly at the hands of five sadistic Memphis officers. The fact that the officers were Black doesn’t matter, because as cops say themselves, the only color that matters is blue.
We have reasoned, pleaded and protested, to no avail. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 was supposed to have produced a “reckoning.” That was supposed to be the moment when the scales were lifted from America’s eyes, when they finally saw what Black Americans had been trying to tell them, literally for decades. The video was irrefutable, the anguish too palpable. That was supposed to be the moment when we collectively cried, “Enough!”
But then, the pandemic receded and people were able to go outside for something other than protests… and then the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act failed to pass in Congress…and then the murder rate increased and Democratic officials not only retreated from police reform, but called for more funding for the police. The appeals for a radical new approach to public safety disappeared.
The results were predictable. In 2021, the number of people killed by the police barely budged, and in 2022, police killed 1176 people, more than in any other year on record, (Source: “‘What Are We Doing Wrong?’: US Police Killed Record Number of People in 2022,” by Julia Conley, CommonDreams.org, 1/6/23). Of those, only 31% involved an alleged violent crime and 11% did not involve any offense at all (ibid).
By all accounts, Tyre Nichols was a “gentle soul,” who never had so much as a “parking ticket,” (Source: “Tyre Nichols remembered as a wonderful son who loved skating and sunsets,” by Victoria Bisset, Hadley Green and Robert Klemko, The Washington Post, 1/28/23). Yet, even if he had a record and was engaged in criminal activity, we tell ourselves that the police are not supposed to serve as judge, jury and executioner, in the span of minutes!
The truth though, is far darker. As Jill Lepore details here, American policing began as slave patrols. In the early 20th century, American policing was organized and deployed to conduct “a war against the enemies of society,” who were defined as “[m]obsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants and Black people,” (Source: “The Invention of the Police,” by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 7/13/20).
Is it any wonder that such a system dehumanizes and kills unarmed Black people at alarming rates? Is it any surprise that Black and Brown officers who become part of that system often display the same brutality towards Black and Brown citizens? We should understand by now that it is not the color of the police, but the color of those policed, that dictates the outcome.
So when we call for justice for Tyre Nichols, we need to understand what that means. It doesn’t just mean prosecuting the officers who killed Tyre. That is accountability, which is a prerequisite, but not a substitute, for justice. It doesn’t just mean disbanding the SCORPION program in Memphis, or even every program like it around the country, which treats Black and Brown communities like war zones and positions the police as a hostile occupying force with unchecked power to violently control, rather than protect, residents. Justice for Tyre Nichols will be impossible until we face the fact many Americans define “safety” as the absence of Black people from their neighborhoods, their classrooms, their places of leisure and labor, and consider our deaths an acceptable price to pay.
They Were Expendable
January 7, 2023
Early this morning, on the 15th vote at 12:30 a.m., Kevin McCarthy finally achieved his Pyrrhic victory and was elected Speaker of the House. As numerous commentators have pointed out, it was a hollow victory befitting the empty suit who “won” it. In the negotiations leading to his win, McCarthy gave the bomb throwers everything they asked for. McCarthy can be ousted on the motion of a single House Republican and he ceded control of the all-important Rules Committee, “which controls what legislation reaches the floor and in what form,” (Source: “Speaker Quest Reveals McCarthy’s Tenuous Grip on an Unruly Majority,” by Luke Broadwater, The New York Times, 1/7/23).
There has been something darkly comic about watching the serial humiliation of a feckless dimwit, as he lost the Speakership vote to a Biggie quoting brother from Brooklyn day after day. Yet, as we marked the second anniversary of the violent insurrection at the Capitol yesterday, this circus hit a bit differently. We realized that, while President Biden was busy awarding medals to an assortment of law enforcement officers, public officials and ordinary people who made valiant sacrifices to uphold our democracy yesterday, steps away, elected officials who, at best, are on record repeatedly denying the legitimacy of a valid election, or at worst, stand credibly accused of complicity with the coup conspirators, were hijacking the levers of power in the House of Representatives.
Lauren Boebert, who infamously tweeted, “Today is 1776,” on January 6, 2021, was “among a group of lawmakers who met with White House aides and Trump campaign officials in the weeks after the 2020 election to discuss whether…Mike Pence could delay certification of the election,” (Source: “Boebert was present for early stages of Jan. 6 discussions, ex-Trump aide testifies,” by Ernest Luning, Coloradopolitics.com, 4/27/22). Although Boebert has denied involvement in the violence of January 6th, there is no question that she has trafficked in hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that has contributed to murderous violence against LGBTQ people in her home state.
Each of the 20 “Never Kevins,” who effectively control the House holds truly odious views about anyone who isn’t a Bible thumping, gun toting, straight white man. Boebert, Biggs, Gosar, Gaetz and their ilk, were elected by our fellow citizens because of those views. They were sent to Congress to use the levers of power to harm those they consider outside of their definition of Americans- LGBTQ people, Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous people, Jewish people, and women who believe in bodily autonomy. The sobering fact is that these people represent a “constituency.”
If we have learned nothing else in the last 246 years of our history, we have learned that constituencies that prop up white supremacy are rarely forcefully challenged. Instead their views are mainstreamed and used as an excuse not to enact policies that redress structural racism and advance equity for fear of angering this constituency and precipitating a backlash.
It is already happening. We need only look to Biden’s move on Thursday to broaden Title 42 to allow for the immediate expulsion of asylum seekers from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela for proof. This is an expansion of a racist Trump-era policy that blocks legitimate Black and Brown asylum seekers from entering the country under the guise of protecting public health. While the new rules expand the number of people from those countries eligible for entry through a “parole” program, applicants must have a fiscal sponsor and know that the program exists, ensuring that it will be out of reach for the most desperate asylum seekers. Under these new regulations, more asylum seekers will be expelled each month than were expelled in the entire previous year, (Source: “Biden immigration plan would restrict illegal border crossings,” by Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., Nick Miroff, Maria Sachetti and Kevin Seiff, The Washington Post, 1/5/23).
Senator Menendez and Jonathan Blazer of the ACLU blasted this blatantly racist policy, stating that it would “put more lives in grave danger,” (ibid). Yet the move was described in anodyne terms as “reflect[ing] a political move to the center,” deemed necessary ahead of Biden’s presumed re-election bid.
Make no mistake— our failure to hold those responsible for planning, financing and inciting January 6th accountable has landed us here, with the House under the thumb of the insurrectionist wing of the Republican Party and our Democratic President using Black and Brown migrants as sacrificial lambs to mollify their constituents. At a perilous time like this, we would do well to remember, if a politician tells us that in order to preserve democracy, a group of people must be expendable, democracy isn’t what they’re preserving.
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Asymmetrical Warfare
December 1, 2022
It has been almost two weeks since the horrific mass shooting in Colorado Springs, where the body armor-clad 22 year old grandchild of a MAGA Republican legislator barged into Club Q, killing 5 people and injuring 25 more. Only the quick thinking of Richard Fierro, a battle-scarred Latino veteran, and a trans woman patron kept the death toll from being higher. Richard Fierro was out with his wife, daughter and daughter’s boyfriend, seeking nothing more than a fun Saturday night watching one of his daughter’s friends perform in Club Q’s drag show (Source: “Army Veteran Went Into ‘Combat Mode’ to Disarm the Club Q Shooter,” by Dave Phillips, The New York Times, 11/21/22).
Fierro’s wife and daughter were injured and his daughter’s longtime boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance, was killed. When police arrived at the scene, they handcuffed Fierro and held him in the back of a squad car for an hour, rather than apprehend the battered white perpetrator on the floor, (Source: ibid).
The right wing response to the carnage bypassed the hollow “thoughts and prayers” invocation and doubled down on homophobia and transphobia, (Source: “Right-wing media and influencers double down on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in wake of the Colorado shooting,” by Ben Goggin and Kat Tenbarge, NBCNews.com, 11/23/22). There were those who wondered what a straight man and his family were doing in a LGBTQ bar and those who cynically cited the killer’s assertion that they were nonbinary as proof that this wasn’t a hate crime. The vilest Christofascists heaped scorn on the victims,claiming that murders would continue unless trans affirming healthcare was stopped!
We barely had time to catch our breath from the Colorado Springs mass shooting when we were rocked by the news of yet another. Last Wednesday morning, as we awoke, hoping to concentrate on nothing more consequential than meal prep and travel logistics, we learned that a disgruntled Walmart manager had used a brand new 9mm handgun to execute six of his co-workers at a Chesapeake, Virginia Walmart the previous night, (Source: “Walmart shooter left a ‘death note,’ bought gun the day of shooting,” by Ben Finley and Matthew Berakat, APnews.com, 11/26/22).
The most striking thing about our response to these two shootings is how resigned we have become. We treat mass shootings like inevitable acts of God (or the devil) that we are powerless to prevent. It has become so disturbingly commonplace that a “new type of reporter” has emerged, “the ‘mass shooting correspondent’.”
The rhetorical response to mass shootings has normally followed a predictable rhythm of Democratic demand for gun control and Republican deflection. Not this time. The right wing escalation after Colorado Springs shows that we have turned a dark corner. In truth, we have known since January 6th that an aggrieved white supremacist minority seeks to impose its will through violence. Republicans obdurately refuse to enact gun control legislation, not because of campaign donations from the NRA, but because they seek to empower that minority to menace or murder the majority of us who oppose them. They gleefully feed their adherents hatred and lies and arm them with weapons of war to mow down those of us they have demonized.
As a result, armed goons who believe the Second Amendment trumps the First are actively trying to silence and intimidate those of us simply trying to vote, or protest in favor of basic civil rights. 77% of those armed at protests are right wing (Source: “At Protests,Guns Are Doing the Talking,” by Mike McIntire, The New York Times, 11/26/22). This is what makes Elon Musk’s blanket amnesty for racist, antisemitic and transphobic Twitter accounts and Trump’s cozy dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes so incredibly dangerous. The world’s wealthiest man and the former President of the United States are literally platforming Nazis, amplifying and mainstreaming their hateful messages.
While it is hard to believe that antisemitism, racism and transphobia are being openly celebrated in 2022 by millions of mediocre men (and the women who love them) who have nothing but the myth of their superiority to hold onto, we don’t have the luxury of being shocked. As long as we sit, mouths agape in disbelief, thinking that these people will wake up and recognize our humanity, we’ll be engaged in asymmetrical warfare. There is no choice but to literally disarm them and to overpower them by standing up for each other. We need to show up for trans lives, condemn antisemitism, no matter the mouthpiece and combat anti-Black racism, every single day. Yes it will be hard, but face it, the other way lies madness.
#MomsDemandAction
#Banassaultweapons
#callen-lorde.org
#NAACPLDEF
Who tells your story?
November 15, 2022
One week past Election Day we can confidently say we fought the fascists to a draw. The announcement of Catherine Cortez-Masto’s victory in Nevada Saturday night clinched Democratic control of the Senate. Katie Hobbs’ win in the Arizona governor’s race, called last night, denied a telegenic Trumper the top spot in the state. Thanks to young voters, (who favored Democrats by a 28% margin), Black voters, and tireless organizing by thousands of regular people, we not only won the Senate, but a trifecta in the state governments in Michigan and Minnesota. Election denying Secretary of State candidates lost in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada and we have flipped at least two Congressional seats (Wa-3 and Md-6) that prognosticators were sure were going to Republicans, (Source: “Democrats still have a path to keep the House—but it’s tough,” by Andrew Prokop, Vox.com, 11/12/22).
It was equally as significant that voters in California, Michigan and Vermont passed ballot measures to guarantee abortion rights, while in Kentucky, voters defeated a measure “aimed at denying constitutional protections for abortion,” (Source: “Abortion, marijuana were also on 2022 ballots. Here’s how states voted,” by Karin Brulliard, The Washington Post, 11/10/22).
While the Democratic Party results bucked the historic trend of a president’s party suffering significant losses in their first midterm, the magnitude of the surprise was thanks to the endless drumbeat of “red wave” predictions made by credulous pundits regurgitating Republican spin. They uncritically repeated the talking point that Americans would allow high gas prices and an imaginary crime wave to blind them to the existential threat posed by vituperative theocrats.
This should serve as a cautionary tale. As we analyze the results over the coming weeks, we should also critically examine and push back against emerging narratives. A prime example is the statement that Tuesday’s results prove that Florida is “ruby red” and that Democrats should not waste any time investing in the state. Those statements ignore Florida’s rampant and persistent voter suppression.
Florida’s felon disenfranchisement law, like all such schemes, is rooted in a desire to deprive Black people of the right to vote. Florida originally added lifetime disenfranchisement for people convicted of felonies in 1868, during Reconstruction. The explicit purpose of the measure was to “prevent a negro legislature,” (Source: “History of Florida’s Felony Disenfranchisement Provision,” The Brennan Center for Justice & Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Brennancenter.org).
Permanent disenfranchisement remained the law in Florida for more than one hundred years, despite decades of unsuccessful litigation and lobbying by civil rights groups. By 2016, “more than one in five of Florida’s Black voting age population was disenfranchised,” (Source: “Voting Rights Restoration Efforts in Florida,” brennancenter.org, 8/10/22). In response, civil rights organizations formed the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition worked with the Brennan Center to get a measure ending felony disenfranchisement on the ballot. It passed with 65% of the vote.
The Republican legislature immediately set out to undermine the will of the people. In June 2019, the governor signed Bill #7066 into law, which prohibited formerly incarcerated people from voting until they had satisfied their “legal financial obligations” and paid all fines and costs imposed on them by the court. The law created an often insurmountable burden for Florida citizens who either couldn’t afford to pay all of the costs or, in many instances, even found out how much they owed. Civil rights groups immediately challenged the law in court as an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment (on equal protection and due process grounds) and the 24th Amendment (as an impermissible poll tax). The District Court agreed and held that 7066 was unconstitutional. The 11th Circuit reversed on appeal, leaving a scheme in place that disenfranchises almost 800,000 Floridians who are disproportionately Black, (Source: “Litigation to Protect Amendment 4 in Florida,” Brennancenter.org, 9/11/20).
Never one to shy away from performative cruelty, Governor Ron DeSantis engineered the high profile arrests of 19 people (15 of whom were Black) for voter fraud. DeSantis didn’t care that many of these people had been told by government officials that they could vote. He didn’t care whether the arrests would ultimately hold up in court. The only goal of this preening fascist with presidential ambitions was to build a victory on a foundation of voter suppression. DeSantis’ 19 point margin is evidence of its success, (Source: “Florida’s Voter Fraud Arrests Are Scaring Away Formerly Incarcerated Voters,” by Nicole Lewis and Alexandra Arriaga, TheMarshallProject.org, 11/4/22).
As the Republicans try to pivot from Trump and pick a smarter, slicker vessel for their fascistic, theocratic aims, last Tuesday’s results are a reminder to treat prevailing narratives with healthy skepticism and always ask whose interests those narratives serve?
November 5, 2022
Saturday. We’re three days out from an Election Day that may seal our fate as a country that has abandoned democracy. Around the country, there are razor-thin margins in Senate and gubernatorial races between competent, rational and caring politicians on the one hand and hair-on-fire extremists who indulge in Confederate cosplay, proudly proclaim that they’ll support a nationwide abortion ban, and basically shut down democracy. These races shouldn’t even be close. The fact that they are tells us some sobering facts about our fellow Americans.
Last week’s vicious attack on Paul Pelosi is a grim harbinger of things to come. Last Friday at 2:00 a.m, a violent, right wing zealot broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home armed with a hammer, zip ties and duct tape, looking for the Speaker. When the assailant realized that she was not home, he attempted to take her husband, Paul Pelosi, hostage. Pelosi’s quick thinking summoned the police to arrive within minutes, but they could not prevent David DePape from fracturing the 82 year old’s skull with a hammer. DePape later told authorities that he had planned to question Nancy Pelosi and if she “lied,” to break her kneecaps, (Source: ““Details emerge in Paul Pelosi attack: a break-in, conversation, 911 call, then violence,” by Bart Jansen, USA Today, 11/4/22).
The uniform Republican response to this shocking act of political violence was to mythologize, minimize or mock. In the first few days after the attack, the far right floated disgusting rumors of a personal relationship between Pelosi and his attacker, that were amplified by Apartheid Lex Luthor on the giant social media platform he purchased as a plaything. Kari Lake, Arizona gubernatorial candidate, used the attack on Pelosi as a punchline at a campaign event, drawing laughs from the crowd.
Not one Republican expressed dismay or sympathy for the Speaker in the face of a blatant assasination attempt that nearly killed her husband, because this has been the goal of their stochastic terrorism all along. They have demonized Nancy Pelosi for years because she has the temerity to be a woman with enormous power who wields it effectively.
The far-right that has subsumed the Republican Party uses the same playbook everywhere — demonize and dehumanize their opposition to justify violence and terror against us. They seek electoral power so that they can do so with the patina of legitimacy. Just look at the videos of DeSantis’ “election police” arrests of Black voters or armed Oathkeepers patrolling ballot drop boxes in Arizona. Republicans’ message to those who oppose their Christofascist aims is loud and clear— “we will threaten your life and liberty if you vote.”
Let’s face it. This side of America is very ugly, but it isn’t new. These people are the children and grandchildren of the people who spit on and threw rocks at Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock 9 when they integrated public schools. They are the children and grandchildren of the antisemitic “America Firsters” who found common cause with Hitler, that Rachel Maddow profiles in her new podcast, Ultra. The only thing that stopped them then were brave Americans who chose to dig in and fight, rather than look away. Wednesday morning, we may all have to decide what kind of Americans we’re going to be.
#Mobilize.us
#Voteriders.org
As American as Apple Pie
October 16, 2022
It seems like our country is irretrievably broken. Everywhere we turn, we see the full throated embrace of hatred and violence. Anti-blackness has become so fashionable that Black people proudly sport it on the runway. White supremacy is so widely seen as a ticket to power that Latinx elected officials casually dehumanize Black children while conspiring to deprive Black adults of political power. The siren song of whiteness is so seductive that nearly 50% of us will forgive a corrupt vulgarian for fomenting insurrection and stealing state secrets because for them, whiteness trumps everything (pun intended).
In such a scenario, despair seems not only understandable, but unavoidable. We must remember that none of this is new. Kanye’s antics are a sideshow. He is merely a troll mining the attention economy for money, and there have always been Black people willing to publicly work against the interests of Black people for profit. The L.A. City Council is another matter entirely. It fits into a depressingly familiar pattern that Black people have seen again and again— that the quickest road to acceptance as a “true American” is to be virulently anti-Black.
American history is replete with examples. The Irish immigrants who fled famine and British persecution in the 1840’s were derided as criminal and subhuman by bigoted nativists. They were depicted as monkeys in newspaper cartoons and confined to the most menial jobs, (Source: “When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis,” by Christopher Klein, History.com, (3/16/2017)).
Almost twenty years after their arrival as destitute refugees, Irish American New Yorkers erupted in a spasm of anti-Black violence that left 3000 Black New Yorkers homeless and caused millions of dollars in property damage. In the years leading up to the Civil War, cotton represented 40% of the goods shipped out of New York’s ports and the city’s economy was dependent on the continuation of slavery. Newspaper editors and politicians fomented white working class antipathy to abolition by warning that ending slavery would “flood the city with cheap” labor who would undercut white workers’ ability to earn a living, (Source: “White Riot: Why The 1863 Draft Riots Matter Today,” by John Strausbaugh, The New York Observer, 7/11/2016). These fears were exacerbated by an 1857 recession that caused high unemployment.
When the Civil War began, some New Yorkers even considered seceding from the Union, rather than fighting on its behalf. When President Lincoln passed a federal draft law in 1863 with a lottery that wealthy New Yorkers could buy their way out of, mobs of Irish Americans rioted, killing Black men, stringing their corpses up on lampposts and most notoriously, robbing the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue before burning it to the ground, (Source: “New York Draft Riots,” by the editors of History.com, History.com, updated 9/6/2022).
Only 67 people were tried and convicted for their part in the New York Draft Riots and by the 1880’s Irish Americans, who had built a robust political machine that elected Irish American mayors in New York and Boston, “were considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life,” (Source: “When America Despised the Irish,” citing “The Irish Americans: A History,” by Jay P. Dolan).
Successive waves of immigrants replicating this pattern led inexorably to where we are today— with a significant percentage of people who equate white supremacy with patriotism and believe, based on the evidence, that violent anti-Blackness will not be punished. Our only recourse is to elect people who will prove them wrong. For some of us, it may be the difference between life and death. We have 23 days.
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