The Blindness Of White Privilege: Donald Trump's Bigotry

Trump either doesn't understand or doesn't care to understand (a) the ongoing effects of structural & systemic inequality (b) how redlining and placement of interstates through African American neighborhoods leads to economic blight (c) that accumulated white privilege excludes non-whites.

White Privilege and White Supremacy both simply point at current conditions and denigrate those suffering under them - without any understanding of causality and complicity.

Authoritarians’ Sympathetic Friends: U.S. Conservatives - Robert Kagan in Washington Post

Since the end of the Civil War, the story of the U.S. has been the continual expansion of rights to more and more groups. When certain strands of conservatism object to this historical reality, it is to the democratic ideals of the United States' founding that they are objecting. Therefore, these days some U.S. conservatives have become adoring fans of some of the world’s staunchest anti-democratic and anti-U.S. leaders.

Today, many in the United States — mostly, but certainly not exclusively, white Christians — claim to be defending themselves and their “values” against decisions by U.S. courts granting rights and preferences to minorities, to women, to the LGBTQ community, to Muslims and other non-Christians, and to immigrants and refugees.

There has always been an element of anti-Americanism in that strand of conservatism, in the sense that it has stood in opposition to the liberal Enlightenment essence of the American founding.

Since the end of the Civil War, the story of the United States has been the continual expansion of rights to more and more groups claiming them, as well as continual resistance to that expansion. When conservatives object to this historical reality, it is to the democratic ideas of the United States' founding documents (Declaration of Independence and Constitution) that they are objecting.

These days, some American conservatives find themselves in sympathy with the world’s staunchest anti-American leaders. As the Trump administration tilts toward anti-democratic forces in Europe and elsewhere, most Americans appear indifferent, at best. In contrast to their near-obsession with communism during the Cold War, they appear unconcerned by the challenge of authoritarianism.

Political theorist Marc Plattner argues that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is that the “mainstream center-right parties” of the liberal democratic world are being “captured by tendencies that are indifferent or even hostile to liberal democracy.”

The full article is available here

Neoliberal Extreme Capitalism and Resurgent Fascism - Henry Giroux in Tikkun

Fascism is never entirely interred in the past.  The conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes in the West, especially in the United States.

Cynical authoritarian politicians and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crises of economic inequality and immigration - and what Paul Gilroy has called its "manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements" - to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy. 

In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions in order to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance and a militarized spirit of white nationalism.

In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of “casino capitalism” with fascist ideals.

These ideals include the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism, dehumanization, a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity, the suppression of freedom and dissent, a culture of lies, a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language, a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms.

Fascism is never entirely interred in the past.  The conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes in the West, especially in the United States.

The full article is available here

Why Do Some Believe A Sitting U.S. President Shouldn't Face Criminal Prosecution In Court? - Reuters

Unfortunately, the U.S. Justice Department has a decades-old internal policy which argues that a sitting president cannot be indicted (dating back to 1973) despite the fact that the idea that no one is above the law is a central tenet of Constitutional Republicanism.

The U.S. Constitution explains how a president can be removed from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors” by Congress using the impeachment process. But the Constitution is silent on whether a president can face criminal prosecution in court, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not directly addressed the question.

Some legal experts have argued that the nation’s founders could have included a provision in the Constitution shielding the president from prosecution, but did not do so, suggesting an indictment would be permissible.

According to this view, immunity for the president violates the fundamental principle that nobody is above the law (which would be in keeping with the spirit of constitutional republicanism).

Unfortunately, the U.S. Justice Department has a decades-old internal policy which argues that a sitting president cannot be indicted, dating back to 1973. In the midst of the Watergate scandal engulfing President Richard Nixon, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel adopted in an internal memo the position that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

“The spectacle of an indicted president still trying to serve as Chief Executive boggles the imagination,” the memo stated.

The Justice Department reaffirmed the policy in a 2000 memo, saying court decisions in the intervening years had not changed its conclusion that a sitting president is “constitutionally immune” from indictment and criminal prosecution.

The full article is available here

Trump & His Supporters: The Cruelty Is The Point - Adam Serwer in The Atlantic

The cruelty of the Trump administration's policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era.  The Trump-supporter community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them.  They have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life (and/or late stage capitalism).

This reflects a clear, guiding principle to this community: Only Trump and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of law (and immunity from it if necessary).  The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. 

This how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.  Trump's ability to get away with graft, corruption, and fraud is tied to cruelty.

The cruelty of the Trump administration's policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected.  His cruelty makes his supporters feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. 

So long as Trump continues to cause them to feel that way, his supporters will let him get away with anything, no matter who it harms or even if it costs them.

The full article is available here

Trump’s Duplicity On Anti-Semitism - Rabbi Danya Rattenberg

Trump, who referred to white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville two years ago as “very fine people,” insists that the Democrats have become an “an anti-Jewish party” now.

Trump has also retweeted white nationalists who accuse Jewish businessman George Soros of paying Central American migrants to form caravans and “invade” the United States. The ancient myth that we Jews are the villains behind the scenes, running things in secret, continues to persist in our society.

Also, consider that Trump's using of antisemitism isn't meant to pander to Jews (except maybe Sheldon Adelson) so much as to his Evangelical base, which cares for us only insofar as we are useful instruments for them and not for ourselves.

The full article is available here

The Mixed Bag of Republican Party with Race and Helping Those At The Bottom - Heather Cox Richardson

Cherry-picked versions of GOP history argue that the party has been unchanging in its support for black rights and ordinary U.S. Citizens, but that's just not right.

The long history of the GOP has been both glorious - as they argue - and sordid.

From 1860 to 1864, the new Republican party put the federal government to work for ordinary white men rather than oligarchs. It gave out land, provided education, invented national taxation (including what would become the IRS), all while fighting for the nation.

After the war - when Andrew Johnson tried to resurrect the pre-war world, minus the slavery that had supported the rich southerners he hated, and Democrats signed on - the Republicans passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, providing for black male citizenship and guaranteeing black male voting.

If only we could stop right there, all the threads you read about the glorious Republican Party would be true.  But as we know, many years have come and gone between 1870 and 2019.

Former Confederates hated black voting, but organizing as the Ku Klux Klan had backfired. So they started to say they weren't racists ... they were "fiscally conservative." They complained that poor blacks elected leaders who promised schools, roads, hospitals, and so on were using their tax dollars for socialism.

In 1872, a GOP faction wanting to replace U.S. Grant sided with the Democrats to argue that protecting black rights was communism.  To win reelection, Grant needed to cozy up to Wall Street, which would give him the money to offset the anti-Grant newspapers.

Grant won, and the GOP began to interpret their pro-ordinary man ideology as pro-prosperity, which increasingly meant passing laws to protect business. This meant tariffs, above all, for they protected businesses from foreign competition. But protecting labor was "socialism."

By the 1900s, the GOP worked for big business, crushing ordinary farmers and workers. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was another rhetorical boogeyman that the well-heeled portion of the GOP could use to claim that activist government was socialism and a ruse to redistribute tax money to black people and immigrants who were ruining American traditions.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, FDR's New Deal regulated business and finance, protected basic social welfare, and promoted infrastructure. Even most GOP recognized their old system was a disaster, and backed active government.

But the pro-big business Hoover faction of the GOP, led now by William H. Taft's son Senator Robert Taft (OH), still hated the New Deal's active government and set out to erase it. They were so convinced that US citizens hated this "socialism" they assumed they would defeat Truman in 1948.

When Eisenhower ran for the GOP nomination in 1952, the Hoover/Taft faction blamed the "Eastern Establishment" for stealing the nomination. Moderates had won, but Taft was irate and his men vowed revenge.  In Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, they found a powerful figure to carry out their agenda.

The full thread is available here

The Dictatorship of Ignorance in the Age of Trump - Henry Giroux in Tikkun

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." - James Baldwin

We are witnessing the closing of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.”

Moreover, the very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment.

Under the reign of corporatist neoliberalism - with its antithesis for community and embrace of deregulation, privatization, downsizing and consumerism - individuals are left to find sanctuary in the feudal orbits of self-interest, a selfie culture, and individualistic rather than social goals.

As public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of education are under siege, the authoritarian discourses of hate, racism, rabid self-interest, and greed are gaining traction. Under such circumstances, civic illiteracy substitutes opinions for informed arguments and works to erase collective memory (for example, the revisionist history of Trump-supporting right wing polemicists like Dinesh D'Souza, Dennis Prager, Candace Owens, and David Barton, etc.).

As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good.

This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality” - a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good.

There is an urgent political need for a public to understand what it means for an authoritarian society to both weaponize and trivialize the discourse, vocabularies, images, and aural means of communication in a society.

The full article is available here

A Guide to Your Rights When Interacting with Law Enforcement - Catholic Immigration Network

Undocumented immigrants and their families have rights. These "Know Your Rights" resources are available in multiple languages and include pictures and explanations of the different warrants that officials may use in immigration enforcement actions.

The full guide is available here

Trump Incorrectly Rants About Article 2 - Splinter News

Speaking about Special Counsel Robert Mueller with reporters outside the White House today, Trump ranted about  “a thing called Article II”—presumably meaning the section of the Constitution on presidential authority.

“Nobody ever mentions Article II,” Trump continued. “It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

In fact, Article II gives him “rights” at exactly the same level as every other president for the past 200+ years.  Also it is chock full of very clearly enumerated limits to his power, as well as the basis by which he can be removed from office through impeachment.

The full article is available here

U.S. Women Dying Even A Year After Giving Birth - Huffpost

“The United States is the only developed country in the world where the maternal mortality rate is increasing, particularly among women of color — and lack of postpartum support is a major contributing factor.”

The full article is available here

The Unspoken Logic of Trump's Immigration Tweets - Jeff Wiersma

Trump Administration's Citizenship Question for Census: Bad Faith Mockery Of Law

Every single thing about the way the Trump administration has handled the citizenship question - from its origins, to its lies before Congress and courts, to this latest chapter where Trump’s impulsivity had DOJ lawyers scrambling to explain to courts that they weren’t trying to mislead them - has been rife with egregious bad faith and mockery of the law.

The full article is available here

Border Patrol Agent Secret Facebook Group Joked About Migrant Deaths, Posted Sexist Memes - MSN

Group members joked about the deaths of migrants.

A private Facebook group of 9,500 current and former Border Patrol agents had extremely troubling xenophobic, sexist, and dehumanizing content.

Group members joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in South Texas on Monday, and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

One user posted a manipulated image showing President Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez to perform oral sex on him. Like I said, pretty vile. Here as elsewhere, the outspoken congresswoman is a favored target for gendered abuse.

In early 2018, federal investigators found a raft of disturbing and racist text messages sent by Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after searching the phone of Matthew Bowen, an agent charged with running down a Guatemalan migrant with a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The texts, which were revealed in a court filing in federal court in Tucson, described migrants as “guats,” “wild a** s***bags,” “beaners” and “subhuman.” The messages included repeated discussions about burning the migrants up.

The full article is available here