They Mean She Sounds Black

 

Maria Bartiromo claims Kamala Harris is faking a southern accent. Rep. Michael Rulli responds by saying "she must've gotten the blueprint from Hillary Clinton" pic.twitter.com/CmySD9KyvJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 3, 2024

OK, in the spirit of "same old tired playbook" I could refrain from addressing this stupidity, but I won't because just let me do this white privilege thing for a minute. I strained to hear a hint of a southern accent. It isn't that. I feel like the people who are saying this aren't sure what a southern accent sounds like (and there are multiple southern accents--Texas doesn't sound like Georgia, and neither sounds exactly like Florida). I have a Philadelphia accent. I distinctly don't sound southern, but there are traces of the south in the mouths of some of the people where I live--Black people. 

This is because of the great migration. Racist whites with memories of the 1950s and 1960s can tell you they think Black people were literally invited up here. Practically trucked in. That's not exactly how it went. But it does explain in part White Flight to the Philadelphia suburbs. And how some Whites feel about the integrated public schools I attended where I noticed the difference in how some of my peers spoke versus how I did. 

But not that much. Your working-class White is just as likely to drop a double negative, say "ain't" out loud where people can hear, or employ "wrong" verb tenses for emphasis--as in "She don't know what she's doing" has a different mouth feel and intentionality from "She doesn't know, etc."  

Now, my folks set me down in front of PBS as a kid and I can speak the Queen's English if I mean to with a credible Mid-Atlantic accent, even.   I speak customer service for my job--proper nearly accent-free and grammatically correct.  It is not how I speak at home. This is called code-switching. And I am not bothered about what that says about my authenticity--so how could I be fucked up about what it says about Kamala Harris' authenticity if she sounds a little different to different audiences--I do it myself. If you read my blog, you know Yiddish and Italian slang creeps in. It would! I have dimensions and have sat at different tables.

So I understand what they mean by this particular "trifling", and I think I want to call it racist-adjacent. It isn't said totally out loud, and they do want to compare it to Hillary Clinton--but I get what they are trying to say about who she is. And it's bullshit. She is being herself with the people she's being with. This is what diversity looks like. People swim in many waters. They use different strokes. 

Nothing New Under the Florida Sun

 

Ryan Christopher Palmeter, the white gunman who shot and killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida was a 21-year-old who bought his guns legally and had no criminal history, local law enforcement said https://t.co/iXp0cIgwMo

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 28, 2023

The oft-repeated social media line is that Ron Desantis is coming back to Florida to address a tragedy that he doesn't want students to learn about the origins of in class. It's true, though. The slaying of 3 Dollar General patrons due to a racially-motivated murder spree, happened near to the anniversary of a race riot where white people went crazy in response to a lunch counter civil rights protest.* Like the Parkland shooter of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas HS, this young man painted swastikas on his rifle. It was meant to send a domestic terrorist message. 

Tulsi Gabbard was On Fox and Said a Thing

 

Tulsi on Diversity in The Biden Administration: They’re proud to be selecting people based on race.. It’s based on genetics.. Where do we see that connection? These are the very same core principles embodied by Nazism and Hitler. pic.twitter.com/bI2HoumYaw

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2023

I get that the Fox Mushroom Farm infotainment network has no respect whatsoever for the clickers that they mutant cordycep-pilled over the years, but having mule-faced Jesse nod while obvious op Tulsi lays the line on his viewers that the eliminationism of Hitler and the inclusivity of the Biden Administration are the exact same thing should insult the fuck out of even someone whose brain is 75% taken over by fungal rot.

But even if the fan club don't feel like what's left of their basic intelligence has been insulted, those of us who can still appreciate what's in front of us know that's straight-up Orwellian doublethink. Inclusivity and elimination are opposite things. Gathering in people so they can contribute and prosper and cutting people out in the hopes they are destroyed are obviously not the same thing. To say that--to say what she said, isn't a mistake. It's seeding the ground for resentment. What she's doing is telling straight white cis males that the inclusion of other people is their exclusion. That if people who deviate from their default humanity are featured, it's the exact same thing as one of them being annihilated. 

Competition for roles in a society is not annihilation but regular order: may the best person win. If the assumption is some people are by identity simply better suited--what are the deets on their CV? What is the real-life contribution they are making? Saying something that stupid out loud and so obviously biased would have been seen for exactly what it is if Watters said it by himself. Why Tulsi Gabbard is so willing to say it is justified by her getting to be on Fox. 

This is why exactly nothing she ever says has any value to me. Nor should it to anyone else. 

A View of DeSantistan

 

“Leave our country go back to Israel”
“Heil hitler” “sir do you think you should be put in an oven”

These “GDL” nazi animals have been terrorizing & targeting Jews & Jewish communities with impunity

Police are refrained from doing anything. This needs to be stopped pic.twitter.com/WGJrt9GZjE

— Baruch Sandhaus (@BaruchSandhaus) February 22, 2023

While I could talk about how Trump threw hats at the good folks of East Palestine and offered them his brand-name bottled water, I am more interested in what is happening in the state where his chief rival is governor--his "home" state of Florida (since New York's fine but it ain't home no more). More than a year ago, I noted that Florida Nazis were a very bad sign. I think something is very rotten in Florida.  I understand this guy--I do. 

He looks like a little pouty potato, but he's always thinking about how to destroy the history he learned so that no one is ever troubled by it again. He's a clever spud who wrote his own book trying to ignore race and its impact on our history, He would rather no one was ever confronted by bad thoughts. So he's removing the libraries and the people who want to remember what libraries used to be. 

And We All Got a Little Dumber That Day

 

Greene: Can you tell me how much money went to CRT?
Dodaro: CRT?
Greene: It’s a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin not equal to black skin and other things pic.twitter.com/ssFZE7Gxlz

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 1, 2023

This hearing was supposed to be something to do with the waste of Trump-era Covid-19 spending, so I don't know how we got here, but I think it has to do with MTG being an astonishingly stupid bubblehuman who does not have any information outside of culture war propaganda. And for a person who received a PPP loan and got forgiveness, she seems stupid as hell about how funds were wasted since it literally looks like she has first-hand experience. But no, Marge, the large sum of money you think went to CRT didn't and why do you think that, and why do you think that's even what CRT is? 

Critical Race Theory is a college-level legal conversation about how laws can be made to disadvantage populations based on their legal definition. Race is a social construct that can be codified into law--that is to say, people can write words to define the way certain people get to be oppressed. It can be based on immigration status, it can be based on assumed ethnicity, it can be based on religious affiliation--basically people can be told who they are by law, and they don't have a say about their identification. Being "one of the good ones" doesn't even legally save you. 

I Feel Bad for Fatima Devolder

 

I don't know much about George Santos' mother other than what fact-checkers have had to debunk. Above, I posted a screenshot of two Tweets from George Santos about his mother's passing: that her life was claimed by 9/11 and that she had died in 2016. This doesn't strike me as so necessarily conflicted--of course, people who were near Ground Zero succumbed, even years later, due to disease from the toxic fallout of the rubble. If she contracted cancer from that, however later, it is just as much a case of 9/11 claiming her life as if she had passed when the Towers fell. 

Only--Santos says she was an executive working at a major financial institution, and it appears she was actually a domestic worker or home health aide. So how was she even there? Was she?

We can question whether his need for assistance with the burial matches his bio--and I will say, I believe he had financial problems.  I can see with my own eyes the struggle was real. But why did he have to lie so much about his mother? 

He concocted from nothing at all a story about her family and variously said she was from Belgium, or that her ancestors were Ukrainian Jews with the family name "Zabrovsky". He said his mother fled socialism in Belgium (which is not a socialist country) and also that his Ukrainian Jewish forebears fled the Holocaust because of socialism (because the whole "First they came for the socialists" thing is entirely lost on people whose life of the mind is entirely constructed of fables). 

George Santos, Caucasian, Jew-ish and Black (because he claims Angolan ancestry via his father) never seems to think his own story is good enough. Or that his own mother's story was good enough. He name-checks the Holocaust, 9/11 and even fabricated employees that died in the Pulse shooting as if only major events give meaning to one's life. 

His actual story, as a first-generation American who had a loving mother who protected him even though he was a check-stealing shit back in Rio de Janeiro, was not enough. That he now pretends he made a fortune just a minute ago in something he refers to as "capital introduction" can only make us wonder who introduced this ne'er-do-well to the kind of capital that finances a successful congressional campaign--and investigators are gonna be on it. (I always suspect Russians but Dark Money is a real thing, too.)

His lies about who he is and who she was fall around her--unable to say one word because she isn't alive to say her piece.  But I think she deserved better. Who she actually was should have been enough. 

UPDATE: Is he a chronic liar because he had a brain tumor or did he have a brain tumor because he's a chronic liar? 

3 years ago, he claimed he had a brain tumour and received chemo… pic.twitter.com/fBclHQjrps

— Ravin Boodram (@rvbdrm) December 29, 2022

How the whole hell?  I mean, how the whole hell? 

 

The Federalist Society is Affirmative Action for Shitheads.

 

Hey, I just wanted to get this out here, but is there any good reason that so many of our SCOTUS picks for all of the history of the Supreme Court have been white guys? That's pretty suspect to me. I definitely think this is the result of some serious gaming of the table. Actually, I think the Federalist Society is a problem. I mean, like, why are Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and Sam Alito even here, except that they managed to apply in the broadest sense of the word, to the job of SCOTUS eligibility by way of social associations many of us never would have understood existed?

What if that structural injustice, where you had to know someone to be someone, wasn't so much a thing? Ah, but what if extremely well-qualified Black women were actually extremely well-qualified?  (Like--managed to finagle the right kind of connections?) What if several Black women were eminently qualified?  What if people who pretended that the answer to Joe Biden's decision to make the next SCOTUS a woman of color was to complain that great white hopes existed actually obviated the need for someone who was not them? 

What if fuck your white guys? What if Lani Guanier  deserved better?  What if Pauli Murray should have been a SCOTUS? What if we could have been representing the POV of Anita Hill and not Clarence Thomas for all this time? Would we have had a fairer country? A more equitable court with more representative judgement?

I don't pretend I know that, but I will say that the people who want to claim that Black women judges who are fully qualified and would somehow have their experience called into question by Biden's political pronouncement are absurd. Of course, their qualities exist in spite of and because of at once their identities. They bucked a curve, and they overcame false expectations to get here. So, screw Roger Wicker, and other unconscious Confederates who don't appreciate that to be good enough to even be considered, Black women have had to be twice as good to be considered at this point. 

The reality of an appointment to SCOTUS is that you aren't likely to even be in the running. It isn't like being an associate at the local department store. And of course, a POTUS will have some political reasons--but I'm just saying. It would be nice if the next SCOTUS understood where I'm from. I support the Biden's choice because he would be making this decision. And I approve of his criteria. 

Like Mom & Apple Pie

Just to get this off my chest--how did CNN find these ladies? Because Twitter figured out that they were activists of various shades. It shouldn't even be news to an outlet like CNN that when you see supposed "grassroots" movements spring up all over the country in the way school boards were hit by anti-mask, anti-shutdown, anti-CRT activism, like Tea Party activists swarming townhalls just about ten years ago over the ACA--maybe question what you're looking at?

Because while parents have great reasons to be frustrated lately, their anger is being deliberately shaped with outside help. 

Now, I feel extremely cynical writing about this. I'm the goddamn mirror image of the blonde ladies right there, except I'm more red-headed, and have no kids, and am atheist, and queer. But leaving all that aside, I'm culturally Catholic and damn-near white as nurses' shoes. So maybe I almost understand what kind of mistruths move these folks--but I don't. I can't. Lies are lies, no matter who tells them, and when they further marginalize people, I am not there for it. 

So anyway, back to the mom thing: remember this mom? Yeah, she was probably connected to Republicans too, and stuff, but you know what? McAuliffe could have blunted his "parents shouldn't determine what books" etc. soundbite with an ad with another white mom talking about freedom of speech. We don't have to assume all white moms are one way.

General Lee, Surrendered

 

There was no good reason for the statue of a losing General on the wrong side of history to have so long stood, tempting history to set this metallic ass in its rightful place--off-stage. This is restorative history. This is correcting a myth (the noble General who fought for his home, not slavery) and undoing a harm caused by allowing that myth to perpetuate. The simple reality is, the South seceded because of slavery. The whole "states' rights" issue came down to only that: whether states could permit slavery or not. And whether non-slave states were obligated to be participants in cultivating, supporting and promoting that industry, being abettors of kidnapping and punishing those souls who yearned to breathe free. 

I want to take this moment to reflect on the disdain conservatives presently have for critical race theory, to talk about the Fugitive Slave Acts and the Dred Scott decision. See, the Fugitive Slave Acts decreed that black people were presumed to be slaves--laws were made compelling citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves (and any Black person could be suspect) and the basic due process permitted any citizen was explicitly denied to presumed enslaved persons. The Dred Scott decision held that Black people could never be treated as equal citizens because once enslaved, always of a different class. 

Joe, Chill

I don't have a whole lot to comment about with The Breakfast Club/Biden interview, but in terms of Biden gaffe, if this is going to be a problem, um, hold on to your butts, because it's kind of Joe Biden's thing. I think I lean towards the "badly-landed and too familiar joke" camp with what Biden had said because I don't think his intentions are bad or that he doesn't care, but I think he made a classic white people mistake (of which I am also guilty sometimes) of thinking if you have Black friends, you can kind of get away with being a little looser in discussing race issues--and it was the wrong time, because it always is. 

But especially when running for president, and here's my issue with it, which doesn't necessarily come down to a question of race or any other thing, but Trump. Because when Charlemagne said "It don't have nothing to do with Trump", he has an incredible point. You have to imagine that you are not running against the worst human, a person with a terrible record and who says hateful things. You have to realize you are running to do something about the country that elected that guy. You have to pull this country back from that edge. It isn't Trump--it's the things that got him here. *

Hillary Clinton, on paper, should have kicked Trump's ass on experience and buried him with a better vison of how to run a country. What the hell does "Make America Great" even mean? It's vague sloganeering, and the wall was and is a dumb idea. People have gotten to the US on innertubes for crying out loud. Now that we've seen Trump in office, and the dysfunctional machinery he is making of government, and the cynical transactionalism that motivates the least thing ("Drain the swamp", my ass), and Trump's own deeply personal and worsening hang-ups, who wants to be the next person to lose--to that?

But it isn't about Trump. He is awful--so what? Republicans came out for him, and they will do it again. In the meanwhile, Biden has to turn out voters for him, and can't count on people to just turn out because they are anti-Trump. 

Location, Location, Location?

One thing that has bothered me about young Mayor Pete is, well? He is young. It isn't that I'm overly freaked out about the prospect of a US president younger than myself--maybe he has some ideas. Maybe he has the right kind of focus and ambition. But something I would love to see Buttigieg "outgrow" is political clichés like this Tweet, right here, which I screen-capped, because eh? 

Even though it has been up awhile, someone surely might have pointed out to him it's...problematic.

He said "In the face of unprecedented challenges we need a president whose vision was shaped by the American Heartland rather that the ineffective Washington politics we've come to know and expect."

The American Heartland? Seems mighty geographically specific. Why not someone whose vision was shaped by, say, the Bronx? See, even though the idea of the American Heartland includes Illinois, for most people, it doesn't include Barack Obama's Chicago (it obviously doesn't include Honolulu). It doesn't include LA or New Orleans, it covers Oklahoma with a stretch. It doesn't include where I grew up in Philadelphia. It makes me think of the way conservatives talk about "real America"--the small town and rural, not-especially diverse America that gets contrasted with liberal hellholes in Trump rants.

Is he intentionally talking up Heartland America to obliquely say he's an outsider to dysfunctional Washington DC? Okay, then, he could say that. But even that is a cliché. Trump was an outsider to Washington DC--has he made it more functional? There's a faint whiff of Reaganite disdain for the government: the most dangerous words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

It isn't so much a question of where someone is from in terms of their lived experiences sometimes, but what they take away from what they have experienced. My America looks like this--

These are the Sears Tower and the Bond Bread plant that were part of the neighborhood I grew up in in NE Philadelphia. The Sears Building was imploded in the 1990s and the Bond Bread became a Boscov's before they closed. They represent for me, a little bit, of how once-thriving businesses disappeared in the course of chasing profitability over stability. My head has a landscape of stores and office buildings and factories that no longer exist in it. And the thing is--that story is just as true in the heartland as it is to me, in Philadelphia. That wasn't a Washington, DC failure, or not exactly. It was a structural problem with how capitalism is pursued. I think. 

Anyway I guess I just feel suspicious when the youthful mayor of a small city starts talking about winning via heartland values. Especially when I don't know how in heck you gentrify a cornfield. (The flight from small town America to the big cities is not unlike the flight of some people in big cities for their suburbs. But for different reason, of course. And while small businesses are supergreat--there are only so many jobs they provide and service jobs have been historically lower-paying.) 

And not for nothing, but the word "heartland" signifies whiteness, in a way "urban" signifies....not white. And when he uses it to say he'll take that vision to Washington DC, it sounds like he thinks he will talk whitely to GOP white people and that will sort things out. He probably doesn't mean that at all! But he isn't using language that won't sound that way to a lot of people. To navigate some of the issues he needs to reach out on, he's going to have to build on the language needed to address them, 

He's good at languages. Politics is also a language. 

Entirely Different Worlds

.@RepTedLieu plays recording of Candace Owens: "I don't know Ms. Owens. I'm not going to characterize her. I'm going to let her own words do the talking. So, I'm going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler." pic.twitter.com/xiilLBUIwF

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 9, 2019

Man, sometimes I hate the little hamsters that make my brain-wheel go round. They've been chirruping to me that I should have something to say about the white nationalism hearing the other day and how really dystopic it was and whether it was just really weird that the person who actually made a "gotta hand it to em" comment with respects to Hitler was somehow picked by some Republican to publicly say things like the Southern Strategy didn't happen. Except it very factually did. It should matter that she really only came to slam liberals and try to talk about whatever her definition of nationalism was, but here's the really weird thing--

It should have been apparent with the replay of her Hitler quotes that she was a little off--and her saying that a longer version would necessarily make her point clear doesn't really help, because she is simply wrong in every respect. The nationalism of Hitler was blood and soil nationalism, and Hitler did not fail to be a nationalist because he killed his own (German Jewish) people--he was very much a nationalist by his own definition because he did not consider people of other races to be his people regardless of where they were living. The character of nationalism is very much a part of identity politics. Understanding this point is something it might very well help Turning Point as it reaches out to and is reached out to by supposed "like groups" like Identity Evropa.

But anyway, even though liberals think this display meant that Owens was revealed to be a lightweight who says flakey things that are not supportable by facts, some conservatives think that her comments totally "owned the libs" because our reaction was perceived as so butthurt and reactive.

To which I would have to say, "Um, what?" I don't know how being wrong and staying confident in one's wrongness is winning, and making people who know better just want to correct the wrongness is owning anything but apparently, the ability to wallow in bullshit without minding the stink is the new conservative hotness.

It is weird to consider that there is a parallel universe currently observable where facts do not matter, can be dismissed as biased, and where bullshit artists and grifters can be lionized. And yet, this is apparently our current politics.

Mayor Pete and The Goblet of Fine

The first same-sex husband of a major-party presidential candidate is a historic figure, but he’s also a surprisingly traditional one https://t.co/ol75Q3J7dK

— POLITICO (@politico) March 31, 2019

Pete Buttigieg and I have something in common--we're both Hufflepuffs. (I know this is absurd--obviously I should be Gryffindor owing to my foxy nature, but the sorting hat doesn't cater to personal style, AFAIK, so, Team Badger it is. Up with loyalty and service!)I like Mayor Pete, and his spouse and their dogs. I am not going to hate, exactly, on him for going on Bill Maher's show because I sort of hate watch it--I don't think Maher is a great liberal (he's so Boomerish and a little racist and ableist and misogynist in the jokes he does, and promotes the whole PC canard and generally treats conservative "D0rkw3b" people and their nods towards extremism differently from how he routinely characterizes Muslims for just being). Buttigieg has decided that he wants to go where the eyeballs are, and that makes sense. And he actually acquitted himself pretty well against some pretty dumb things:



Bill Maher to Buttigieg: A Lot of Millennials Are 'Fragile,' Need 'Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces' https://t.co/9kYgFc3ENr pic.twitter.com/raJu63xfv1

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) March 30, 201


Millennials aren't fragile and FWIW, Maher needs to get over using trans people using the bathroom as a gag or as some kind of example of SJW's going too far. They are just doing a normal function--why is that weird? What I think isn't really discussed enough, is that the fight over trigger warnings and for more inclusive language is a sign of people sticking up for themselves, when at an earlier time, they might have just gone home without asking for the respectful dialogue they needed. I could go so far as to say people who actually complain about other people being "PC" are mostly looking for a safe space where they won't be criticized for actually being shit towards other people and called out on their bullshit.

But there is a kind of live wire Buttigieg has triggered that is hard not to be zapped by--he's commented on Clinton 2016 in a way that touched some nerves. It's wrong to say Hillary Clinton didn't address problems of inequality and how to get people employed. But it is possible that by underestimating the pessimism in, say, the Midwest, and proclaiming America as already great, her campaign did miss a sentiment some people actually felt.

Trump's candidacy promised a shakeup of the status quo. I would be immune to this argument because I'm solidly middle class and saw Obama's presidency as meaning an advancement for civil rights and more progressive (relatively!) foreign policy than neocons gave us. Obama was my "shakeup of status quo" from the Bush years. But for someone whose politics is yet more local than mine, who isn't Extremely Online and Very Political, maybe my perspective isn't theirs. Maybe trying to tell people that things are fine just doesn't sound right to them, especially if they have a diet of Fox News and RW talk radio and experience localized economic depression because of factors the general economy uplift hasn't touched. They have a deep sense that something isn't right, and that politicians are full of shit.

I'm going to tell you I don't think it matters if that opinion is even wrong--it exists. These are people Buttigieg has spoken with--his folks. When he talks about "coastal elites" I rankle, obviously. WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm in Philadelphia, which is practically New Jersey (coastal), but "coastal elite" is sort of out because I'm desperately of the class of them that work and got no fancy education, and yes, people I know, live around, work with, are Trump voters. I can easily imagine them. There's millions of Trump voters on the coasts--the thing is--we're populous! Diverse!

So I guess the question is--is Buttigieg able to figure out how to work with Philadelphia? Because I would be comfortable saying that he might have a good grasp on Indiana politics, but what he's saying isn't exactly heartening for those of us who really have been turned off to the "economic desperation of the heartland" bullshit because we want to know why Trump's obvious racist bullshit doesn't turn them all the way the hell off the way it does us. And came up with the obvious reason why. Which was never about being PC, just aware that bigotry is real, and not to be dismissed. He isn't not talking about it, just not as explicitly as I think some of us would like.

I think he's got a good head on his shoulders, but I wish it were an older head. He speaks well, but I don't know that he addresses all we need a Democratic 2020 candidate to do.

The Strange Case of Mr. Smollett

Regardless of whether you believe actor Jussie Smollett paid two men to stage a hate crime attack on him, the question on many people's minds is why he -- or anyone -- would lie about such a thing https://t.co/ujAR99aGgL pic.twitter.com/PBoP0PyIBn

— CNN (@CNN) February 22, 2019

There's something about the Jussie Smollett situation that pretty much scrapes every nerve, and even now, I find myself trying to understand why a person who is in a good position as an artist, is talented and well-liked, and who has a solid reputation for trying to do good, would engage in such a pathetic, time and emotion-wasting lie. There is a lot of real hate out there, for people of color and LGBTQ folks. There has been no shortage of examples of people who have experienced hate and violence. For someone to perpetrate a false alarm with the intention of just garnering sympathy to make himself more marketable or valuable in a salary dispute is so extraordinarily selfish it literally beggars my capacity to consider that such a nakedly selfish motive could be all there is to the story.

If anyone, anyone at all, considers the rights of victims of hate crimes or other deeply personal violence, it has to be understood that false accusations harm real victims. The biggest barrier to justice is the fear of reporting due to being disbelieved, or being accused of trying to ruin someone else's life or reputation. It places a terrible stigma on a person already injured by encouraging other people to consider "what if this terrible thing never happened?" Maybe the world isn't so terrible that people can randomly be assaulted for any reason. Maybe the victim is the problem. We can see this easily with circumstances of domestic violence or rape. Victims sometimes opt not to come forward because their reputations will be damaged, or they will face other societal or economic penalties for trying to receive justice. With hate crimes, this can also have other levels of blowback, if one suspects that law enforcement are not sympathetic to their race or orientation or gender expression. There is a risk of further oppression.

For Jussie Smollett to wave away the entirety of what the revelation of his imposture would mean to real victims, his counting on his identity to earn his sympathy, and the supposition that he would never be found out, shows an enormous ignorance or tunnel-vision about social and criminal justice. The idea that he staged this for solely monetary reasons, when the reality of his salary is already just nonsensically rich to regular folks, is as unsympathetic to consider--in much the way the plight of an actual victim of hate would seem sympathetic.

And yet--the perpetrated story of Jussie Smollett is his story, and it was told to family, friends, co-workers, fans, and the world. The love and sympathy and outpouring of affection he received, and the harshness with which people would condemn violence against people due to racism or homophobia are still good motives, even if what he did to elicit them was a lie. It is still right to stand by marginalized people because of real harms they experience, and it is still right to listen to the stories of victims because most really are true. It is still right to condemn hate and seek justice, and although Smollett's story called out MAGA hat wearing fake perps, I want one thing to be pretty clear:

The fake details were not a smear against all Trump-supporters. This was Smollett's version of verisimilitude. He was working with the reputation MAGA hat wearing people (like Cesar Sayoc) already had, in rather the same way Susan Smith blamed the death of her boys on a carjacking by black men.  He wasn't trying to make a political statement--his shit was very personal.

And what remains to be considered is whether some other issue (outside leverage or mental instability) encouraged what Smollett seems to have done. There may be a reason besides the extremely selfish for what he has done. But although the details were political, I don't see this as solely a political case. The people he hurt most were POC and LGBTQ people whose stories are now going to be met with "but Jussie". It was certainly not "MAGA country" people.

A Matter of Speaking

There have been two episodes of absolute communications-failure that have happened lately that I think expressed dangerous anti-Semitic tropes (whether inadvertently or not) and are truly regrettable, but should, I hope, teach something. (And not to the same degree.)

One of these things was when Turning Point's Candace Owens blathered about nationalism and felt she had to use Hitler and National Socialism as her example, which ignorantly resulted in her sort of forgetting that scapegoating a minority population and exterminating them was a large part of the nationalist domestic policy of Hitler's Germany. She let on that she felt the problem wasn't so much what Hitler wanted to do in his own country but just the way he exported it. A thing just isn't national if it goes "international" am I right? Which gave off the grim idea that she didn't find the "Vernichtung durch arbeit" (where "arbeit macht frei" means through death) entirely condemnable except when it was franchised, to, say Poland, or....

For a communications person repping Turning Point, she had a pretty serious communication problem if she only understood the nationalism she wanted to represent via the literal worst and most murderous example. She could have expressed nationalism in the actual immediate founding sense of Garibaldi for Italy or the unification of Germany under Bismarck, or even the Young Ireland movement. But no, she went to Hitler. This is how I know American children just don't learn world history--and it well should settle whether Turning Point speakers actually have anything to show a broader audience. (They do not. They do not know, in fact, actual shit. But they may have made more money at not knowing shit than I did at their age actually knowing shit with an entire liberal arts degree and doing retail work, so basically, I hate them body and soul. Except you could not have paid me to ever say the things they do even when I was living off dollar store beans in my 20s.)

The other thing was when recently sworn Congressperson Ilhan Omar made a Twitter commentary to the effect that the RW in this country is beholden to the "Benjamins" of pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC. Everything about the way she said this was flippant and a bit insensitive. I don't know that in essence, what she said was factually entirely wrong--AIPAC is a broadly influential political group--but expressing their influence solely in terms of money was wrong, and I would say the kind of abbreviated wrong that Twitter definitely lends itself to. 

Whatever, Ben

So, Kevin Hart, who is really a talented and likeable performer, was picked to host the Oscars, but the problem was, he used to say some pretty homophobic shit. It was offensive, and he recognized it enough to delete his previous Tweets, but people screenshot them because whoa!, and instead of apologizing, Hart sort of responded at first about how he was changed, but didn't exactly apologize or acknowledge how he knew what he said was wrong, and it just wasn't enough. Saying you've evolved pretty much means putting your better ideals into action, and he realized this shitstorm was something he owned, and he posted a Tweet that showed he owned where he went wrong, and stepped aside.

And that seems like a reasonable trajectory. Losing out on one gig isn't getting his career ended, and you can still like Kevin Hart's work otherwise and it really takes a lot to actually get one's career so fucked that, once a star, one doesn't work again. Mel Gibson still gets work, ok?

Ben Domenech wants to make a couple of points, here: Hollywood is two-faced because it celebrates black artists but then holds them to account when they have fucked up, that regular people hate Hollywood values because apparently that's the only place the gays are, that voluntarily choosing not to accept a job when it become controversial is solely the business of the "Liberals What Are in Charge of the Whole Entertainment Shebang" and there is a thing called "intersectionality" and it is really scary and fuck that thing.

So much ignorance there, Mt. McCain. See, I get where Kevin Hart is coming from: he went to George Washington HS and is a Gen X-er and I went to Northeast HS and graduated about six years before he did.  My frame of reference is Philadelphia and the culture we grew up with in that time. I listened to rap music that referenced f------ and this was how people talked around me, even though I was already recognizing I wasn't exactly straight. I don't know what language Hart was specifically raised with (his mother was a University professor) in the home, but we had anti-LGBT language in our experience; I did, I know he did. His perspective as a black male (intersectionality) may have informed his observation that life as both black and gay would be undesirable because of the way gay people were treated, but the reality is that gay and black people exist, and instead of counseling them to deny their existence, the empathetic course is to show them the love some retrograde parts of the world won't.

I don't necessarily think Hart is being held more to account here than a white artist having said the same things would be (although this is a reasonable distinction to draw--I would unquestionably want a white artist to be considered equally suspect for homophobic language). But part of his commentary was about his potential child displaying non-heteronormative behavior, and being punished not for even being gay, but for behaving in a way that could be perceived this way. Little kids have been beaten and killed by their parents for this kind of thinking. This is what kills so many gay or non-heteronormative-presenting kids all the time: the lack of support, denial of validity, the coached expectations to just try being straight, as if this was a choice, not an essential part of one's selfness. They are beaten, or disowned and put out on the street, or they suicide.

The harm of this language and what it means to LGBT people is real. His perspective might have been explained by culture and immaturity, but he made these statement when he was grown enough to know better and have seen better, and the gripe that he is being punished for them now seems to stem not from whether Hart's response was too little and too late, but from a culture (conservatism) that really has no problem at all with actual homophobia. With decreeing that gay or trans persons shouldn't fully participate in the military service or public life. With denying job protections against discrimination.

Kevin Hart is a talented comedian and I enjoy most of his work, but this is a problematic area. I think we need to get to where we can recognize that not all places and people experience "wokeness" vis a vis all cultural intersections at the same rate, but credit should be granted for trying. The culture war response downgrades the idea that one should even bother doing better, and this helps exactly no one. I don't want his career wrecked and don't think it will be. I just think he can do better and should. And if he's the guy I think he is, he will do better. (And sometimes I'm wrong, but here's me, doing the benefit of the doubt thing.)

Ben Domenech can also do better. I just don't have the same faith he will. Because his team seems to reward bullshit signifying (sort of a RW version of "virtue-signaling", I guess, where there is surely signals, but the actual virtue is harder to place).

The Blood is Rigged

Having some memory problems, @realDonaldTrump? Should we call for a doctor?

Here’s something you won’t “forget,” Mr. President: You’re the least popular president in modern history & your allies will go down hard in the midterm elections. 22 days. Tick-tock, tick-tock. pic.twitter.com/53FV0HXGXX

— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) October 15, 2018

I really have no impression about what Senator Warren's DNA test means in 2020 terms because it's a pretty good troll right now. It will actually not in any way change any opinions on one side or the other: people who though Elizabeth Warren was a pretty effective politician regardless will likely still think she's pretty effective, and people who don't like her much will continue to not like her very much. I don't think she's fooled about what this does for her, except get the dumb question of taking a DNA test in the first place out of the way well in advance of 2020.

The point is really that she's never run on identity politics. This wasn't a part of how she got on the national stage, but the "Pocahontas" nickname basically became how Trump preferred to define her because she got under his skin. 

Now, the degree to which she has native ancestry really doesn't matter--she isn't claiming anything except there was an ancestor according to family lore, there apparently was, that's it. Trump, on the other hand, bet a million dollars, with his own alligator mouth, that she had none. And now his canary ass will only pay if he gets to administer the DNA test himself, which he wouldn't enjoy doing (what does he think this entails?) because--?

The blood is rigged? She dramatically faked a DNA test to put a person worth, according to his own estimation "$TEN BILLION DOLLARS" on the hook for a measly $1 million for (checks notes) an Indigenous women's resource center.

It doesn't really seem likely, unless you happen to be notoriously dodgy debt-skipper Donald Trump, who will still use the racist nickname, because he is an insensitive asshole. Which says far more about Donald Trump than it says about Elizabeth Warren. And maybe he'll pay, maybe not (probably not). But every time he says it, it's like a little reminder that she at least put up. And he can't even shut up.

Not...Quite...There

In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi disappointed me a little. Although she quietly pushed Rep. Conyers to give up his role in the House Judiciary Committee, she seemed to dismiss the claims of his accusers, claiming she did not know who they were.

This isn't quite what I want to see in response to claims of sexual harassment in this day and age. I respect John Conyers for his long years of service and his generally being on the side of right, too. I think he is an icon politically and has done some good. And yet, even icons fail. Even "good guys" screw up. The point is that there really isn't anyone so sacrosanct that we can dismiss the claims against them. This is why, even though the claims against Sen. Franken bear a certain whiff of rodent carnality, I'm reserving my judgement about why his accusers are being heard now--because for a long time, so many would-be accusers' voices were never heard, because they would not have been believed. Yes, maybe some claims are going to be flummery. But we can't get anywhere by dismissing people out of hand, and we need to create a process for people being heard out and supported. 

Rep. Conyers is 88 years old. Maybe you can call this ageism on my part to suggest that one of the things I find very troubling is the idea that the Representative is not quite as able as he needs to be and is not as in control of his own behavior as he should be. He is still putting up a good fight. But I want to know that the leaders of my party are truly capable of carrying out what they promise us. I need to know they understand that times are changing, and that they will need new, young, vital and unstained people to move into safe seats, get their bones made, and move up into leadership. They need to be working now to mentor and motivate people to run for House seats and become the leadership we need tomorrow. Like, Tuesday. Actual tomorrow. 

Without intending it, Rep. Pelosi kind of sent a message that if it were politically expedient, she would maybe throw accusers under the bus. That is not ok. 

I think she understood she fell short later on, after the interview, but I would have felt so much better about this if her instincts were right-on in the first place. I do have to wonder if this is in part, a generational thing--a difference between her expectations, and what I might expect. 

Another interview that was "not quite there" was an interview in The Guardian of Susan Sarandon.  Now, I don't hold Sarandon to the same standard that I would Pelosi. She is an actor first and an activist second and for a lot of things, her heart seems to be in the right place. She cares about climate and the death penalty. She knows inequality exists--she just isn't in a place to experience inequality except as a person in the upper end. So maybe her ideas of economics fail. Maybe she claims Hillary Clinton would have lead us to war as president, notwithstanding we were already in Iraq, Syria, much of Africa, Afghanistan, etc., and that the GOP choice has apparently revised the ROE of our alleged anti-terror combat to be more tolerant of civilian casualties, and the failure of Trump to even acknowledge diplomacy as an option has lead to the utter degradation of the State Department. 

I don't expect her to understand that. I wish I could. I wish the understanding that diplomacy is the better part of military valor and Clinton would have elaborated on that was a commonplace not just for her, but for, you know, people who vote in elections as a general thing. But what I shudder at is her understanding of feminism as "strident" and "shrill".  Her interpretation of what Weinstein et als being recognized as abusers means, seems stuck in the "nobody sees" camp.  She is happy to dismiss. She succeeded. Isn't victimization culture about failure? 

Sigh. 

This is what we might call "exceptional feminism"--women who prevailed despite sexism (which might being owing to white privilege, class, or connections) have experienced a privilege that many women don't, and therefore don't even entirely grasp the discussion. I feel like we need a better and broader understanding of intersectional feminism to even start these conversations without prominent voices stalling them. 

Frigging in the Rigging 2

It would be a lie to say that there are actually no daily newspapers that have endorsed Donald Trump for president--to date, there are two. But these papers stand as rare islands in what looks like a sea of Clinton endorsements, from papers that have seldom or never endorsed a Democrat before, or even publications that generally have no political bent whatsoever--like Vogue (?!) or who very seldom make presidential endorsements except at what their editorial staff deem to be an historic juncture.

It's no wonder, then, that Trump has been softening up the media all this time--look at them! In the tank for Hillary Clinton! in part blaming the media for the rigging of the election. His rhetoric has become so negative regarding the press that reporters at Trump rallies fear for their safety. (I don't think any of this bodes well for the First Amendment under a possible Trump presidency--could anyone?)

But "the media" is not some cozy monolith that can just lockstep into a conspiracy to get a given candidate elected. There was no bias for Clinton or against Trump displayed in the primaries in terms of media coverage (the opposite seems to have been the case). I hate to be the bearer of the fucking obvious, but when you read something like this that indicates that there is more "negative coverage" of a certain candidate (Trump)--it might just be because that candidate has generated more negative coverage by stupid things that he or she has actually done or said.  As in, Donald Trump has interesting stories about himself that he calls attention to and drags out in the media because that is who he is. And frankly--the email stories about Clinton are basically Yawn City at this point. That's not an indication of bias. It's what's current and what the audience might find interesting (yes, Virginia, there is a ratings clause). Trying to create balance where it does not exist would be, well, false.

So when Hillary Clinton gets endorsements from assorted GOP officials past and present, retired military figures, GOP national security experts, and Nobel Laureates in Science,  it might actually serve us to look at whether these endorsers are seeing a qualitative difference between the candidates. Numerous figures have pointed out that Hillary Clinton is simply the most qualified, by virtue of experience, candidate to have run for this office, while Donald Trump's ace card is his "outsider cred". As in--he has little relevant experience for the job at all. And he seems, to many observers, to be a petulant credulous man-baby with boundary issues, a fetish for self-aggrandizement, and an inability to admit he is wrong about obviously wrong shit. (Like his repeated claims he was originally right about the Iraq War, Libya, or whether the US is the most taxed nation on Earth. Sad!)

But beyond that, the "rigging" could only be evident if somehow the election results madly deviated from all the polls. Now, we know local polls can go all wonky--witness the incredible failure of polls to predict the primary loss of Eric Cantor to David Brat in VA a couple years back. But presidential polling is way more granular--there are more polls, different samples, they are taken more frequently, etc. And we can see that Trump has a deficiency with POC voters (Wow, really? Is this a source of shock to anyone at all, even his fans?) And young people are turned off by him. Even if you allow that POC and young voters might not turn out reliably--in general--they bloody well will for this election.

Add to all this the Trump campaign's lack of a strong ground game or strategic ad buys or logical campaigning strategy. There are obvious real-world indicators to point to if Trump loses that do not necessitate an assumption of "rigging".

Long story short--Trump might want to imply that there has been substantial rigging--but he's frigging wrong.

Peace to the Greatest of All Time

BREAKING: Boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 'the greatest of all time,' has died at 74https://t.co/tA6SGOWREz pic.twitter.com/wrHYu3wnOn

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 4, 2016

Muhammed Ali was not just the greatest in the ring, a man of poetic footwork and sizzling athleticism, but a man of introspection and faith, whose greatest legacy may well be that tribute to what one person can with discipline and insight make of him or herself. He was boxing's poet and bard. He was a forthright commenter on race and faith. He was a powerful symbol of resistance against the Vietnam War. He was a beautiful person and well-respected and beloved.

He will be missed.