Charlottesville – immigrationcourtside.com

EUGENE ROBINSON IN WASHPOST: The Master Of Racial Identity Politics & His GOP Stooges!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-trump-is-the-master-of-abhorrent-identity-politics/2017/11/02/e675bca8-c003-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html?utm_term=.47797a94c8ea

Robinson writes:

“By now it should be clear that racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s hideous rewriting of Civil War history is merely the latest evidence. Can anyone really believe “the lack of an ability to compromise” caused that bloody war? Is it possible to become a four-star Marine general without knowing that the Constitution itself was structured around a compromise on slavery? Or that the first half of the 19th century saw a series of equally immoral compromises that let slavery continue?

How can a man whose son died in service of his country believe that “men . . . of good faith” is an acceptable description of military officers who committed treason and took up arms against the United States, as did Robert E. Lee and the rest of the Confederate generals? Do people of good faith hold others in cruel bondage, buy and sell them like chattel and forcibly compel their unpaid labor?

Kelly buys into the racist, revisionist, dripping-with-Spanish-moss version of history that white Southerners concocted as they were imposing the system of Jim Crow repression. Anyone ignorant enough to believe the war was about anything other than slavery should read the declarations issued by the Confederate states upon secession. Here is a quote from Mississippi’s proclamation, which is vile but at least forthright:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Those who profited handsomely from slavery — including the growing financial markets of Wall Street and the bustling textile mills of New England — knew full well that it was wrong. They just didn’t want to give it up.

Kelly’s “good faith” historical claptrap would be bad enough in a vacuum. But it alarmingly echoes President Trump’s “many sides” analysis of the Charlottesville incident — and continues a tone that Trump set at the outset of his campaign, when he vilified Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists.

. . . .

When Trump miscalibrates and strays into explicit racism, as he did in the case of Charlottesville, there are expressions of shock and horror from fellow Republicans and even members of his Cabinet. But nobody renounces him, except senators who are about to retire. Nobody quits his administration on principle. Trump’s enablers meekly go back to the all-important business of cutting rich people’s taxes.

Making whites feel embattled and aggrieved is central to the Trump presidency. It is what makes him different from all other recent presidents, perhaps going back as far as Woodrow Wilson, who imposed Jim Crow segregation on the federal workforce. It is what makes Trump so corrosive to the national fabric.

There is one master practitioner of identity politics in the United States today. Shamefully, he lives in the White House.”

*****************************************

Read Robinson’s entire op-ed at the link.

Yup! Hard to add much to this analysis! Kelly’s perverted account of the Civil War (although depressing) is not particularly surprising when you remember that this is a guy who bought into the Trump-Gonzo-Miller-Bannon racist and bogus “overrun by the immigrant hordes and Muslim terrorists” fear-mongering hook, line, and sinker, with no apparent reflection on its demonstrable falsity or stupidity.

PWS

11-05-17

HISTORY: CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE REAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (IN FACT, THEY WERE EXPRESSLY INTENDED TO DISTORT HISTORY) BUT LOTS TO DO WITH PROMOTING WHITE SUPREMACY!

Two very powerful stories in today’s Washington Post Outlook Section make that point.

In the first, Karen Finney, journalist and bi-racial descendent of General Lee:

“I always fiercely disagreed with my grandmother’s take. I loved her, but recognized that she simply couldn’t face the truth — the dramatically different, and all too real stories of brutal tyranny, courageously endured, during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South that I learned from my father, his family and my own experience.

No telling of Lee’s story, however complicated, can be separated from the leading role he played in a grievous chapter of American history. That part — and the decisions by Charlottesville’s city council, New Orleans’s mayor, Baltimore’s mayor and Lexington, Kentucky’s mayor to remove Confederate statues from public spaces — isn’t complicated. The general was as cruel a slave owner as any other and fought to defend a society based on the brutal enslavement of black people that, had it persisted until today, would have included me. His cause wasn’t righteous, then or now. He’s my ancestor, but as far as I’m concerned, his statues can’t come down soon enough.

The revisionist version of his story attached to the hundreds of Confederate monuments around the country (not just in the South) is part of the most effective rebranding campaign ever implemented. Like the Lee statue at the center of the tragic, deadly violence in Charlottesville on Saturday, many, if not most, of these monuments were built — not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War — but decades later, in the 20th century. They were erected to advance a dishonest history that claimed the war was about states’ rights and the preservation of a way of life, and to obscure the real cause at the root of the conflict: the perpetuation of white supremacy and economic hegemony through the enslavement and violent suppression of African Americans. It’s propaganda that has exploited fear, and sown division and hate, in a conscious effort to obscure our shared humanity for more than 150 years.”

Read the complete article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/15/im-black-robert-e-lee-is-my-ancestor-his-statues-cant-come-down-soon-enough/?utm_term=.56193efb1814

In the second, Professor Karen L. Cox of UNC-Charlotte points out that: “White supremacy is the whole point of confederate statutes:”

“While Confederate monuments honor their white heroes, they do not always rely on the true history of what took place between 1861 and 1865. Nor was that their intent. Rather, they served to rehabilitate white men — not as the losers of a war but, as a monument in Charlotte states, preservers of “the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.”

Today’s defenders of Confederate monuments are either unaware of the historical context or do not care. Like generations of whites before them, they are more invested in the mythology that has attached itself to these sentinels of white supremacy, because it serves their cause.”

Read that complete article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments-is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a44dddf18bfe

**************************************

Trump’s lack of knowledge of history is breathtaking. Indeed, based on performance and utterances (including tweets) he would be unable to pass the basic American history and civics exam required for naturalization. Fortunatly for him, like many other things in his life, he got his citizenship purely by good fortune, not merit.

PWS

08-20-17

TRUMP & PUTIN USE THE SAME BOGUS TACTIC TO CHANGE THE DIALOGUE: “Whataboutism”

http://wapo.st/2fPY0v

Dan Zak writes in the Washington Post:

“What about antifa? What about free speech? What about the guy who shot Steve Scalise? What about the mosque in Minnesota that got bombed? What about North Korea? What about murders in Chicago? What about Ivanka at the G-20? What about Vince Foster? If white pride is bad, then what about gay pride? What about the stock market? What about those 33,000 deleted emails? What about Hitler? What about the Crusades? What about the asteroid that may one day kill us all? What about Benghazi?

What about what about what about.

We’ve gotten very good at what-abouting.

The president has led the way.

His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic. Tuesday’s bonkers news conference in New York was Trump’s latest act of “whataboutism,” the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting moral equivalency between two things that aren’t necessarily comparable. In this case, the president wondered whether the removal of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville — where white supremacists clashed this weekend with counterprotesters — would lead to the teardown of others.

Donald Trump’s news conference on Tuesday offered a crash course in whataboutism. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Robert E. Lee? What about George Washington?

“George Washington was a slave owner,” Trump said to journalists in the lobby of his corporate headquarters. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”

Using the literal “what about” construction, Trump then went on to blame “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville.

“What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’?” the president said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

For a nanosecond, especially to an uncritical listener, this stab at logic might seem interesting, even thought-provoking, and that’s why it’s a useful political tool. Whataboutism appears to broaden context, to offer a counterpoint, when really it’s diverting blame, muddying the waters and confusing the hell out of rational listeners.

“Not only does it help to deflect your original argument but it also throws you off balance,” says Alexey Kovalev, an independent Russian journalist, on the phone from Moscow. “You’re expecting to be in a civilized argument that doesn’t use cheap tricks like that. You are playing chess and your opponent — while making a lousy move — he just punches you on the nose.”

[‘There are no fine people marching with Nazis’: Seth Meyers on Trump’s Charlottesville response]

Vladimir Putin has made a national sport of what-abouting. In 2014, when a journalist challenged him on his annexation of Crimea, Putin brought up the U.S. annexation of Texas. The American invasion of Iraq is constantly what-abouted on state television, to excuse all kinds of Russian behavior.

In Edward Snowden, “Russia has found the ultimate whataboutism mascot,” the Atlantic’s Olga Khazan wrote in 2013. “By granting him asylum, Russia casts itself, even if momentarily, as a defender of human rights, and the U.S. as the oppressor.”

The term was first coined as “whataboutery” and “the whatabouts,” in stories about the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s, according to linguist Ben Zimmer. But the practice goes back to the chilly depths of the Cold War.

“An old joke 50 years ago was that if you went to a Stalinist and criticized the Soviet slave-labor camps, the Stalinist would say, ‘Well what about the lynchings in the American South?’” philosopher Noam Chomsky once said.”

************************************************

Read the entire article at the link.

Trump is an expert on this; most of us “bite” at least some of the time. He’s also a master practitioner of the “big lie” — a technique used by Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, among others.

PWS

08-19-17

BREAKING: WE KNEW TRUMP’S FAKE “CRACKDOWN” ON WHITE SUPREMACISTS WOULDN’T LAST LONG — AND IT DIDN’T — HE’S BACK TO DEFENDING WHITE NATIONALISTS & RACISTS & BLAMING OTHERS FOR PROBLEMS HE HAS INSTIGATED!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/08/15/trump-doubles-down-on-initial-charlottesville-response-saying-there-is-blame-on-both-sides-for-violence/?utm_term=.15199c19fbc8

From the Washington Post:

“By Washington Post Staff August 15 at 4:31 PM

President Trump first asked reporters to define the “alt-right,” before saying members of the “alt-left” were also to blame for violence in Charlottesville, while taking questions from reporters on Aug. 15 at Trump Tower in New York. (The Washington Post)

President Trump on Tuesday said that counterprotesters at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville over the weekend acted violently and should share the blame for the mayhem that left a woman dead and many others injured. The president also defended those protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

In a testy exchange with reporters at Trump Tower, the president called the events on Saturday a “horrible thing to watch,” but he emphasized that both sides of the clashes contributed to the violence.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.”

*************************************************

Not surprising, since his earlier insincere follow-up statement in which he singled out racist and White Supremacist groups by name appeared to be “read from cue cards” probably written out for him by Ivanka. But, eventually his “White Nationalist rage” always boils over, and he goes on the attack, revealing once again just how unqualified he was and remains for the high office to which he was elected.

Very similar to the Travel Ban and the Comey firing when he couldn’t stick to the script that some of his advisers had prepared for him.

PWS

08-15-17

VOX: THINK TRUMP IS GOING TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO CRACK DOWN ON WHITE SUPREMACISTS? — NOT LIKELY, THEY ARE A KEY PART OF HIS “BASE!”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/14/16144598/trump-white-terrorism

Dara Lind writes:

“The president of the United States finally condemned white supremacist violence in Charlottesville on Monday, two days after an initial statement that blamed “both sides” for violence largely instigated by far-right activists (including a car attack on counterprotesters that killed one person and injured 19).

But the only part of his remarks that appeared to promise that he was devoting not just words, but action, to the problem of right-wing extremism in America — “We will spare no resource in fighting so that every American child can grow up free from violence and fear” — was actually the most hollow.

On Saturday, too, Trump promised to get to the root of the problem: “We want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.” The problem is that his administration has already indicated that it thinks it knows the answers to these problems. It’s cut funding for outreach to counter white supremacism, while pushing punitive “law and order” responses to civil unrest.

Trump’s willingness to explicitly say that white supremacism is bad (even if it’s only offered in response to criticism) is worth at least something — it’s a nod in the direction that white supremacism is an ideology that ought to be ostracized. But his administration’s actions threaten to undermine any value in countering white supremacism that Trump’s rhetoric might have had.

The Trump administration has systematically rejected efforts to counter right-wing violence

Barely a week after President Trump was inaugurated, rumors began to swirl that he was going to change the name of the federal “Countering Violent Extremism” task force, located in the Department of Homeland Security, to “Countering Islamic Extremism” — and that the task force would accordingly “no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.”

The task force’s name hasn’t changed. But its function has. After a review of grants provided by the task force, the Trump administration preserved most of the grants (which involved Islamic communities) — but killed a $400,000 grant to Life After Hate, a group that attempts to “deradicalize” young men drawn to white supremacism.

It’s not that the Trump administration didn’t have evidence that right-wing extremism was a potential problem for public safety. According to Foreign Policy, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a report on May 10 called “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence,” which noted that white supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement.”

But among conservatives skeptical of “identity politics,” there’s been a longstanding resistance to any government warnings about far-right extremist groups. When the Department of Homeland Security published a report in 2009 warning of increased racist extremism after the election of President Obama, the backlash was so intense that the department had to formally retract the report.

. . . .

There’s been a similar turn away from community engagement and toward punitiveness on other fronts. Under Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly (who’s now White House chief of staff), Trump administration officials were indifferent or hostile to concerns that aggressive immigration enforcement might be discouraging victims of crime from reporting to police. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice has stopped supporting legal “consent decrees” between police departments and local governments to rebuild public trust, while Sessions himself has advocated for a return to maximal punitiveness in criminal punishment and explained that African-American communities need to do a better job of trusting police to protect them.

In both his initial statement Saturday and his remarks Monday, President Trump presented the violence in Charlottesville as primarily a problem of social disorder — something that more and better policing, and more public trust in policing, could solve. It’s an old theme for Trump; “law and order” has been the theme of some of his biggest public moments on the campaign trail and as president. According to the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump was particularly insistent that his Saturday statement on Charlottesville adhere to a “law and order” theme, because he remembered it fondly from the campaign.

Trump may see “law and order” as the solution to everything because it reminds him of his electoral success. Other members of his administration see it as the solution to everything because they believe the fundamental problem is “social disorder,” not racism or white supremacism.

Trump’s willingness to criticize white supremacists by name is welcome and important. But if his administration has already decided what caused the problems in Charlottesville over the weekend, it’s hard to imagine that their attempts to “spare no expense” will get to the root of the problem — and won’t end up targeting the same nonwhite Americans and immigrants that the white nationalists themselves wish to intimidate.”

***************************************************

Read Lind’s entire article at the above link.

I also think the Lind’s observations about Jeff Sessions are “spot on.” I have read other commentators suggest that because Sessions is such a “law and order guy” he can be trusted to prosecute the Charlottesville gang to the fullest extent of the law. That might well be true in this particular case. Clearly, Sessions is someone who historically has and continues to get his jollies from throwing folks in jails of all sorts (unless he can seek the death penalty which excites him even more).

But, Sessions has spent a career on the wrong side of racial history and hung around with immigration restrictionists and White Nationalists like Bannon and Steven Miller (who actually worked for him). He has wasted no time in essentially dismantling the Civil Rights enforcement mechanisms at the DOJ and turning the resources to looking for ways that whites can use civil rights laws for their advantage and to keep blacks and other minorities in their respective places. Further, he shows neither respect for nor acknowledgement of the tremendous achievements of American migrants, both legal and undocumented. In plain terms, he has faithfully carried out key elements of Trump’s White Nationalist agenda, to the delight of white supremacists and racists. And, it’s certainly not like Sessions isn’t aware of how his actions “play” in both the white and non-white communities.

Sessions is far too compromised ever to be an “honest broker” in combating white supremacists and racial hatred in the United States. Even if he throws the Charlottesville perpetrators in jail and throws away the key, he’ll never be credible as a defender of decency, tolerance, and civil rights in the face of White Nationalism or its first cousin white supremacism.

PWS

08-14-17

WASHPOST: OUR UNPRESIDENTIAL PRESIDENT FAILS TO RESPOND PROPERLY TO DOMESTIC TERRORISM!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-a-presidential-president-would-have-said-about-charlottesville/2017/08/12/9f1ffec6-7fa4-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html?utm_term=.aa4c1a783bce

“By Editorial Board August 12 at 6:27 PM

HERE IS what President Trump said Saturday about the violence in Charlottesville sparked by a demonstration of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.

Here is what a presidential president would have said:“The violence Friday and Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., is a tragedy and an unacceptable, impermissible assault on American values. It is an assault, specifically, on the ideals we cherish most in a pluralistic democracy — tolerance, peaceable coexistence and diversity.

“The events were triggered by individuals who embrace and extol hatred. Racists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and their sympathizers — these are the extremists who fomented the violence in Charlottesville, and whose views all Americans must condemn and reject.

“To wink at racism or to condone it through silence, or false moral equivalence, or elision, as some do, is no better and no more acceptable than racism itself. Just as we can justly identify radical Islamic terrorism when we see it, and call it out, so can we all see the racists in Charlottesville, and understand that they are anathema in our society, which depends so centrally on mutual respect.

“Under whatever labels and using whatever code words — ‘heritage,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘nationalism’ — the idea that whites or any other ethnic, national or racial group is superior to another is not acceptable. Americans should not excuse, and I as president will not countenance, fringe elements in our society who peddle such anti-American ideas. While they have deep and noxious roots in our history, they must not be given any quarter nor any license today.

“Nor will we accept acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by such elements. If, as appears to be the case, the vehicle that plowed into the counterprotesters on Saturday in Charlottesville did so intentionally, the driver should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The American system of justice must and will treat a terrorist who is Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or anything else just as it treats a terrorist who is Muslim — just as it treated those who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

“We may all have pressing and legitimate questions about how the violence in Charlottesville unfolded — and whether it could have been prevented. There will be time in coming days to delve further into those matters, and demand answers. In the meantime, I stand ready to provide any and all resources from the federal government to ensure there will be no recurrence of such violence in Virginia or elsewhere. Let us keep the victims of this terrible tragedy in our thoughts and prayers, and keep faith that the values enshrined in our Constitution and laws will prevail against those who would desecrate our democracy.”

****************************************************************

It might not be Presidential, but it’s what you’d expect from a President who has unabashed White Nationalists among his closest advisers and in a key cabinet position. It’s also what you would expect from someone who has spent the last several years pandering to White Supremacists, who now feel “at home” in today’s GOP, bigots, and racists, and whose own career shows little sensitivity to decency, values, or toleration.

PWS

08-13-17

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

The Trump administration has systematically rejected efforts to counter right-wing violence

Related posts:

Related posts: