🇺🇸🗽🤯 HISTORY: 100 YEARS AGO, AMERICA TRIED, BUT ULTIMATELY FAILED, TO STAY “WHITE & PROTESTANT” WITH THE 1924 IMMIGRATION ACT — Many Were Hurt Or Died From This Bias In The Interim — Now Trump & The Nativist Right Want To Revive One Of The Worst Eras In U.S. History — Will Indifference & Ignorance From Dems & So-Called “Centrists” Let Them Get Away With Turning Back The Clock? ⏰☠️🤮 — Two Renowned Authors Offer A View Of A Biased, Deadly, & Ultimately Highly Counterproductive Past That Still Poisons Our Politics & Threatens Our Future As A Beacon Of Hope! — PLUS: Kowalski & Chase Take On The “False Scholars” 🤮 Who Disingenuously Attempt To “Glorify” Xenophobia & Racism!🤯

1924 Act
The 1924 Immigration Act vilified, dehumanized, and barred many of those immigrants who have made America great, like Italian Americans being demeaned in this cartoon. Yet, some descendants of those unfairly targeted appear oblivious to the mistakes of the past and willing to inflict the same immoral lies, harm, and suffering on today’s migrants.
IMAGE: Public Realm
Eduardo Porter
Eduardo Porter
Columnist and Editorial Board Member
Washington Post
PHOTO: WashPost

Eduardo Porter writes in WashPost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/immigration-history-race-quota-progress/

“I think that we have sufficient stock in America now for us to shut the door.”

That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “most important problem” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “critical threat.”

Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith, a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.

. . . .

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth, even while helping keep a lid on inflation.

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s—hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

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

Gordon F. Sander
Gordon F. Sander
Journalist and Historian
PHOTO: www.gordonsander.com

Gordon F. Sander, journalist and historian, also writes in WashPost, perhaps somewhat less optimistically, but with the same historical truth in the face of current political lies and gross misrepresentations:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/05/24/johnson-reed-act-immigration-quotas-trump/

. . . .

Johnson and Reed were in a triumphant mood on the eve of their bill’s enactment. “America of the melting pot will no longer be necessary,” Reed wrote in the Times. He remarked on the new law’s impact: “It will mean a more homogenous nation, more self-reliant, more independent and more closely knit by common properties and common faith.”

The law immediately had its intended effect. In 1921, more than 200,000 Italians arrived at Ellis Island. In 1925, following the bill’s enactment, barely 6,000 Italians were permitted entry.

But there were less intended consequences, too, including on U.S. foreign relations. Although Reed insisted there was nothing personal about the act’s exclusion of Japanese people, the Japanese government took strong exception, leading to an increase in tensions between the two countries. There were riots in Tokyo. The road to Pearl Harbor was laid.

During the 1930s, after the eugenics-driven Nazis seized control of Germany, the quotas established by the act helped close the door to European Jews and others fleeing fascism.

At the same time, the law also inspired a small but determined group of opponents led by Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), who were committed to overturning it. Celler’s half-century-long campaign finally paid off in 1965 at the Statue of Liberty when, as Celler looked on, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national origin quotas.

But with anti-immigration sentiment on the rise and quotas once again on the table, it’s clear that a century after its enactment, the ghost of Johnson-Reed isn’t completely gone.

Gordon F. Sander is a journalist and historian based in Riga, Latvia. He is the author of “The Frank Family That Survived: A 20th Century Odyssey” and other books

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

Many thanks to my friend and immigration maven Deb Sanders for alerting me to the Sander article. I strongly urge everyone to read both pieces at the links above.

Perhaps the most poignant comment I’ve received about these articles is from American educator, expert, author, and “practical scholar” Susan Gzesh:

And because of the 1924 Act, my grandparents lost dozens of their siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews to the Holocaust in the 1940s because Eastern European Jewish immigration to the US had been cut off. They would have been capable of sponsoring more family to come to the US in the late 1920s and 30s, but there was no quota for them.

I have no words to describe my feelings about so-called experts who would praise the 1924 Act. I know that Asian Americans must feel similarly to my sentiments.

Well said, Susan!

 

Susan Gzesh
Susan Gzesh
American scholar, educator, expert, author
PHOTO: U. Of Chicago

I’ll leave it at that, for you to ponder the next time you hear Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, and the like fear-monger about the bogus “invasion,” spout “replacement theory,” and extoll the virtues of extralegal cruelties and dehumanization inflicted upon “the other” — typically the most vulnerable who are  seeking our legal protection and appealing to our senses of justice and human dignity! And, also you can consider this when the so called “mainstream media” pander to these lies by uncritically presenting them as “the other side,” thereby echoing “alternative facts!”

It’s also worth remembering this when you hear Biden, Harris, Schumer, Murphy, and other weak-kneed Dem politicos who should know better adopt Trumpist White Nationalist proposals and falsely present them as “realistic compromises” — as opposed to what they really are —  tragic acts of political and moral cowardice!

Eventually, as both of the above articles point out, America largely persevered and prospered over its demons of racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant nationalism. But, it would be wrong to view this “long arc” analysis as “zeroing out” the sins and horrors of our past. 

Susan Gzesh’s relatives died, some horribly and painfully, before their time. That can’t be changed by future progress. Nor can the children they might have had or the achievements they never got to make to our nation and the world be resurrected. 

As Susan mentions, the 1924 Act also reinforced long-standing racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans that led to the irreversible harm inflicted by the internment of Japanese American citizens, continuing Chinese Exclusion, and a host of state laws targeting the Asian population and making their lives miserable. Belated recognition of the wrongfulness and immorality of these reprehensible laws and actions does nothing for their past victims.

Many Irish, Italian, and other Catholics and their cherished institutions died, lost property, or were permanently displaced by widespread anti-Catholic riots brought on and fanned by the very type of biased and ignorant thinking that undergirded Johnson-Reed. They can’t be brought back to life and their property restored just by a “magic wave of the historical wand.” 

U.S. citizens of Mexican-American heritage were deported and dispossessed, some from property their ancestors had owned long before there was even a United States. Apologizing to their descendants and acknowledging our mistakes as a nation won’t eliminate the injustices done them — ones that they took to their graves!

Despite the “lessons of the Holocaust,” America continues to struggle with anti-Semitism and anti-Islamic phobias and indifference to human suffering beyond our borders.

And, of course, the poisonous adverse impacts of slavery on our nation and our African-American compatriots continue to haunt and influence us despite disingenuous claims to the contrary.

Dan Kowalski
Dan Kowalski
Online Editor of the LexisNexis Immigration Law Community (ILC)
Jeffrey S. Chase
Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase
Jeffrey S. Chase Blog
Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges

My friends immigration experts Dan Kowalski and Hon. Jeffrey Chase also had some “choice words” for the “false scholars” who extol the fabricated “benefits” of White Nationalism and racism embodied in “laws” that contravened the very meaning of “with liberty and justice for all” — something to reflect upon this Memorial Day. See https://dankowalski.substack.com/p/true-colors.

That prompted this response from Susan:

Susan Gzesh

11 hrs ago

Thank you, Dan! In memory of my Gzesh, Wolfson, Kronenberg, and Kissilove relatives who were victims of the Holocaust – after their U.S.-based relatives failed to get visas for them.

I also recently weighed in on the horrors of the 1924 Act in a recent article by Felipe De La Hoz, published in The New Republic: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2024/05/02/🏴☠%EF%B8%8F🤯🤮-a-century-of-progress-arrested-the-1924-immigration-act-rears-its-ugly-nativist-head-again-felipe-de-la-hoz-in-the-new-repub/.

Heed the lessons of history, enshrine tolerance, honor diversity, and “improve on past performance!”  We have a choice as to whether or not to repeat the mistakes of the past — to regress to a darker age or move forward to a brighter future for all!  Make the right one!

 

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

05-27-24

📚PROFESSOR IBRIM X. KENDI: Why Black History Is So Important & Why The White Nationalists Suppress The Truth!

Professor Ibrim X. Kendi
Professor Ibrim X. Kendi
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities
Boston University
PHOTO: Linkedin

Professor Kendi writes on LinkedIn:

To preserve slavery, enslavers claimed slavery was “positively good” and that abolitionists were making up the terror and exploitation of slavery. To preserve Jim Crow, segregationists claimed public accommodations and institutions were “separate but equal” and that civil rights activists were making up all the racial inequity and injustice. To preserve racism today, the ideological descendants of enslavers and segregationists are claiming that the U.S. is a “colorblind” society and antiracist intellectuals and activists are making up all the racial inequity and injustice. As they strive to preserve racism, we must strive to recognize and combat these repackaged ideas by deepening our understanding of history. Making this #BlackHistoryMonth all the more critical. 👊🏿

Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. 

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

Lots of power and truth in five sentences. Let’s celebrate Black History Month by embracing and understanding what right wing politicos don’t want you to know about our nation, how we got to where we are today, and how we can finally achieve the long-unfulfilled promise of “equal justice for all!”

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-06-24

 🏴‍☠️☠️ NAACP ISSUES TRAVEL WARNING: Florida, The Neo-Fascist “Hate State” ⚠️

 

Nina GolgowskiSenior Reporter HuffPost PHOTO: HuffPost
Nina Golgowski
Senior Reporter
HuffPost
PHOTO: HuffPost

Nina Golgowski reports for HuffPost:

The NAACPs Board of Directors has issued a travel warning about Florida that accuses the state, and pointedly Gov. Ron DeSantis, of being openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color,” the notice issued Saturday states.

The civil rights organization specifically accuses DeSantis, a possible 2024 Republican presidential candidate, of aggressively attempting to erase Black history and restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”

. . . .

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

Read Nina’s complete report at the link.

Colfax Massacre
“Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873” — White Nationalist snowflakes like DeSantis feel diminished and threatened by the truth about American history and the role of race.                                                                  

The “anti-woke agenda” touted by DeSantis is a very thinly disguised euphemism for “overtly racist!” That, decades after folks like Gov. George Wallace and Sen. Strom Thurmond unabashedly made hate, segregation, and racism the “centerpieces” of failed presidential bids, racists like DeSantis are openly campaigning on the same basic platform, and enacting it in their “mini-reichs,” should be deeply disturbing to younger generations of voters who will have to live with the stupidity, ignorance, cynicism, and hate promoted by these immoral GOP pols. It’s a race backwards and to the bottom that can only end in a complete catastrophe for our nation and the world!

Also remember: It all started with the dehumanization and false demonization of migrants. Many, including too many Dems, have been unwilling to stand up against it! That’s how the GOP’s “destroy America” agenda gains traction!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

05-22-23

 

 

🗽⚖️🇺🇸🌟🏆 AYUDA’S PAULA FITZGERALD GETS GEORGETOWN U’s “JOHN THOMPSON, JR. I HAVE A DREAM AWARD” IN STIRRING KENNEDY CENTER MLK CELEBRATION FEATURING LESLIE ODOM, JR. (“HAMILTON”) & LET FREEDOM RING CHOIR! — Watch It Here On YouTube!

Paula Fitzgerald
Paula Fitzgerald
Executive Director
AYUDA

 

“The power of AYUDA is hope!”

— Paula Fitzgerald, Executive Director, AYUDA

PROGRAM NOTES ADAPTED FROM http://NEWORKSPRODUCTIONS.COM:

Nolan Williams, Jr.Composer & Director, Let Freedom Ring Choir PHOTO: NEWorks.com
Nolan Williams, Jr.
Composer & Director, Let Freedom Ring Choir
PHOTO: NEWorks.com

The Let Freedom Ring Celebration is an annual celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., jointly presented by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Georgetown University. Following a two-year hiatus prompted by the COVID pandemic, ‘Let Freedom Ring’ returns this weekend to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall with a stellar program headlined by Tony and Grammy winner Leslie Odom, Jr. and music produced by NEWorks Productions CEO, Nolan Williams, Jr.

The program will feature Odom performing a range of selections from the American songbook, Williams leading the Let Freedom Ring Celebration Choir and NEWorks Band, and the presentation of the 21st annual John Thompson Jr. Legacy of a Dream Award to Paula Fitzgerald, executive director of Ayuda.

Other program participants include: Naomi Eluojierior, Georgetown University student; Marc Bamuthi Joseph, VP & Artistic Director of Social Impact, The Kennedy Center; [Cheri Carter, Vice President,] Boeing (LFR Title Sponsor); and John J. DeGioia, President, Georgetown University.

Williams will present two original works as part of the program, performed by the Let Freedom Ring Celebration Choir and Band, Georgetown University student poets Cameren Evans, Isaiah Hodges, and Lucy Lawlor, and community soloists Roy Patten, Jr. and Laura Van Duzer.

The program [opened] with the world premiere of Williams’ “We’re Marching On!,” a work commissioned by Georgetown University. The piece draws inspiration from a 1965 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and features spoken word delivered by Evans, Hodges and Lawlor.

Williams’ second musical contribution is the social-justice-themed ballad, “We are the ones to heal our land.” Commissioned last year by Choral Arts Society and Washington Performing Arts, this work has been adapted for this occasion and will feature Patten and Van Duzer.

(Scroll below to access Williams’s song lyrics.)

The program [closed] with a stirring rendition of Dick Holler’s 1968 classic “Abraham, Martin and John.” The song pays tribute to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy, all American icons of social change who were tragically assassinated.

[Odom then brought the audience to its feet one final time with a totally awesome and inspiring encore rendition of “Ave Maria,” to piano accompaniment, in recognition of the “Christ energy” of Dr. King: A characteristic that, to paraphrase Odom’s words, “transcends individual religious beliefs or non-beliefs!”]

[I loved that in his musical selections Odom took pains to showcase the talents of, and share the spotlight with, each member of his amazing band. That shows just the type of teamwork, awareness, humility, and appreciation of those who made and make you what your are that Dr. King preached. It also reminded me of my experiences with Paula, AYUDA, and Georgetown Law (which I’ve also found to be a great team effort.)]

[Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics of Williams’s“We’re Marching On:”]

LET FREEDOM RING
Georgetown University Student Poets Cameren Evans, Lucy Lawlor, and Isiah Hodges, perform “We Keep Marching On” at the Let Freedom Ring Concert, Kennedy Center, Jan. 16, 2023
PHOTO: YouTube

“We’re Marching On!”

Music and Lyrics by Nolan Williams, Jr.

Spoken Word by Lucy Lawlor, Cameren Evans, Nolan Williams, Jr. & Isaiah Hodges

Commissioned by Georgetown University for Let Freedom Ring 2023.

Copyright secured, NEW-J Publishing. All rights reserved.

 

PROLOGUE

Sometimes I find myself running,

my feet burnt and charred from the fire behind me,

my memories all caught up in coal combustion.

All I have is a body full of smoke.

I remember learning my red, white, and blues,

my Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue

inside an underfunded public school.

A gleeful American history lesson

that always came with a fog.

[During the concert, the stage was enveloped in machine-generated (I assume) smoke and fog to emphasize (I assume) the often ambiguous position and perspective of African Americans and other minorities in relation to the “standard — often whitewashed — version” of the “American Dream.” Does that “Dream” really look the same if your family members were denied educational, political, and economic rights, or the entire “pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” because of their skin color? I doubt it.]

Sometimes the American dream sounds a lot like pitchforks and screams.

Haunting screams from Rosewood, Ocoee, Ponce,

all forgotten pieces of our history.

Reminding us there’s still work left to do—

that’s why we keep marching.

THE HOOK

We’re marching on

‘cause we must keep marching on.

We’re marching on

‘cause the truth is marching on.

. . . .

BRIDGE 

Opposition forces

sense their voice is

quelled the more we persevere.

That’s why their raging more

And waging war

on this the last frontier

of their inhumanity,

superiority,

inequality.

That’s why we keep marchin’

. . . .

[And, here are excerpts from Williams’s “We are the ones to heal our land:”:]

“We are the ones to heal our land.”

Music and Lyrics by Nolan Williams, Jr.

Commissioned by Choral Arts Society and Washington Performing Arts.

Adapted for Let Freedom Ring 2023.

Copyright secured, NEW-J Publishing. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE SONG…

“For most of my life, I have been deeply inspired by the scriptural verse, 2 Chronicles 7:14. If the text does not readily come to mind, here it is for your immediate reference:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (King James Version)

These words have long embodied for me the profound hope that God will eventually make right the many wrongs that trouble our land.

In recent years, however, I have found myself challenged by the application of this verse. Too often, it is interpreted in a way that absolves us of the responsibility of being active agents of our own healing. Too often, it justifies a passive process of waiting on God (above) to move as if we have no power within to bring about the change we seek.

With this new song, I offer a reimagining of the 2 Chronicles text to provoke and awaken our consciousness and to call us as a community to renewed action. And I do so with verses that explore four forms of justice disparities: earth, social, environmental, and economic.

As you read these lyrics and listen to the world premiere performance of this song, meditate deeply upon the meaning and application of these words.”

-Nolan Williams, Jr.

LET FREEDOM RING
Community soloists Roy Patten, Jr. and Laura Van Duzer belt out a heartfelt version of “We are the ones to heal our land” at the Let Freedom Ring concert at the Kennedy Center, Jan. 16, 2023.
PHOTO: YouTube

. . . .

VERSE 3 

The haves get more while the rest of us survive,

doing our best to make ends meet.

And chances to advance are not the same

for the lost, the least, and all those in between.

When will the just cry, “Enough?”

When will the righteous more demand?

At such a time as this,

We need the brave to take a stand.

REFRAIN

So, we pray to us,

call ourselves by name,

humbly asking if we’ve had enough of our own pain.

Here, now, face to face,

will we turn from our own wicked ways?

Hear us now, we are the ones to heal our land.

BRIDGE

We’ve no right to pray to God then wait with no resolve

to accept the charge we have to act and get involved,

knowing God is calling us to right the wrong we’ve caused,

knowing God is calling us to right the wrong we’ve caused!

. . . .

VAMP

If not us, who?

If not now, when?

Calling me, you:

It’s time to heal our land.

It’s time to heal our land.

 

John Thompson
John Thompson
1941 – 2020
Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Broadcaster, Mentor
Photo from Wikipedia/Sports Illustrated

Watch the video of the full performance and the award presentation to Paula by Georgetown University President John G. DeGioia here. It’s a wonderful award to a terrific person and true American hero who embodies the values and determination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Thompson, Jr., to fight to finally make equal justice in America a reality and to make our world a better place!

Former Georgetown and Princeton Head Basketball Coach John Thompson III and the Thompson Family attended and were recognized for their continuing contributions to social justice in America and for making this great event possible. Cathy and I were honored and thrilled to be in the audience.

I was especially moved by Paula’s highlighting the successful efforts of AYUDA and other community groups to welcome and care for migrants to DC who were bussed here as part of a nativist political stunt by some governors. Certainly, it illustrates who “gets” Dr. King’s spirit, dreams, and messages of hope and who is arrogantly, and cynically, paying his memory and values “lip service,” at best!

The “video short” on the social justice impact of John Thompson & Paula (including my “Paula anecdote”) begins at 42:20:

https://youtu.be/Ru8aww7Gxag

Leslie Odom, Jr.
Leslie Odom, Jr.
“Aaron Burr in Hamilton”
PHOTO: Pete Souza, Official White House Photo, July 2015, Public Realm

🇺🇸Congrats, Paula, my friend, and Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-17-23

CHARLES M. BLOW @ NYT BEGS TO DIFFER WITH GOP SENs SCOTT & GRAHAM: “However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?”

 

Charles M. Blow
Charles M. Blow
Columnist
NY Times

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/opinion/america-racism.html?referringSource=articleShare

. . . .

I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that “woke supremacy,” whatever that is, “is as bad as white supremacy.” There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None.

Colfax

It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: “What, to you, is America?” Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?

When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?

Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the United States wrote in the infamous ruling on the Dred Scott case that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”

Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.

. . . .

As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this subject contributes to the murkiness — and to the myth that the question of whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of genuine debate among honest intellectuals.

Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.

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

Read Blow’s full article at the link.

Four things that are clear to me:

  • The “history” that most of us in my generation learned in high school was “whitewashed;”
  • The monumental achievements of non-white Americans, women, and children which allowed this country to exist, prosper, and flourish have consistently been ignored or downplayed;
  • America still has race issues;
  • The GOP, in particular, has failed to come to grips with the issue of race in 21st century America (apologists Scott & Graham notwithstanding).

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process For All Persons Under Law, Forever!

PWS

05-03-21

CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH @ DHS: ICE DEPORTS BLACKS TO DANGER & POTENTIAL DEATH, MANY WITH NO DUE PROCESS!🏴‍☠️ — Legislators Call On Biden Administration To End Racist Enforcement Policies!

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

Colfax

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/black-immigrants-deportations-biden/2021/02/12/5f395932-6d54-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html

Maria Sacchetti
Maria Sacchetti
Immigration Reporter, Washington Post, Photo: WashPost
Arelis R. Hernandez
Arelis R. Hernandez
Southern Border Reporter
Washington Post, Photo: WashPost

 

By Maria Sacchetti and Arelis R. Hernández in WashPost:

Prominent Black lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants to nations such as Haiti that are engulfed in political turmoil, fearing that they could be harmed or killed.

Hundreds of immigrants have been swept out of the United States in recent days, a blow to groups that had been counting on President Biden and Vice President Harris, the daughter of immigrants and the first Black vice president, to halt deportations and overturn the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

Biden attempted to pause most deportations on Jan. 20, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. Immigration officials say the recent removals match Biden’s new enforcement priorities — such as people who recently crossed the border or who were convicted of serious crimes — but advocates say immigrants are being sent to nations where they could face danger.

“The community should not still be in panic across this nation when we have an administration that is willing to do the work of stopping these deportations,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Friday in a call with reporters. “They have the authority to say no more flights will leave the United States.”

Migrants who cross the border are still being removed under a Trump administration order that allowed the expulsion of recently arrived people under Title 42, Section 265, of the public health law that aims to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Advocates for immigrants tracking the flights say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled approximately 900 Haitians, including dozens of children, in the past two weeks.

Advocates for immigrants say the situation is urgent, as Haiti and nations in Africa are facing varying threats. Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, has seen its democracy plunge into a constitutional crisis with allegations of a coup attempt and conflicting claims to the presidency.

. . . .

ICE deported New York resident Paul Pierrilus to Haiti on Feb. 2, even though he has never been to that country and has lived 35 of his 40 years in the United States.

He had fought deportation since 2004 after a drug conviction. His parents are of Haitian descent, but they are U.S. citizens and Pierrilus was born on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

Haiti had never recognized him as a citizen, he said, but an immigration judge ordered him deported more than 16 years ago and he lost his appeals.

In an interview, Pierrilus described how he had to be dragged off the airplane. He wore the parka he used to wear in New York into the tropical 85-degree air. He said he is stunned and defeated.

“I’m not a Haitian citizen! I’m not a Haitian citizen!” Pierrilus recalled yelling as local officials pushed him onto a bus. “I felt helpless because it’s a situation out of my control. It’s a situation I can’t do anything about. No one is hearing what I’m saying.”

. . . .

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

Read the complete article at the link. 

The Pierrilus story is particularly indicative of ICE’s attitude toward people of color: If he’s black send him to Haiti, ask questions later!

Courtside was “on top” of Ed Pilkington’s recent Guardian article on deporting babies and children to total disorder and danger in Haiti. 

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/02/08/%f0%9f%96%95ice-continues-to-give-biden-administration-humanity-the-big-middle-finger-racism-also-on-display-as-haitian-kids-babies-deported-to-burning-house/

Remember, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in ethnic communities throughout the United States was a key priority of the Trump White Nationalist kakistocracy — with a some help from the Supremes’ majority. It has been very successful. In fact, as noted by Vice President Harris, hate crimes directed against Asian Americans are up astronomically.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjxhrifm-fuAhU4MVkFHTW0BywQ0PADegQIGRAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnbc.com%2F2021%2F02%2F12%2Fvp-harris-responds-to-surge-in-violent-attacks-against-asian-americans.html&usg=AOvVaw2FZQYF9caSSckRsqU9fO58

But, of course, there aren’t any Asian American Justices, are there? So, out of sight out of mind for perhaps Ameria’s “least representative” court (with the possible exception of the EOIR “courts”).

I’ve consistently been making several points that others are finally starting to pick up on and that will be essential for Biden Administration policy makers to keep in mind: 

  • The issues of racial justice and immigrant justice are deeply intertwined — one can’t be solved without addressing the other; 
  • Dehumanization of “the other” (Black, Latino, Asian-American, women, immigrants, asylum seekers, etc.) — “Dred Scottification” — has been promoted over the past four years and essentially endorsed and furthered by a tone-deaf Supremes’ majority;
  • Racist attitudes and misogyny are deeply ingrained in the current DHS and EOIR (now operating as an adjunct of DHS Enforcement) enforcement mechanisms and in some of the personnel carrying out enforcement policies, including some EOIR judges; 
  • An aura of impunity and unaccountability infects both DHS and DOJ;
  • Racial justice and equal justice under law will not be achieved without significant personnel and attitude changes at the “retail level” of both DHS and EOIR.

Finally, complaining is a start. But, it won’t result in the necessary systemic changes. 

The only way that African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and female lawmakers are going to get durable change is by prevailing on their colleagues to recognize the humanity of all persons in the United States and to make the necessary statutory changes in the immigration laws, beginning, but not ending, with an independent Article I Immigration Court.

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-13-21

HISTORY: 160 YEARS AGO A GANG OF TRAITORS AND OATH BREAKERS LED AN ARMED INSURRECTION THAT KILLED 620,000 AMERICANS — Then, “Whitewashed” American History Turned Them Into False “Heroes,” While Loyal American Citizens Were Lynched & Systematically Denied Their Constitutional & Human Rights!

 

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-southerner-who-abandoned-the-lost-cause/2021/02/04/5d01effc-5031-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

John Reeves reviews Ty Seidule’s “Robert E. Lee & Me” in WashPost:

January 1872, Jubal Early, a former Confederate corps commander, delivered an address at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., to honor Robert E. Lee, who had recently died. Believing that Lee was one of the finest military leaders in history, Early declared, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime, needing no borrowed lustre; and he is all our own.” In subsequent years, Early and several elite ex-officers would deify Lee while creating the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. According to that view, the war wasn’t about slavery but rather states’ rights. And the North won only because of its superior resources. An additional tenet is that Lee was the greatest soldier in the war on either side.

At the same time the Lee myth was being created, former rebels began reinforcing white supremacy all across the South. In Walton County, a rural community in Georgia, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized freedmen after the war. In 1871, Jake Daniels, an African American blacksmith from the county, was killed by 20 disguised men after refusing to repair a buggy for a White man, who still owed him money from previous jobs. The Klansmen showed up at Daniels’s door in the middle of the night. Daniels went outside but quickly recognized the danger. He tried to reenter his house but was shot in the back of the head. The men then shot him five or six more times before leaving the scene.

This type of violence was not uncommon in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Georgia alone, 589 people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. As Ty Seidule writes in his powerful new book, “Robert E. Lee and Me,” “If Lee and Confederate worship created one side of the white supremacy coin, violent terror to enforce racial domination provided the other side.”

Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: “I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.”

Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders. Perhaps the best attribute of this fine book is the author’s honesty. When talking of his personal metamorphosis, he vows to “quit hiding behind the impartial, know-it-all historian and open up about the southerner, the boy who grew up on Lee idolatry, and the man who wrapped his identity around the heroes of the Confederacy. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Above all, tell the truth.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the review at the link. 

It’s never too late for the truth. 

Lots of White folks still have the audacity to be upset and offended because “their” factionalized account of U.S. history — one that even those of us who grew up in the North were fed to a large extent — is (finally and incrementally) being replaced with a more accurate accounting of the truth, unhappy as facing it sometimes can be. 

“Their” myths and false narratives are more important than the many African-American lives and futures snuffed out by racism. Shows that BLM has it right — the myths and fabricated visions of the past so integral to the White self-esteem of many are more important than the lives and futures of African-Americans snuffed out by institutionalized racism, much of it perpetrated by our Government and our legal system.

A frank accounting of our past, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is a necessary step to our moving forward as a nation.

PWS

02-08-21

☠️FASCISM: GOP PARTY OF TREASON, TRAITOR TRUMP BRING “KRISTALLNACHT” TO CAPITOL IN OVERT ACT OF  NEO-NAZISM — Listen To  Arnold “The Terminator” On How This Is, In Fact, “Nazism In Action” Led By Traitor Prez, Promoted By Cruz, Hawley, & McCarthy, & Endorsed By GOP Silence, Denial, Equivocation,  & Cowardly Butt Covering In The Face Of Terrorist🥷🏻🏴‍☠️☠️ Anti-American Insurrection! — This Attack On Democracy Was Aided & Abetted By Spineless GOP Supremes Unwilling To Stand Up For Our Constitution & Humanity In The Face Of Clear Tyranny & The Groundwork For Subversion!

Arnold
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Terminator & Former GOP Governor of California
PHOTO: YouTube

Watch here on YouTube, courtesy of The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/10/capitol-riot-schwarzenegger-rebukes-trump-kristallnacht?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://youtu.be/x_P-0I6sAck

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

How do you I know your country is in “deep dodo?” When Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jessie Ventura become the “voices of reason” and the “President” and his party are the “voices of treason.” 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwil59_mnJTuAhUswlkKHQJrBpAQglR6BAgCEAc&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FGovJVentura%2Fstatus%2F1346932652931219457%3Fref_src%3Dtwsrc%255Egoogle%257Ctwcamp%255Eserp%257Ctwgr%255Etweet&usg=AOvVaw1kp-sHirIW5ahJwlV_VMkm

It’s likely that the movement to hold accountable and remove from Congress traitors like Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, and the other Republicans who shamelessly and seditiously continued to support the anti-American lies, racist false narratives, and conspiracy theories that fueled Trump’s insurrection and domestic terrorism will die out over time. But, it shouldn’t!

As I write this, the GOP treasonists in the House are blocking what should be a unanimous resolution to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove this dangerous, unhinged, traitor/moron from the office he has abused and disgraced from Day One!

One reason why our democracy is on the ropes is that there hasn’t been any accountability whatsoever for Trump and his kakistocracy of thugs on the public payroll or for the GOP White Nationalist traitors and enablers in Congress who have furthered their grotesque abuses of humanity and our democratic institutions.

The lack of accountability is particularly glaring and disgusting for Trump’s lawyers, both in and out of Government, who have lied, misrepresented, and totally jettisoned ethics and “due diligence” in supporting and furthering Trump’s attacks on our democracy. Why is Rudy Giuliani, who led a coast to coast “conspiracy of lies and treason” in Federal and State Courts, before calling for armed rebellion against our Government, still walking free and “practicing” law? Why are Billy Barr, Gonzo Sessions, Don McGhan, Noel Francisco, and a host of others who lied, misrepresented, and abused their ethical obligations as well as their oaths of office happily ensconced in the private sector rather than being held accountable for their “crimes against humanity?” 

Contrary to all the total BS 💩being spread by GOP Trump toadies, the unconstitutional, racist, illegal, violent, anti-democracy agenda of Trump, Miller, and the rest of of the Thugocracy/Kakistocracy was apparent from the “git go.” 

And, Chief Justice Roberts and the other GOP Justices who helped roll out and encourage “Kristallnacht” by rubber-stamping the “Muslim ban,” “Let ‘Em Die In Mexico,” the “Bogus Wall of Misappropriated Funds,” stripping legal migrants of life-saving and health preserving benefits, helping fuel a DHS “reign of terror” directed at ethnic communities, and other neo-Nazi travesties should also tender their resignations to President Biden as of Jan 21, 2021! Intellectual dishonesty by judges and bad, righty biased (non)jurisprudence have real life consequences! 

Trump and Miller told the Supremes precisely what their invidious racist, religiously biased, politically pandering intent was in all of these cases and the GOP Justices ignored it in favor of bogus, fabricated, right wing, authoritarian, racist driven, anti-democracy agendas thinly camouflaged by legal gobbledygook.

People die and lives are ruined forever when judges who are supposed to protect them instead “take a dive” for the forces of tyranny and cruelty! “Dred Scottification” (“dehumanization”) of Blacks, Latinos, Immigrants, and other People of Color by our highest Court is neither acceptable nor should it be “swept under the rug” as has happened all too often when the Supremes fail democracy and align themselves with anti-democracy racists and authoritarians.

For four years, the GOP Justices on the Supremes have treated due process, democratic institutions, and the lives of asylum seekers and other migrants (and to some extent their pro bono lawyers) as “jokes.” That’s because 1) neither they nor their families are rotting in Mexico or facing torture and death in El Salvador or some other failed state; and 2) this time, the right wing thugs they enable were across the street trashing our Capitol rather than storming the Supremes. Better Justices and Better Federal Judges for a Better America!

🇺🇸🗽⚖️👍🏼Due Process Forever!

Best 

PWS

01-11-21

”DRUMPFJUGEND” 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️🆘— The Whitewashing Of US History By Trump & The Radical Right — “1776 commission sure sounds better than ‘Trump Youth,’ but it’s functionally no different than what Hitler did to brainwash a generation into accepting the Holocaust.” — Bess Levin Reports!

Hitlerjugend
Hitlerjugend
Public Realm

Scenes from “The Beautiful Vision” of U.S. racial history:

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873, Public Realm

Colfax

Public Realm

Slavery
“At least they weren’t asked to wear masks or socially distance; now that would have been a real crime against humanity,” says Billy the Bigot.
Public realm

 

From The Levin Report by Bess Levin:

. . . .
At this point, there are thousands of examples underscoring the need to remove the president from society, but the most recent is his unhinged response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which he wants abolished in schools and replaced with a revisionist history of America that teaches children how white people have only ever had their Black peers’ best interest at heart, including when said white people literally owned slaves.

Speaking at the National Archives Museum on Thursday, Trump announced that he would be signing an executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to promote a “patriotic education.” Apparently attempting to reach his white nationalist supporters, Trump said that the left is “attempting to destroy [the] beautiful vision” that the founding fathers had for America, and that things like the 1619 Project, which teach children about systemic racism and reframe the country’s history by examining the consequences of slavery, are “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison” that “if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together” and “will destroy our country.” Then he claimed liberals want to tear down Mount Rushmore . . . .

 

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

Read the rest of the article and the full Levin Report here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/bess-levin

Trump’s view of America is unrelentingly bogus. racist, unethical, and unpatriotic! This is “Dred Scottification” in action. And, we must never forget the disgraceful failure of Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supremes’ majority to take a strong stand against the very overt White Nationalist racism of Trump, Miller, and the GOP. They are indeed promoters of “Dred Scottification,” racial divisiveness, inequality, and the breakdown of the rule of law and ethical and moral norms that should guide 21st Century  governance.

American democracy is indeed “on the ropes.” But, we still have a chance to save our republic this Fall. Don’t blow it!

This Fall, vote like your life and the future existence of our nation depend on it.  Because they do!

PWS

09-18-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻POLITICS: Without Ideas, Achievements, Or Humanity, GOP Turns To Trump’s Platform Of Hate! — FAIR Deserves Its “Hate Group” Designation By SPLC!

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

Former Klan leader David Duke once famously urged his fellow Klansmen to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms” if they hoped to accomplish their goals.

The message was clear: A hate group with a mainstream veneer can get much further than a hate group that looks like one. It’s a lesson the radical right seems to have heeded as more hate groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center present a mainstream face to the public as they peddle academic racism, white nationalist immigration policy or other beliefs that are every bit as corrosive to our nation as the beliefs spouted by someone in Klan or neo-Nazi garb.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is one such hate group masquerading as a public policy think tank. Inspired by a recent resolution by the Republican National Committee that was aimed at giving the Trump administration cover for its racist and bigoted policies, FAIR decided to attack the SPLC’s hate group designations, claiming the SPLC is the “godfather” of “cancel culture” and is willing to attack any group that is not “woke” enough.

These allegations are nothing more than the latest fearmongering dog whistles that have been used by white supremacists to silence organizations and people – particularly people of color – when they speak out against injustice.

FAIR maintains that it “advocates mainstream immigration policy views.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the group has long advocated upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law that ended a decades-long, racist quota system limiting immigration mostly to northern Europeans. In 1994, FAIR President Dan Stein said supporters of the act wanted to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” In 2011, FAIR launched an effort to end birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment, which is how most Americans become citizens.

Kris Kobach, who worked for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Known as the “papers, please” law, the anti-immigrant law forced police officers to detain people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants and made it a misdemeanor for noncitizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers.

Kobach also helped other states and communities across the country enact nativist laws designed to punish those who aid and abet “illegal aliens.” Those laws often proved to be massive financial burdens to the governments that passed them and, in many cases, sparked racial strife.

FAIR’s demonization of immigrants was laid bare in April 1999 when the group attacked then-U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, a Michigan Republican, for supporting more visas for foreign workers with technology skills. A FAIR newspaper ad placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab American, alongside a photo of Osama bin Laden and asked, “Why is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easy for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?”

What’s more, Donald A. Collins Sr., a member of FAIR’s advisory board and board emeritus, has written for VDARE, an anti-immigrant hate site that has a long history of publishing the works of white nationalists and antisemites. The site is named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. Joe Guzzardi, a FAIR advisory board member, has worked as a VDARE editor.

Read more here.

In solidarity,

The Southern Poverty Law Center

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

It’s not “rocket science” to figure out FAIR isn’t a “woke” group. Nor is it rocket science to acknowledge that Kris Kobach, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions and others like them are White Nationalist racists!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-05-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️WELCOME TO COLFAX, LA: DEADLY WHITE SUPREMACY DEEPLY ROOTED IN U.S. LEGAL HISTORY: “The Colfax Massacre” Lives On In Roberts’ Court’s Willingness To Sacrifice Constitutional, Statutory, & Human Rights Of People Of Color To The Trump/Miller Nakedly White Supremacist & Clearly Illegal Agenda!

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/black-lives-civil-rights.html?referringSource=articleShare

From The NY Times:

By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer

The authors are writers.

  • Aug. 28, 2020

. . . .

In March 1876, Bradley and his fellow Supreme Court justices decreed that he was correct in rescinding the convictions of William Cruikshank and the other white defendants, ruling that although the 14th Amendment gave the federal government authority to act against violations of civil rights by state governments, it did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. Furthermore, the court ludicrously declared, the prosecution failed to show that crimes against the murdered Black men were committed “on account of their race or color.” All 98 defendants escaped accountability, emboldening white supremacists across the land.

The Cruikshank decision reinforced a grotesque judicial precedent that severely limited the power of the federal government to prosecute violent crimes against the formerly enslaved. Given free rein by the Supreme Court, white supremacists continued their coordinated campaign of terror against Black people, hastening the demise of Reconstruction. By 1877, every Southern state had been “redeemed,” and they would remain under the control of their white redeemers for decades.

By eviscerating crucial protections of the 14th Amendment, the Cruikshank ruling ensured that the most basic constitutional rights of Black citizens would be denied well into the 20th century. The crabbed, inhumane logic of Cruikshank provided legal cover that allowed systemic racism to flourish and denied civil rights to millions of Americans, perpetuating what John Lewis called a “soul-wrenching, existential struggle.”

A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo., Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought.

William Briggs is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of “How America Got Its Guns: A History of Gun Violence in America.” Jon Krakauer is the author of numerous books, including “Into Thin Air” and “Missoula.”

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

Read the full article at the link. 

I’ve previously highlighted the Colfax Easter Massacre and the  Supremes’ disgusting historical ties to racism, White Supremacy, and the suppression and murder of people of color on Courtside! 

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/04/16/history-lest-we-forget-the-u-s-justice-system-the-supreme-court-have-sometimes-been-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-justice-remembering-the-easter-sunday-massacre-in-colfax-la-the-racist-su/

It’s an ugly and disturbing story. But, the worst part is that the ugliness is being repeated in the bogus, White Supremacist friendly jurisprudence of the Roberts’ Court’s GOP majority!

Great deference is given to the illegal and overtly racist schemes of Trump, Miller and their cronies. By contrast, short shrift is given to the voting rights of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The rights and lives of asylum seekers and other migrants are treated as beyond the realm of humanity. Who cares what abuses the scofflaw regime heaps on them. After all, they aren’t really “persons” entitled to exist. 

Pulling out a few toenails? Hey, A-OK with the JR Five just as long as it’s not their toenails and their exalted positions protect them from having to hear the screams of the tormented or get blood and gore all over their pristine black robes!🤮⚰️☠️👎🏻

It’s called “Dred Scottification” or “dehumanization of the other.” It has no place in 21st Century America. And, neither do the public officials and complicit Justices and judges who enable rampant racism and inhumanity. The “JR Five” would have felt right at home on the “Cruikshank Court.” They are masters at finding disingenuous legal gobbledygook to avoid protecting the rights and lives of people of color from invidiously Executive tyranny and abuse!

Had enough? If we want equal justice under law in America, we must start by taking back control of our nation at the ballot box. Get enough voters and even the Trump regime and the GOP Supremes won’t be able to suppress the results and keep the majority from exercising political power.

This November, vote like your life, our nation, and the world’s future depend on it! Because they do! And, this may be our last chance to save our sinking Ship of State!

PWS

08-30-20

WE MUST DEFEAT THE “END OF AMERICA” CAMPAIGN: Lacking Constructive Ideas, Positive Achievements, or Human Values, Trump Makes Hate, Racism, & Lies His Message — It’s Joe Biden’s Time to Shine!

Me

WE MUST DEFEAT THE “END OF AMERICA” CAMPAIGN: Lacking Constructive Ideas, Positive Achievements, or Human Values, Trump Makes Hate, Racism, & Lies His Message — It’s Joe Biden’s Time to Shine!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

July 5, 2020

Upon hearing Donald Trump declare his candidacy for President, I turned to my wife Cathy and said “The guy is totally without values and redeeming qualities.” While I didn’t get the outcome of the election right, I nailed the Trump kakistocracy. If anything, it’s been much worse than my bleak outlook. 

Who would have thought that our un-President would dance on the graves of 130,000 dead Americans while urging his followers to “drink the Kool-Aid?” Who would have believed that our supposed leader would urge the maximum spread of deadly disease, intentionally overload an already stressed healthcare system, while looking to insure thousands of unnecessary deaths and disabilities by maliciously seeking to ax health insurance for some of America’s most vulnerable? With a “Jim Jones style” false leader like this, who needs enemies?

But, speaking of “enemies,” why not suck up to Putin while turning against long-time allies like the EU, Canada, and Mexico? Why not give the PRC an opening to subsume Hong Kong, while increasing its influence in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean as U.S. foreign policy crumbles?

Worldwide pandemic — embrace it. Climate change — deny it. Inevitable increase in worldwide migration driven by the preceding — build walls and prisons. High unemployment — end the Federal supplement. Failing bridges and unsafe highways — who cares. Falling revenues — cut taxes for the rich and services for the poor. Institutional racism — double down and glorify past racists. Voting rights — suppress them. Police brutality — enable it. Free speech —punish it. Environmental degradation — deregulate. Truth — be damned. Human decency — mock it. Justice — only for some. Reports of bounties on American soldiers — look the other way. Hate crimes — encourage them. Trump’s “malicious incompetence,” cruelty, corruption, and downright stupidity is endless and on public display every day.

Now, with no message of hope, healing, improvement, or a better future for all Americans and the world, Trump spews and babbles the only things he actually stands for (other than his own self-aggrandizement): hate and racism. Is this “Know Nothing/KKK Redux” really the message on which the GOP seeks to govern in 21st Century America? Outrageously, the answer clearly is “yes,” even if the Tim Scotts, Clarence Thomases, Herman Cains, and Ben Carsons of the world feign ignorance or believe that their privileged positions will save them, if not their souls.

For the rest of us, the time has come to rise up and throw the imposter out. Joe Biden might not be the “perfect candidate.” Has there ever been such a thing? As humans, we all have our warts and past mistakes. But, unlike Trump, Biden has a message and a plan for healing America, correcting long-standing injustices, and moving forward.

Biden’s July 4 message emphasized the positives that will make a better future for all in America, regardless of race, religion, status, or economic power:

  • Enhancing voting rights and maximizing participation in elections;
  • Safeguarding elections from Putin and other corrupt foreign governments leaders;
  • Reversing inhumane and counterproductive asylum, visa, “baby jails,” and family separation policies; 
  • Reaffirming our identity as a proud nation of immigrants; 
  • Protecting and enhancing judicial independence; 
  • Honoring freedom of the press and independent journalism; 
  • Rooting out institutionalized racism from every part of society where it is now embedded;
  • Leading the world to better times by example, encouragement, and mutual assistance, rather than constantly issuing threats, reacting with childish petulance to every perceived slight, and spewing the ugly, disproven gospel of selfish nationalism, that has nearly destroyed our world in the past, as the vision of the future.

Joe Biden is an accomplished public servant, capable leader, decent human being, and advocate for true American values. He will restore our humanity, reinvigorate our democratic institutions, bring Americans of goodwill together, rebuild our economy, protect our health, care about our environment, address racism and inequality, maximize everyone’s human potential, and reestablish our international political, economic, and moral leadership. 

This is our chance to join together to retake our Government from the forces of darkness and hate and to finally achieve that which our Constitution has demanded for the last century: Equal justice for all. This November, vote like your life, the life of every American, and the future of our world depend on it. Because they do!

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻AMERICAN INJUSTICE: A COURT SUPREMELY WRONG FOR OUR TIME: Justices Who Oppose Equal Justice For All, View Refugees & Asylum Seekers As Subhuman, Are Incapable Of Consistent Moral Leadership, & Willingly Participate In & Hollowly Attempt To Justify The Bullying Of “The Other” Are Fueling America’s Race To The Bottom Under Trump! — “They believe these people do not deserve an iota of sympathy, let alone due process. That is already how many border agents viewed these immigrants: not as humans with rights, but as fraudulent parasites. The Supreme Court has now transformed that vision into law—and, in the process, allowed the executive to send more persecuted people to their deaths without even a meaningful day in court.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/supreme-court-asylum-deportations-thuraissigiam.html

From Slate:

JURISPRUDENCE

The Supreme Court Doesn’t See Asylum-Seekers as People — One week after saving DACA, the high court proved that its sympathies for immigrants seeking better lives are limited.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK and MARK JOSEPH STERN

JUNE 25, 20203:35 PM

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court saved more than 700,000 immigrants from the Trump administration’s nativist buzz saw. The court ensured that these immigrants, who were brought to the United States by their undocumented parents as children, would continue to be protected by an Obama administration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, sparing them from deportation to countries many could not even remember. The court split 5–4, with Chief Justice John Roberts throwing his lot in with the liberals to find that Donald Trump’s rescission of DACA had been unlawful—largely because it had been carelessly effectuated, defended pretextually, but also because hundreds of thousands of young people had altered their lives in reliance on the promise that they would be immune from deportation.

In a key section of the majority opinion, Roberts highlighted the humanity of these young undocumented people, as was the hopes and dreams of their families: “Since 2012, DACA recipients have enrolled in degree programs, embarked on careers, started businesses, purchased homes, and even married and had children, all in reliance” on DACA, Roberts wrote, quoting from briefs in the case. “The consequences of the rescission … would ‘radiate outward’ to DACA recipients’ families, including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children, to the schools where DACA recipients study and teach, and to the employers who have invested time and money in training them.” The chief justice evinced frustration that the Trump administration seemingly took none of those very human interests into account.

One week later, on Thursday morning, the high court proved that its sympathies for immigrants seeking better lives are limited. In a 7–2 ruling, the justices approved the Trump administration’s draconian interpretation of a federal law that limits courts’ ability to review deportation orders. This time around, the court did not note immigrants’ contributions to the nation or acknowledge their humanity in any way. Having last week treated one class of immigrants like actual people, the court on Thursday pivoted back to callous cruelty. All of the chief justice’s kind words about DACA recipients seemingly do not apply to immigrants who—according to the executive branch—do not deserve asylum.

Thursday’s case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, involves an asylum-seeker from Sri Lanka named Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam who faces likely death if he is deported because he is Tamil. Thuraissigiam was apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol while trying to cross at the southern border in 2017. After an asylum officer and immigration judge rejected his claims, Thuraissigiam was slated for “expedited removal.” Federal law bars courts from reviewing that deportation order. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional as applied to Thuraissigiam under the Constitution’s suspension clause, which limits the government’s ability to restrict habeas corpus—the centuries-old right to contest detention before a judge.

At the Trump administration’s request, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit, with Justice Samuel Alito writing a maximalist majority opinion for the five conservatives and Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg proffering a narrower concurrence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a lengthy, vivid dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan that accused the majority of flouting more than a century of precedent and “purg[ing] an entire class of legal challenges to executive detention.” (In his own opinion, Alito dismissed Sotomayor’s criticisms as mere “rhetoric.”)

This outcome strips due process from immigrants seeking asylum, who now have even fewer rights to a fair adjudicatory process under an expedited system that already afforded them minimal protections. It will also embolden the Trump administration to speed up deportations for thousands of people with no judicial oversight. Under this now court-approved system, immigrants fleeing their home country must undergo a “credible fear” interview, at which they must explain to a federal officer why they qualify for asylum. (The Trump administration has allowed Customs and Border Protection agents—not trained asylum officers—to conduct credible fear interviews.) If the officer finds no “credible fear of persecution,” their supervisor reviews the determination, as does an immigration judge (who is not a traditional judge but rather an employee of the executive branch appointed by the attorney general). If these individuals find no credible fear, the immigrant is thrown into “expedited removal”—that is, swiftly deported in a matter of weeks. They may not contest the government’s “credible fear” determination before a federal court. It is this extreme rule that Thuraissigiam challenged as a violation of habeas corpus and due process.

Alito breezily dismissed Thuraissigiam’s individual claims by stripping a broad swath of constitutional rights from unauthorized immigrants. First, he declared that habeas corpus does not protect an immigrant’s ability to fight illegal deportation orders. Sotomayor fiercely contested this claim, citing an “entrenched line of cases” demonstrating that habeas has long protected the right of individuals—including immigrants—to challenge illegal executive actions in court. Second, Alito held that unauthorized immigrants who are already physically present in the United States have not actually “entered the country.” Thus, they have no due process right to challenge the government’s asylum determination. Sotomayor noted that this holding departs from more than a century of precedent by imposing distinctions drawn by modern immigration laws on the ancient guarantee of due process.

Alito not only waved away these galling consequences; he seemed to laugh at them.

The upshot of the decision will mean almost certain death for Thuraissigiam and others like him. Thuraissigiam faced brutal persecution in Sri Lanka, a fact Alito did not seem to understand at oral arguments. Various officials in the executive branch shrugged off that persecution. Thuraissigiam just wants an opportunity to prove to a federal judge that these officials violated the law by denying his asylum claim. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, he cannot. Nor can the many immigrants thrown into expedited removal by the Trump administration, which has used the process as a tool to speed up deportations across the country. Just two days ago, a federal appeals court cleared the way for the government to expand expedited removal beyond immigrants intercepted near the border to those apprehended anywhere in the nation. The administration has shown little interest in carefully considering whom it’s deporting; now many of those decisions will be rubber-stamped by executive officers and left unscrutinized by the federal judiciary.

Alito not only waved away these galling consequences; he seemed to laugh at them. Not for a moment does he appear to believe that asylum-seekers may be genuinely in fear for their lives. Among the many bon mots dropped by Alito in his opinion, he wrote: “While [Thuraissigiam] does not claim an entitlement to release, the Government is happy to release him—provided the release occurs in the cabin of a plane bound for Sri Lanka.” Given that Thuraissigiam claims he will likely be tortured to death if he is sent back to Sri Lanka, it’s not clear that line means what he thinks it does. Throughout the opinion Alito refers to Thuraissigiam as either “alien” or “respondent” and appears simply incapable of imagining that his claims are truthful.

RECENTLY IN JURISPRUDENCE

It’s easy to miss the massive erosion of asylum-seekers’ rights in the victory last week around the triumph of DACA. But in some ways, it’s the most American outcome in the world to view DACA beneficiaries as more human because they have gone to school here and birthed children here, while scoffing at asylum-seekers, who, as part of a lengthy tradition under both constitutional and international law, simply ask the U.S. government to save their lives. Roberts, who seemed so attuned to the hardships of DACA recipients, joined Alito’s merciless opinion in full; in fact, the chief justice assigned the opinion to Alito, who has become the court’s staunchest crusader against immigrants’ rights.

The court’s split shows that a majority of justices think immigrants like Thuraissigiam are not the productive young people of the DACA case, with financial and familial ties to all that makes America great, but rather faceless masses cynically manipulating America’s generous asylum policy and overwhelming its immigration system. They believe these people do not deserve an iota of sympathy, let alone due process. That is already how many border agents viewed these immigrants: not as humans with rights, but as fraudulent parasites. The Supreme Court has now transformed that vision into law—and, in the process, allowed the executive to send more persecuted people to their deaths without even a meaningful day in court.

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Imposing death sentences without fair hearings, or indeed any real hearings at all, is bad stuff. And, Justices who justify this behavior should not be on the bench at all.

Sadly, that applies just as much to the two so-called “liberal icons” who voted with Alito and four other sneering colleagues who seemed to actually glory in being able to dehumanize another soul with the audacity to fight for his life. Frankly, this stuff is right out of the Third Reich. Read a few of the German Judiciary’s opinions of the time and see how quickly, easily, naturally, and often happily Reich jurists “justified the unjustifiable and the unthinkable.”  I have no doubt that Sam Alito and some of his colleagues would have fit right in. How has American Justice gotten to this incredible “low point.”

I don’t know exactly what we can do about life-tenured judges who are unqualified for their jobs. Life tenure is there for a reason — to insure judicial independence overall, even in particular instances like this where it clearly does no such thing. And, with 200+ largely unqualified Trump appointees now on the Federal Bench, essentially “young deadwood,” the problem will get worse before it gets better.

The first step is to replace Trump and oust the GOP from the Senate. Then, methodically appoint only judges committed to equal justice for all, willing to stand up against abuses of justice by both the Executive and the Congress, and whose life experiences and legal work show an unswerving commitment to human rights and the rights of migrants to be treated as persons (fellow humans) under law.

It’s a national disgrace that with immigration and human rights the major issues clogging today’s Federal Courts, few, if any, Federal Judges have any experience representing asylum seekers in the Star Chambers known as “Immigration Courts” nor have they personally experienced the type of dehumanization, racism, torture, grotesque abuses, and unnecessary cruelty that they so unnecessarily, uncourageously, and glibly inflict on migrants and asylum seekers who indeed are the most vulnerable among us. If immigration and human rights are the pivotal issues of American justice, then we need to get Justices and judges on the bench who understand what they are doing and the dire human consequences of their actions (or inactions). 

The situation of today’s asylum seekers of color is not much different from that of others Americans of color whose legal and Constitutional rights were denied, and whose humanity was intentionally degraded, by a corrupt judiciary and a legal system that intentionally failed to make Constitutonal equal justice for all a reality rather than a cruel fiction .

A nation that doesn’t demand better judges will never rise above its own mistakes and failures. And a Federal Judiciary that so obviously and intentionally lacks diversity and humanity can never properly serve the national interest. 

Ditch the clueless, largely white, male “dudocracy” with their Ivy League degrees and not much else to offer. Appoint judges schooled in real life, who know what the law means in human terms and will use it to solve, rather than aggravate, inflame, or avoid, human problems! There are tons of such lawyers out there. We all know them. We need them to move from the “bullpen” to the Federal Benches, before it’s too late for everyone in America!

Folks, what we have here is “judicially-approved murder without trial.” It could also be called “extrajudicial killing.” Ugly, but brutally true! “The upshot of the decision will mean almost certain death for Thuraissigiam and others like him.” We should understand what’s happening, even if seven disingenuous and unqualified members of our highest court claim not to know or care what they are doing and refuse to acknowledge the real life consequences of their deep, dark, and disturbing intellectual corruption and their studied lack of human compassion, empathy, and decency.

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out! It’s a Start On A Better Court, For America & For Humanity!

PWS

06-28-20

COURTSIDE HISTORY: ANNIKA NEKLASON @ THE ATLANTIC: How White Supremacist Conspiracy Theories Fueled The Civil War & Continue To Divide & Endanger America!🏴‍☠️☠️

Annika Neklason
Annika Neklason
Assistant Editor
The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/conspiracy-theories-civil-war/612283/

The Conspiracy Theories That Fueled the Civil War

The most powerful people and institutions in the South spread paranoia and fear to protect slavery. Their beliefs led the country to war—and continue to haunt our politics to this day.

Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.May 29, 2020

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Photo-illustration by Damon Davis

In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country” and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.” Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts and then allow the South to burn, rather than stepping in to quell resistance. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending “emissaries” to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.” Georgia’s insisted that the “avowed purpose” of Republican leaders was to “subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.”

These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.

The lies might not have spread so far or engendered so much violence if not for the real threat, and the real fear, that they tapped into. There was no great sectional war planned to root out slavery in the South, no plot among Lincoln’s allies to execute a mass murder of slaveholders and their families. But there were slave revolts. And those slave revolts could become deadly. In the Caribbean, a series of mass rebellions broke out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most successful of these, the Haitian Revolution, forged a new free state out of a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands of Europeans and white colonists, along with more than 100,000 slaves and freedmen. In the United States, where slaves remained a minority of southern state populations, violent uprisings were more limited, but still occurred: Individual slaves lashed out; groups of fugitives fought off slave catchers; and, every so often, an organized rebellion was planned.

These uprisings contradicted the narratives that southern slaveholders had constructed. In their telling, slaves were well cared for and content, provided with a better life than they could ever build for themselves in freedom—a life that would give them no good reason to turn on their owners.

To square this defense of slavery with the threat of resistance, southern slaveowners “over time shifted toward a more conspiratorial view,” Matthew J. Clavin, an American- and Atlantic-history professor at the University of Houston, told me. “Slaveowners blamed outsiders. Or they blamed free black people. Or they blamed foreign emissaries from London [for] trying to incite their slaves to rebel.”

Writing in The Atlantic in 1861 about the free black man Denmark Vesey’s thwarted plans to lead an uprising in Charleston, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the first official report on the revolt considered a range of possible motivations for the rebels—including “Congressional eloquence,” “a Church squabble,” and “mistaken indulgences”—but not that slavery itself might be to blame. “It never seems to occur to any of these spectators,” Higginson observed, “that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.”

Abolitionists were a favorite boogeyman in slaveholders’ stories. Antislavery pamphlets and speeches were also cited in reports about Vesey’s plans as a “means for inflaming the minds of the colored population” and instigating rebellion.

Such accusations were common in the first half of the 19th century, Clavin noted. “There would be episodes of a slave burning a slave owner’s house to the ground or slitting an overseer’s throat,” he said. “And there would be a wealthy abolitionist from New York City who would give a speech, and the speech didn’t incite violence, didn’t encourage anyone to run away, but six months later, southerners would be blaming that northern orator for causing the slave disturbance. It really [was] just an unbelievable ignorance of the facts used to create a community-wide response that was anti-abolitionist.”

John Brown’s attempt to start a mass slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859 seemed to confirm these sentiments. Brown was like a character straight out of a conspiracy theory: a white abolitionist who intended to arm slaves and turn them against their owners with the backing of a secretive network of antislavery supporters in New England (one of whom laid out the conspiracy in detail in The Atlantic years later).

For southerners, the John Brown rebellion “lent credence to that conspiratorial thinking that The abolitionists are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts,” Clavin said. But Brown’s raid was, in reality, “an absolute anomaly. Very few, if any, abolitionists, black or white, were literally willing to start a slave insurrection themselves.”

And slaveholders knew it. “They overstated the threat from abolitionists,” Clavin said. “They did that on purpose, because it served their intellectual needs”—allowing them to unite the South against a common enemy and to defend the narrative that slaves were docile and content.

At the same time, slaveholders worked to further unite the white South in fear of rebellion by circulating the “diametrically opposed image” of enslaved people as innately violent and dangerous, Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. The revolutionaries in Haiti, for example, were portrayed not as “freedom fighters, but as barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake,” she said.

The abolitionist John Weiss detailed how the revolution was transformed into a scary story for southerners—commonly called “the Horrors of San Domingo”—in an 1862 article for The Atlantic. “The Haytian bugbear” had been wielded by pro-slavery forces “to render anti-slavery sentiment odious” and “to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity” of emancipation, he wrote.

The specter of mass uprising spread “both in public and private narratives,” Sinha said. Southerners grew to fear that “at the moment of emancipation” slaves “were going to wage a huge Haitian Revolution–like rebellion that would kill all whites and establish ‘black supremacy,’” or that they “were just going to rise up, rape all white women, and that would be the end of whiteness.”

These conspiracy theories made an existential threat out of emancipation, and insidious enemies out of northern antislavery forces. Eventually, they became so powerful that southern leaders decided to break from the Union and launch the Civil War. Their racist defenses of slavery could not admit the possibility of a peaceable emancipation such as the one that Lincoln and northern abolitionists actually sought. So after decades of preaching that abolition would mean sweeping violence, southern leaders brought that violence on themselves—and hastened the end of slavery in the process.

Slavery was, however, survived by the racist fears intended to protect it. Sinha traced their legacy through generations of murder, incarceration, and exclusion, from the “regime of racial terror” in the postwar South to the restrictive immigration laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the way up to the “authoritarian mindsets, conspiratorial ways of thinking, and demonization of the other” that continue to pervade American politics in the present day. The belief in abolitionist terror and black violence that southern slaveholders had constructed, she explained, made the prospect of “a republic of equal citizens” feel like an existential threat not only to the culture of white supremacy but to all the white people who lived in it. The groups of people embodying the threat have changed and expanded over time: from slaves to Asian immigrants to civil-rights activists to Muslim Americans. But the fear has never entirely gone away. Through the lens of that fear, racist violence, such as that practiced by the Ku Klux Klan, and laws, such as voting restrictions or Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” have been reframed as protective measures. Conspiratorial vigilance and authoritarianism become shields against an imagined revolution.

. . . . 

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Read the rest of Annika’s article at the link.

Clearly, Donald Trump did not originate the concept of “fake news,” nor did he invent internet conspiracy theories. But, he, his cronies, and his enablers have become experts in exploiting it for their own selfish purposes: From the absurdist, yet dangerous and divisive, “birtherism” to today’s disingenuous attempts to shift blame for the racism that has spawned disorder throughout our nation.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-31-20

COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: “The values preached by Martin Luther King Jr. need rediscovering in 2020” — “Knowing right from wrong; honesty; justice. Basic values preached by Martin Luther King Jr. still need rediscovering in 2020.”

Colbert I. King
Colbert I. King
Columnist
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-values-preached-by-martin-luther-king-jr-need-rediscovering-in-2020/2020/01/17/8225eeb8-3896-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html

By

Colbert I. King

Columnist

Jan. 17, 2020 at 2:47 p.m. EST

It was a 25-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is celebrated on Monday, who stood in the pulpit of Detroit’s Second Baptist Church on Feb. 28, 1954. The Montgomery bus boycott, which would launch the future leader of the American civil rights movement to national prominence, was nearly two years away.

King roused the Second Baptist congregation that Sunday morning with a sermon that did not once mention race. Discrimination, segregation, protest demonstrations — these were not on his agenda. The young preacher went deeper, if such a thing was possible during an era of racial turmoil.

King got the congregation thinking about values, a subject as relevant today as it was in 1954.

King talked about lost values and the need for rediscovering them.

Listen to the Voices of the Movement podcast: Stories from civil rights leaders who changed America

Something seemed fundamentally wrong in society, he preached. And it wasn’t because society didn’t know enough. Scientific progress was amazing. King said in 18th-century America, it took three days for a letter to go from New York City to Washington; in 1954, a person could go from Detroit to China in less time.

It’s even more astonishing today. Breakfast can be had in Washington, teatime enjoyed in London and a nightcap swallowed in New York City — all in the same day.

The trouble, he said, was not that we don’t know enough but that “we aren’t good enough.” Scientific genius, he said, has outpaced “our moral genius.” The greater danger facing the country in ’54, King noted, was not “the atomic bomb that was created by physical science” that could be dropped on the heads of thousands of people, but “that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness.”

That thought calls to mind the more than three dozen countries in the world with unmanned, missile-armed drones capable of being launched from afar under remote control and striking and killing with precision. Think about what lies within the hearts and souls of leaders in countries such as North Korea, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey and, yes, the United States.

King called attention to shaky moral foundations and the “relativistic ethic” that was being applied to right and wrong. He described it as an ethic that says “since everybody is doing it, it must be right” — an ethic that means “people can’t stand up for their . . . convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it.” He said it’s “a sort of numerical interpretation of what’s right.”

King’s teaching got me to thinking about the 53 Senate Republicans who know that some things are right and some things are wrong, but adjust their attitudes relative to the behavior of President Trump.

King said he was at Second Baptist to say that some things are right and wrong, eternally and absolutely. “It’s wrong to hate,” he declared. “It has always been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong!”

That got me thinking about White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. How can a person who pushes white nationalism, invokes a 1924 American immigration law extolled by Adolf Hitler, is bigoted and racially intolerant — how can he end up in the White House?

Then I stopped to think about who put Miller where he is — President Trump. The same President Trump who recently retweeted to his 71 million followers a doctored photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wearing a hijab and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) with a turban on his head in front of an Iranian flag with a caption reading, “the corrupted Dems trying their best to come to the Ayatollah’s rescue.” Why wouldn’t an insulter of Islam and Muslims, who also inflicts cruelty at our southern border, want to have the likes of Stephen Miller at his side?

King’s sermon derided what he regarded as a pragmatic test applied to right and wrong: “If it works, it’s all right. Nothing is wrong but that which does not work. If you don’t get caught, it’s right.”

=Which made me think of Trump using the powers of his office to solicit a foreign government to help take down a domestic political opponent, lying about his successes and taking credit for things he didn’t do — all because it works. And his adoring believers eat it up.

King reminded the Second Baptist worshipers that “it’s possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life.”

Which makes me visualize Trump basking at evangelical rallies and paying lip service to God, while paying actual service to himself.

Knowing right from wrong; honesty; justice. Basic values preached by Martin Luther King Jr. still need rediscovering in 2020.

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Amen!

PWS

01-20-20