Friday, September 22, 2017 1:32:53 PM
The First White President
[ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2017/10/ ]
Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.
Listen to the audio version of this article:
https://soundcloud.com/user-154380542/the-first-white-president-the-atlantic-ta-nehisi-coates [embedded]
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
October 2017 Issue [online early September 7, 2017]
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt ] The New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.”
“The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged [ http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/29/anthony-bourdain ] the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”
That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.
The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. According to preelection polling, if you tallied only white voters, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81 in the Electoral College.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.
Video: “It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiH3YcvRH0 [as embedded; with comments]
The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”
Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.
And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”—even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.
This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.
On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:
I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.
Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”
Invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. “If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “it is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”
Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt” and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.
The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “working class” and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”
The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.
When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.
But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.
That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:
Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.
Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to—black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising-tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting “tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the “super-predator” theory of William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. This theory cast “inner-city” children of that era as “almost completely unmoralized” and the font of “a new generation of street criminals … the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” The “baddest generation” did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound consciousness to be lacking.
It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.
Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.
Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:
“They’re all the people I grew up with … And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist.”
Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:
“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”
Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:
My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.
These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship with white men. “You can’t eat equality,” asserts Joe Biden—a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to “the people” where he “came from,” he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.
The KKK and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have approved of. “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders explained. “And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people.”
This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots—even when their bigotry was evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof ’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed: “Obama phones,” the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.
Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.
Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html ],” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s New Yorker essay [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt ] “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.' ” Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.
That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.
Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia—a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true—the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people—black, Muslim, immigrant—who live under racism’s boot.
The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?
But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola—no way,” he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.
The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.
When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-term president.” A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump’s genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged in January 2016. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.
It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.
This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power [ https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0399590560 ].
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Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/537921/
My President Was Black
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/
The Case for Reparations
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Copyright (c) 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following]
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Full Show - Soros Makes Hurricanes A Globalist Tool - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Real News with David Knight [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g/videos ]
Full broadcast 7Sep17 Real News with David Knight
GUESTS:
• Lionel - DACA: a complete rejection of rule of law
• Millie Weaver: natural causes of hurricane cycles
TOPICS:
• Trump snubs GOP leaders to work with Dems on debt ceiling & hurricane relief
• Soros funds effort to name & shame TV weathermen who deny global warming (27% think it's a sham) and funds "Climate Matters" to reward those who push climate alarmism
• Weather study tells us that people fear "male" hurricanes more, but "female" hurricanes kill more people
[The thirteenth episode of a new show from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX3P8CX0o9k [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXj_b2_PRII (with comments)]
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Vicente Fox is Running for President of the United States
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Super Deluxe [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJLx_Dy_icz3oDHhJeMe9g , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJLx_Dy_icz3oDHhJeMe9g/videos ]
Vicente Fox is the president America needs.
Get your own exclusive Vicente 2020 hat here:
https://store.superdeluxe.com/collections/vicente2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukv9v7IGZw [with (approaching 5,000) comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134678765 and preceding and following]
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WATCH LIVE: Education Sec. DeVos to speak on Title IX guidelines
Streamed live on Sep 7, 2017 by PBS NewsHour [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6ZFN9Tx6xh-skXCuRHCDpQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour , https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnUB-OjvJQQ [comments disabled]
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Full Show - Explosive New Revelations In Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Corruption Scandal - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Thursday, September 7th 2017[, with Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: Irma Threatens Florida Nuke Plants - A laptop Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz fought to keep prosecutors from examining may have been planted for police by her since-indicted DNC staffer, Imran Awan, and multiple nuclear plants in Florida lie in the path of Hurricane Irma. We'll speak with attorney Joni Turner about a lawsuit against fake news network CNN, and discuss the ongoing eugenics movement with author Edwin Black. Mike Cernovich will also break down Trump's surprise deal with Democrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_UbXgEzsI [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vc2n2Vv_pA (additional text adapted from; with comments)]
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President Trump Meets with Amir al-Sabah
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The White House [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYxRlFDqcWM4y7FfpiAN3KQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse , https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse/videos ]
The White House
[no official transcript (yet) at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-and-remarks , https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings , or https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-and-releases ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s70Kh9LGuMQ [with comments]
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WATCH LIVE: President Trump and Kuwaiti emir hold joint news conference
Streamed live on Sep 7, 2017 by PBS NewsHour
U.S. President Donald Trump and Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah will hold a joint news conference on Thursday.
Remarks by President Trump and Emir Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah of Kuwait in Joint Press Conference
East Room
September 07, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/07/remarks-president-trump-and-emir-sabah-al-ahmed-al-jaber-al-sabah-kuwa-0 [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLrEpLh5_j0 [comments disabled] [official White House upload at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_eHbuV0JEw (with comments)]
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Pastor Jim Bakker Feels Fear for the First Time
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Super Deluxe
Vic Berger Presents: Pastor Jim Bakker is scared for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvZr5J5y1Q [with comments]
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Trump Will Soon Be the Ex-POTUS | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by GQ [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsEukrAd64fqA7FjwkmZ_Dw / https://www.youtube.com/user/GQVideos , https://www.youtube.com/user/GQVideos/videos , https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-XWNf9VL-LxVYysdHpjyMF ]
Despite the distractions, Trump's Russia troubles are growing much worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0koTYc4zg [with cvomments]
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Full Show - Democrats Face Ultimate Justice, Wasserman Schultz IT Aide Planted Computer - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by War Room [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsn7QZVdszxLlUs-GOG0Sg , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsn7QZVdszxLlUs-GOG0Sg/videos ]
[The second episode of yet another new show from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_jEP1yghrY [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSpvQdDca2s (with comments)]
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They Came From The Alt-Left!
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Funny Or Die [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzS3-65Y91JhOxFiM7j6grg / https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie , https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie/videos ]
A new kind of evil has risen in America, one that is hell bent on the destruction of all you hold dear. Soon our streets will run rampant with Gay Marriage, Feminists, Racial Equality, and Illegal Immigrants. Beware 'Black Lives Matter', beware 'I'm With Her', beware 'Not My President', and most importantly... Beware the Alt-Left!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZzSAqpe4eE [with comments]
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Democrats, free of expectations, can make demands of Trump
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Because Democrats have no expectations of Donald Trump, says Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg, they're able to make demands of him freely. Duration: 7:36
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/democrats-free-of-expectations-can-make-demands-of-trump-1041939011593
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Sanders reacts to Clinton’s new book, Trump's deal with Dems
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reacts to Democratic leaders' deal with President Trump and responds to Hillary Clinton's criticism of him regarding the presidential race. Duration: 8:15
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bernie-sanders-reacts-to-hillary-clinton-s-new-book-1041940035597 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwiyWshR5Jo [with comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134439770 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134399853 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131376472 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131374857 and preceding and following]
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The time Mar-a-Lago got $17M for nonexistent hurricane damage
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Thing 1/Thing 2: When Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in 2005, Donald Trump claimed a $17 million insurance payday on his property - the only problem is, there's no evidence any serious damage ever occurred. Duration: 2:05
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-time-mar-a-lago-got-17m-for-nonexistent-hurricane-damage-1041940547818 [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134520412 and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134570667 and preceding and following]
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Florida nuclear plants plan shutdown ahead of Hurricane Irma
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow reports on preparations by Florida's nuclear power plants and other facilities as Hurricane Irma approaches. Duration: 3:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/florida-nuclear-plants-plan-shutdown-ahead-of-hurricane-irma-1042026051664
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New Russia contact revelations in Trump Jr Senate interview
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow looks at Donald Trump Jr.'s statement to Senate investigators about his meeting with Russians at Trump Tower and notes not only a new story, but new revelations about contacts he had with Russians. Duration: 14:50
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-russia-contact-revelations-in-trump-jr-senate-interview-1042003523630 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMWiz-9rFmo [with comments]
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Exodus of evacuees as Florida faces Hurricane Irma's onslaught
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Mayor Jack Seiler of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, talks with Rachel Maddow about the expected severity of the impact of Hurricane Irma and the effort to evacuate as many people to safety as possible. Duration: 6:53
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/exodus-of-evacuees-as-florida-faces-hurricane-irma-s-onslaught-1042009667548
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Clinton casts Putin as a 'manspreader'
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow shares exclusive audio from Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened," in which she talks about her impressions of Vladimir Putin. Clinton will appear on the Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday, 9/14. Duration: 3:54
Exclusive audio excerpt from Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened."
7 Sep 2017
https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/905968436034940928 [with embedded audio, and comments]
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/clinton-casts-putin-as-a-manspreader-1042013763602 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBCDd6LUneg [with comments]
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Russian fake social media tricks described in new report
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow shares details from a New York Times report on how developed and continues to use fake social media accounts to spread propaganda and misinformation. Duration: 4:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russian-fake-social-media-tricks-described-in-new-report-1042061891637
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Russia still honing fake social media tactics
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Lee Foster, researcher with the FireEye cyber security firm, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Russians are developing their ability to spread propaganda through fake social media accounts. Duration: 9:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russia-still-honing-fake-social-media-tactics-1042020419847
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Florida officials prep Lake Okeechobee for Hurricane Irma rain
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow reports on how Florida officials are trying to make room in Lake Okeechobee for the potential rainfall that could come with Hurricane Irma to avoid overburdening its aging dike. Duration: 1:41
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/florida-officials-prep-lake-okeechobee-for-hurricane-irma-rain-1042029123704
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Lawrence: Hurricanes show gov't is critical in times of crisis
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
Republicans have, in recent decades, attacked government and its most basic functions and even voted to cut funding for emergency services. But Lawrence O'Donnell says during disasters like Hurricanes Irma & Harvey, nothing can replace government's ability to help. Duration: 4:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-hurricanes-show-gov-t-is-critical-in-times-of-crisis-1042003523694 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-v1Ew29BVE [with comments]
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Amidst hurricane, Trump Jr. puts admin in its own crisis
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
Donald Trump Jr. faced 5 hours of questioning from Senate investigators, mostly about his infamous June 2016 meeting with Russian nationals. Mieke Eoyang and Ron Klain say this questioning is only the beginning of Trump Jr.'s troubles as the Russian probes widen. Duration: 10:54
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/amidst-hurricane-trump-jr-puts-admin-in-its-own-crisis-1042008131794 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p2UdZQZpHI [with comments]
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Nancy Pelosi dictates President Trump's tweet
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
After infuriating Republicans by siding with Democrats in debt ceiling negotiations, Donald Trump took Nancy Pelosi's advice that he should tweet a message of reassurance to "Dreamers." Jonathan Capehart and Ron Klain join Lawrence O'Donnell. Duration: 9:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/nancy-pelosi-dictates-president-trump-s-tweets-1042008643742
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Democrats want more answers from Donald Trump Jr. on Russia
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
After five hours of questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump Jr. said he trusts he's 'fully satisfied' lawmakers' questions. Democrats however say they still have questions. Duration: 10:45
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/democrats-want-more-answers-from-donald-trump-jr-on-russia-1042051651658 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of0v-nqHKS0 [with comments]
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Trump deals with 'Chuck & Nancy' before dining with Paul Ryan
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Republicans are still reeling as Donald Trump continues to make deals with Democrats. Something likely to come up at Trump's Thursday dinner with Speaker Paul Ryan. Our panel discusses. Duration: 7:36
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-deals-with-dems-chuck-nancy-before-dinng-with-paul-ryan-1042035267901
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Belcher: Trump's deal with Dems unlike anything we've ever seen
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Democratic pollster and former Obama campaign staffer Cornell Belcher discusses Donald Trump making deals with Democrats. Duration: 2:01
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/belcher-trump-s-deal-with-dems-unlike-anything-we-ve-ever-seen-1042043459576
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Fmr. GOP Rep. on why Paul Ryan should be turning to Democrats
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Fmr. Rep. Chris Shays, Republican from Connecticut, says Speaker Paul Ryan should take a page from Pres. Trump after his deal with Democrats on the debt and turn to Democrats to get more done. Duration: 0:43
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/fmr-gop-rep-on-why-paul-ryan-should-be-turning-to-democrats-1042032707930
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In rare interview Bannon says he's going to be Trump's 'wingman'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Speaking with CBS News, ousted Trump aide Steve Bannon says he will continue to work for Pres. Trump adding that they're both 'fighters.' Our panel discusses. Duration: 2:53
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/in-rare-interview-bannon-says-he-s-going-to-be-trump-s-wingman-1042042435881 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgAOzN_6pNI [with comments]
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Officials: Irma may render areas of Florida 'uninhabitable'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
The latest forecast puts Irma on a path to strike southern Florida by Sunday bringing dangerous winds and a massive storm surge. Meteorologist Bill Karins breaks it all down. Duration: 4:56
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/officials-irma-may-render-areas-of-florida-uninhabitable-1042054211576
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New York Fashion Week, Where Cultural Appropriation Never Goes Out of Style: The Daily Show
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA/videos ]
To celebrate New York Fashion Week, Dulce Sloan breaks down the problematic trend of designers appropriating African-American culture to sell clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFNpFHcQUc [with comments]
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Between the Scenes - Government Shutdowns Are Not Normal: The Daily Show
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Trevor explains how ludicrous it is that Congress has a hard time keeping the government funded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eeRj6z6xDQ [with comments]
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There's A Trump Protest For Everyone!
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig/videos ]
The most difficult part of protesting the Trump administration is figuring out which demonstration is which.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNTkOTkWoG8 [with comments]
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The Democrats Actually Won Something!
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Democrats were able to score a rare win when President Trump sided with their outline for raising the debt ceiling.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vF-aSq4igA [with comments]
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The Worst Part Of Steve Bannon's First Interview: Steve Bannon
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Steve Bannon's upcoming '60 Minutes' interview with Charlie Rose features controversial views, conspiracy theories and, worst of all, Steve Bannon.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajFmgmUSYAc [with comments]
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What Bernie Sanders Wants Hillary To Do Next
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The Vermont Senator and 'Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution' author responds to critical excerpts from Hillary Clinton's memoir.
[originally aired September 7, 2017 (U.S. central time)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv-hgegVq0k [with comments] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134439770 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134399853 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131376472 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131374857 and preceding and following]
Bernie Sanders Tries To Say Something Nice About Trump
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Hey, you can't blame the Vermont Senator for trying.
[originally aired September 7, 2017 (U.S. central time)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTIStPerVNw [with comments] [id.]
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Trump Waffles on DACA, Responds to Hurricane Irma: A Closer Look
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Late Night with Seth Meyers [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVTyTA7-g9nopHeHbeuvpRA / https://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth , https://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth/videos ]
Seth takes a closer look at how Donald Trump is exposing how unfit for the presidency he is through his handling of crises from all sides, from hurricanes to immigration reform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f4khpGnvcY [with comments]
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stashed September 7, 2017:
Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/facebook-says-it-sold-political-ads-to-russian-company-during-2016-election/2017/09/06/32f01fd2-931e-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html
Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html
New evidence emerges on how Russia attacked the U.S. election - Maddow segment 9-61 embedded
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/new-evidence-emerges-how-russia-attacked-the-us-election
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dzUY-ukFflOMmwMcWAeURjABdNyoM?ned=us&hl=en
The First White President
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
Nature's Disastrous ‘Whitewashing’ Editorial - J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century surgeon, widely considered the “father of modern gynecology - Thomas Parran Jr., for whom a hall is named at the University of Pittsburgh. Parran served as U.S. surgeon general between 1936 and 1948, during which time he oversaw the Public Health Service’s infamous Tuskegee experiment
Science's ethos of self-correction should apply to how it thinks about its own history, too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/an-unfortunate-editorial-in-nature/538998/
The Social Benefits of Swearing - for conix: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134400772
How profanity can help you seem more likable - and more
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-beloved-potty-mouth/538791/
Can Anyone Stop Burma’s Hardline Buddhist Monks? - Rohingya Muslim minority
Their anti-Muslim rhetoric poses a challenge for everyone from Aung San Suu Kyi to Pope Francis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/can-anyone-stop-burmas-hardline-buddhist-monks/538992/
How Did North Korea's Missile and Nuclear Tech Get So Good So Fast?
“They’ve been systematically underrated for years.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/north-korea-tech/538959/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3HIyrpV1IDlbEMFQwFz0V1wBuVLM?ned=us&hl=en
Trump, Schumer agree to pursue plan to repeal the debt ceiling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/07/trump-schumer-agree-to-pursue-plan-to-repeal-the-debt-ceiling/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d_wFfV8YZRXQjuMAqCUU40K32TEHM?ned=us&hl=en
Trump Jr. Says He Wanted Russian Dirt to Determine Clinton’s ‘Fitness’ for Office - sen jud interview
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/trump-russia-investigation.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/da1j-Ra3rQgB6dMRTuZK4emvUnmfM?ned=us&hl=en
Steve Bannon: Catholic Church Opposes DACA’s End Because It Needs ‘Illegal Aliens To Fill The Churches’
Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, gave his first major interview since being ousted from the White House.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-daca-immigration_us_59b13c33e4b0354e440fb247
Bannon: Catholic Church needs ‘illegal aliens to fill the churches’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09/07/bannon-catholic-church-needs-illegal-aliens-to-fill-the-churches/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3jx3S_AcUasIQMwUcDoVYzHWSJMM?ned=us&hl=en
Rodrigo Duterte’s son is accused of involvement with massive drug deal
It comes after some of the bloodiest violence yet seen in the Philippines' war on drugs.
https://thinkprogress.org/rodrigo-dutertes-son-accused-involvement-drug-deal-7b31b40cef6a/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dTjvyCWWFjUdUcMml_MNkg2b-VxOM?ned=us&hl=en
Spain to charge Catalan MPs over plans for independence vote
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-politics-catalonia/spain-to-charge-catalan-mps-over-plans-for-independence-vote-idUSKCN1BI1GQ
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d1yN8QRQtNiCJ7MdKn3s524wRXfNM?ned=us&hl=en
Bannon with Charlie Rose - 60 Minutes 9-10-17
Steve Bannon: "I'm a street fighter"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avfCush5UMI
Charlie Rose on Steve Bannon's "60 Minutes" interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODnuxBwNeAE
Steve Bannon on Trump's DACA decision, Catholic church
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpwCsYe_BZA
https://www.youtube.com/user/CBSNewsOnline/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/CBSThisMorning/videos
Bannon criticizes Catholic Church's response to Trump's plan for DACA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eUVHEeho2I
Bannon calls any Church leader who disagrees on DACA "just another guy with an opinion"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoG5zmDacFk
https://www.youtube.com/user/60minutes/videos
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charlie+rose+steve+bannon
The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=+The+Fake+Americans+Russia+Created+to+Influence+the+Election+
Exclusive: Mueller seeks interviews with WH staff over Trump Tower meeting statement
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/07/politics/mueller-trump-air-force-one-statement-russian-lawyer/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d8ynCbu7qID7_EMTJQmKMMUWR3wNM?ned=us&hl=en
DeVos announces review of Obama-era sexual assault guidance - as unfair to accused
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/07/politics/betsy-devos-education-department-title-ix/index.html
Dear Colleague Letter
OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dgqiPHOZajepmhMBFRsN5tNLmndxM?ned=us&hl=en
Three men charged in kidnapping, rape of 15-year-old Alexandria girl
The [white] men kept the girl in captivity for 29 days before she escaped, swimming across a lake. - Minnesota
http://www.startribune.com/three-men-charged-in-kidnapping-15-year-old-alexandria-girl-assualting-and-raping-her/443082573/
Missing Minnesota Teen Jasmine Block Found Safe, Three Arrested
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/missing-in-america/missing-minnesota-teen-jasmine-block-found-safe-three-arrested-n799091
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dkN4GrwnhDJ2TjMXPKtdNQdQPJl6M?ned=us&hl=en
The President’s Son Admitted To An Amateurish Attempt At Collusion. He May Have Helped Bury His Father’s Presidency In The Process
This delicate legal situation is once again due almost entirely to unnecessary and unforced errors on the part of the Trump family.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-presidents-son-admitted-to-an-amateurish-attempt_us_59b1a56ae4b0c50640cd65ce
Ethics Watchdogs Say Kris Kobach’s Compensation From Breitbart Raises Questions
“If you’re getting paid by somebody to write about your official duties, that seems to me a clear problem,” an ethics expert says.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kris-kobach-breitbart-ethics_us_59b13f04e4b0b5e531040fe2
DOJ: Admitting Existence Of A Sessions Resignation Letter Would Violate His Privacy
HuffPost had filed a FOIA request seeking a copy of the alleged resignation letter.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-resignation-letter-trump_us_59b16c35e4b0b5e531045df7
Trump DOJ To Supreme Court: Making Gay Wedding Cake Would Violate Baker’s Rights
The Justice Department said artists can’t be compelled to create against their religious beliefs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-justice-department-gay-wedding-cake_us_59b1af6fe4b0dfaafcf69ee6
Anti-Gay Crusader Who ‘Married’ His Laptop Wants Alabama To Recognize Their Union
Well, no, not really. It’s a convoluted attack on marriage equality.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chris-sevier-computer-marriage-alabama_us_59b1b18be4b0b5e53104ebd3
Florida Sheriff Threatens To Check For Warrants At Hurricane Shelters
“If you have a warrant, turn yourself in to the jail - it’s a secure shelter.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polk-county-sheriff_us_59b1868ce4b0354e4410420e
Texas Provider Will Offer Free Abortions For Women Affected By Harvey
Whole Woman’s Health has clinics in Austin, San Antonio, McAllen and Fort Worth.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/texas-provider-will-offer-free-abortions-for-women-affected-by-harvey_us_59b18d8ee4b0dfaafcf65b92
When Pregnancy Almost Kills You
Hyperemesis gravidarum is in the news thanks to Kate Middleton, but moms say people still don’t get how bad it is.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-its-really-like-when-pregnancy-almost-kills-you_us_59b023c5e4b0354e440ea8ed
Dear Secretary DeVos
I’m having a little more trouble trying to figure out why you chose to go into education.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dear-secretary-devos_us_59b1ab86e4b0bef3378cdeb7
Kid Rock Goes Off In Politically Charged Tirade At Michigan Concert
The profanity-filled speech about Nazis and Black Lives Matter was caught on video.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kid-rock-goes-off-in-politically-charged-tirade-at-michigan-concert_us_59b1abe0e4b0dfaafcf696eb
Hulk Hogan’s Lawyer Is Now Going After Jezebel, Editors
Attorney Charles J. Harder helped Hogan and Peter Thiel take down Gawker last year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hulk-hogans-lawyer-files-defamation-suit-against-jezebel-editors_us_59b1a2bfe4b0dfaafcf68522
ABC Cops Use Apps To Spot Fake IDs
Underage drinkers are going online to buy high-tech phony IDs, and some state alcohol enforcement agencies are using apps to help spot them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abc-cops-use-apps-to-spot-fake-ids_us_59b145c0e4b0d0c16bb52a5c
original http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/09/07/abc-cops-use-apps-to-spot-fake-ids
The tiny Caribbean islands ravaged by Hurricane Irma are in trouble — and begging for help
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/07/the-tiny-islands-ravaged-by-hurricane-irma-are-in-trouble-and-begging-for-help/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.55fd66381a13
These Aerial Photos Show The Destruction Left In Hurricane Irma's Wake
One of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record has killed at least 10 people across the Caribbean so far.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/franciswhittaker/irma-from-above
Hurricane Irma: Roofs blown off, houses under water in Sint-Maarten - BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ3M39GkxcM
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/duLKzADc4t1GLWM5jfKIthyBIHwZM?ned=us&hl=en
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134439770 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134399853 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131376472 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131374857 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134520412 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134570667 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134792980 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134804207 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134795179 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134801379 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134802354 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134803897 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134804433 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134805113 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134805146 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134800008 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134808887 (and any future following)
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134821893 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134827938 (and any future following)
[ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2017/10/ ]
Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.
Listen to the audio version of this article:
https://soundcloud.com/user-154380542/the-first-white-president-the-atlantic-ta-nehisi-coates [embedded]
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
October 2017 Issue [online early September 7, 2017]
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt ] The New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.”
“The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged [ http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/29/anthony-bourdain ] the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”
That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.
The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. According to preelection polling, if you tallied only white voters, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81 in the Electoral College.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.
Video: “It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness”
“The foundation of Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his feature for The Atlantic’s October 2017 issue. In this animated excerpt from a recent interview with Coates about his article, the writer explains how tribalism and white supremacy paved the way for Trump. Gallup research shows that white voters overwhelmingly supported the candidate across demographics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiH3YcvRH0 [as embedded; with comments]
The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”
Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.
And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”—even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.
This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.
On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:
I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.
Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”
Invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. “If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “it is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”
Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt” and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.
The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “working class” and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”
The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.
When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.
But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.
That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:
Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.
Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to—black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising-tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting “tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the “super-predator” theory of William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. This theory cast “inner-city” children of that era as “almost completely unmoralized” and the font of “a new generation of street criminals … the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” The “baddest generation” did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound consciousness to be lacking.
It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.
Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.
Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:
“They’re all the people I grew up with … And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist.”
Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:
“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”
Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:
My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.
These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship with white men. “You can’t eat equality,” asserts Joe Biden—a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to “the people” where he “came from,” he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.
The KKK and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have approved of. “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders explained. “And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people.”
This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots—even when their bigotry was evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof ’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed: “Obama phones,” the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.
Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.
Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html ],” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s New Yorker essay [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt ] “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.' ” Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.
That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.
Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia—a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true—the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people—black, Muslim, immigrant—who live under racism’s boot.
The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?
But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola—no way,” he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.
The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.
When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-term president.” A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump’s genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged in January 2016. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him.
(Gabriella Demczuk)
But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.
It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.
This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power [ https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0399590560 ].
Related Stories
Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/537921/
My President Was Black
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/
The Case for Reparations
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Copyright (c) 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78915505 and preceding and following]
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Full Show - Soros Makes Hurricanes A Globalist Tool - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Real News with David Knight [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC1L9FOMSaPgMyoLSnps47g/videos ]
Full broadcast 7Sep17 Real News with David Knight
GUESTS:
• Lionel - DACA: a complete rejection of rule of law
• Millie Weaver: natural causes of hurricane cycles
TOPICS:
• Trump snubs GOP leaders to work with Dems on debt ceiling & hurricane relief
• Soros funds effort to name & shame TV weathermen who deny global warming (27% think it's a sham) and funds "Climate Matters" to reward those who push climate alarmism
• Weather study tells us that people fear "male" hurricanes more, but "female" hurricanes kill more people
[The thirteenth episode of a new show from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX3P8CX0o9k [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXj_b2_PRII (with comments)]
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Vicente Fox is Running for President of the United States
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Super Deluxe [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJLx_Dy_icz3oDHhJeMe9g , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJLx_Dy_icz3oDHhJeMe9g/videos ]
Vicente Fox is the president America needs.
Get your own exclusive Vicente 2020 hat here:
https://store.superdeluxe.com/collections/vicente2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukv9v7IGZw [with (approaching 5,000) comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134678765 and preceding and following]
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WATCH LIVE: Education Sec. DeVos to speak on Title IX guidelines
Streamed live on Sep 7, 2017 by PBS NewsHour [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6ZFN9Tx6xh-skXCuRHCDpQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour , https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnUB-OjvJQQ [comments disabled]
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Full Show - Explosive New Revelations In Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Corruption Scandal - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Thursday, September 7th 2017[, with Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: Irma Threatens Florida Nuke Plants - A laptop Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz fought to keep prosecutors from examining may have been planted for police by her since-indicted DNC staffer, Imran Awan, and multiple nuclear plants in Florida lie in the path of Hurricane Irma. We'll speak with attorney Joni Turner about a lawsuit against fake news network CNN, and discuss the ongoing eugenics movement with author Edwin Black. Mike Cernovich will also break down Trump's surprise deal with Democrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_UbXgEzsI [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vc2n2Vv_pA (additional text adapted from; with comments)]
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President Trump Meets with Amir al-Sabah
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The White House [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYxRlFDqcWM4y7FfpiAN3KQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse , https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse/videos ]
The White House
[no official transcript (yet) at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-and-remarks , https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings , or https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-and-releases ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s70Kh9LGuMQ [with comments]
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WATCH LIVE: President Trump and Kuwaiti emir hold joint news conference
Streamed live on Sep 7, 2017 by PBS NewsHour
U.S. President Donald Trump and Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah will hold a joint news conference on Thursday.
Remarks by President Trump and Emir Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah of Kuwait in Joint Press Conference
East Room
September 07, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/07/remarks-president-trump-and-emir-sabah-al-ahmed-al-jaber-al-sabah-kuwa-0 [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLrEpLh5_j0 [comments disabled] [official White House upload at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_eHbuV0JEw (with comments)]
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Pastor Jim Bakker Feels Fear for the First Time
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Super Deluxe
Vic Berger Presents: Pastor Jim Bakker is scared for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvZr5J5y1Q [with comments]
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Trump Will Soon Be the Ex-POTUS | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by GQ [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsEukrAd64fqA7FjwkmZ_Dw / https://www.youtube.com/user/GQVideos , https://www.youtube.com/user/GQVideos/videos , https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-XWNf9VL-LxVYysdHpjyMF ]
Despite the distractions, Trump's Russia troubles are growing much worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0koTYc4zg [with cvomments]
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Full Show - Democrats Face Ultimate Justice, Wasserman Schultz IT Aide Planted Computer - 09/07/2017
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by War Room [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsn7QZVdszxLlUs-GOG0Sg , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsn7QZVdszxLlUs-GOG0Sg/videos ]
[The second episode of yet another new show from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_jEP1yghrY [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSpvQdDca2s (with comments)]
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They Came From The Alt-Left!
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Funny Or Die [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzS3-65Y91JhOxFiM7j6grg / https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie , https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie/videos ]
A new kind of evil has risen in America, one that is hell bent on the destruction of all you hold dear. Soon our streets will run rampant with Gay Marriage, Feminists, Racial Equality, and Illegal Immigrants. Beware 'Black Lives Matter', beware 'I'm With Her', beware 'Not My President', and most importantly... Beware the Alt-Left!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZzSAqpe4eE [with comments]
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Democrats, free of expectations, can make demands of Trump
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Because Democrats have no expectations of Donald Trump, says Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg, they're able to make demands of him freely. Duration: 7:36
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/democrats-free-of-expectations-can-make-demands-of-trump-1041939011593
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Sanders reacts to Clinton’s new book, Trump's deal with Dems
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reacts to Democratic leaders' deal with President Trump and responds to Hillary Clinton's criticism of him regarding the presidential race. Duration: 8:15
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bernie-sanders-reacts-to-hillary-clinton-s-new-book-1041940035597 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwiyWshR5Jo [with comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134439770 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134399853 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131376472 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131374857 and preceding and following]
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The time Mar-a-Lago got $17M for nonexistent hurricane damage
All In with Chris Hayes
9/7/17
Thing 1/Thing 2: When Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in 2005, Donald Trump claimed a $17 million insurance payday on his property - the only problem is, there's no evidence any serious damage ever occurred. Duration: 2:05
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-time-mar-a-lago-got-17m-for-nonexistent-hurricane-damage-1041940547818 [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134520412 and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134570667 and preceding and following]
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Florida nuclear plants plan shutdown ahead of Hurricane Irma
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow reports on preparations by Florida's nuclear power plants and other facilities as Hurricane Irma approaches. Duration: 3:47
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/florida-nuclear-plants-plan-shutdown-ahead-of-hurricane-irma-1042026051664
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New Russia contact revelations in Trump Jr Senate interview
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow looks at Donald Trump Jr.'s statement to Senate investigators about his meeting with Russians at Trump Tower and notes not only a new story, but new revelations about contacts he had with Russians. Duration: 14:50
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-russia-contact-revelations-in-trump-jr-senate-interview-1042003523630 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMWiz-9rFmo [with comments]
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Exodus of evacuees as Florida faces Hurricane Irma's onslaught
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Mayor Jack Seiler of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, talks with Rachel Maddow about the expected severity of the impact of Hurricane Irma and the effort to evacuate as many people to safety as possible. Duration: 6:53
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/exodus-of-evacuees-as-florida-faces-hurricane-irma-s-onslaught-1042009667548
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Clinton casts Putin as a 'manspreader'
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow shares exclusive audio from Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened," in which she talks about her impressions of Vladimir Putin. Clinton will appear on the Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday, 9/14. Duration: 3:54
Exclusive audio excerpt from Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened."
7 Sep 2017
https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/905968436034940928 [with embedded audio, and comments]
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/clinton-casts-putin-as-a-manspreader-1042013763602 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBCDd6LUneg [with comments]
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Russian fake social media tricks described in new report
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow shares details from a New York Times report on how developed and continues to use fake social media accounts to spread propaganda and misinformation. Duration: 4:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russian-fake-social-media-tricks-described-in-new-report-1042061891637
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Russia still honing fake social media tactics
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Lee Foster, researcher with the FireEye cyber security firm, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Russians are developing their ability to spread propaganda through fake social media accounts. Duration: 9:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russia-still-honing-fake-social-media-tactics-1042020419847
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Florida officials prep Lake Okeechobee for Hurricane Irma rain
The Rachel Maddow Show
9/7/17
Rachel Maddow reports on how Florida officials are trying to make room in Lake Okeechobee for the potential rainfall that could come with Hurricane Irma to avoid overburdening its aging dike. Duration: 1:41
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/florida-officials-prep-lake-okeechobee-for-hurricane-irma-rain-1042029123704
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Lawrence: Hurricanes show gov't is critical in times of crisis
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
Republicans have, in recent decades, attacked government and its most basic functions and even voted to cut funding for emergency services. But Lawrence O'Donnell says during disasters like Hurricanes Irma & Harvey, nothing can replace government's ability to help. Duration: 4:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-hurricanes-show-gov-t-is-critical-in-times-of-crisis-1042003523694 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-v1Ew29BVE [with comments]
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Amidst hurricane, Trump Jr. puts admin in its own crisis
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
Donald Trump Jr. faced 5 hours of questioning from Senate investigators, mostly about his infamous June 2016 meeting with Russian nationals. Mieke Eoyang and Ron Klain say this questioning is only the beginning of Trump Jr.'s troubles as the Russian probes widen. Duration: 10:54
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/amidst-hurricane-trump-jr-puts-admin-in-its-own-crisis-1042008131794 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p2UdZQZpHI [with comments]
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Nancy Pelosi dictates President Trump's tweet
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
9/7/17
After infuriating Republicans by siding with Democrats in debt ceiling negotiations, Donald Trump took Nancy Pelosi's advice that he should tweet a message of reassurance to "Dreamers." Jonathan Capehart and Ron Klain join Lawrence O'Donnell. Duration: 9:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/nancy-pelosi-dictates-president-trump-s-tweets-1042008643742
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Democrats want more answers from Donald Trump Jr. on Russia
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
After five hours of questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump Jr. said he trusts he's 'fully satisfied' lawmakers' questions. Democrats however say they still have questions. Duration: 10:45
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/democrats-want-more-answers-from-donald-trump-jr-on-russia-1042051651658 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of0v-nqHKS0 [with comments]
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Trump deals with 'Chuck & Nancy' before dining with Paul Ryan
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Republicans are still reeling as Donald Trump continues to make deals with Democrats. Something likely to come up at Trump's Thursday dinner with Speaker Paul Ryan. Our panel discusses. Duration: 7:36
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-deals-with-dems-chuck-nancy-before-dinng-with-paul-ryan-1042035267901
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Belcher: Trump's deal with Dems unlike anything we've ever seen
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Democratic pollster and former Obama campaign staffer Cornell Belcher discusses Donald Trump making deals with Democrats. Duration: 2:01
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/belcher-trump-s-deal-with-dems-unlike-anything-we-ve-ever-seen-1042043459576
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Fmr. GOP Rep. on why Paul Ryan should be turning to Democrats
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Fmr. Rep. Chris Shays, Republican from Connecticut, says Speaker Paul Ryan should take a page from Pres. Trump after his deal with Democrats on the debt and turn to Democrats to get more done. Duration: 0:43
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/fmr-gop-rep-on-why-paul-ryan-should-be-turning-to-democrats-1042032707930
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In rare interview Bannon says he's going to be Trump's 'wingman'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
Speaking with CBS News, ousted Trump aide Steve Bannon says he will continue to work for Pres. Trump adding that they're both 'fighters.' Our panel discusses. Duration: 2:53
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/in-rare-interview-bannon-says-he-s-going-to-be-trump-s-wingman-1042042435881 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgAOzN_6pNI [with comments]
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Officials: Irma may render areas of Florida 'uninhabitable'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
9/7/17
The latest forecast puts Irma on a path to strike southern Florida by Sunday bringing dangerous winds and a massive storm surge. Meteorologist Bill Karins breaks it all down. Duration: 4:56
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/officials-irma-may-render-areas-of-florida-uninhabitable-1042054211576
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New York Fashion Week, Where Cultural Appropriation Never Goes Out of Style: The Daily Show
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA/videos ]
To celebrate New York Fashion Week, Dulce Sloan breaks down the problematic trend of designers appropriating African-American culture to sell clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFNpFHcQUc [with comments]
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Between the Scenes - Government Shutdowns Are Not Normal: The Daily Show
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Trevor explains how ludicrous it is that Congress has a hard time keeping the government funded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eeRj6z6xDQ [with comments]
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There's A Trump Protest For Everyone!
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig/videos ]
The most difficult part of protesting the Trump administration is figuring out which demonstration is which.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNTkOTkWoG8 [with comments]
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The Democrats Actually Won Something!
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Democrats were able to score a rare win when President Trump sided with their outline for raising the debt ceiling.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vF-aSq4igA [with comments]
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The Worst Part Of Steve Bannon's First Interview: Steve Bannon
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Steve Bannon's upcoming '60 Minutes' interview with Charlie Rose features controversial views, conspiracy theories and, worst of all, Steve Bannon.
[originally aired September 7, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajFmgmUSYAc [with comments]
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What Bernie Sanders Wants Hillary To Do Next
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The Vermont Senator and 'Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution' author responds to critical excerpts from Hillary Clinton's memoir.
[originally aired September 7, 2017 (U.S. central time)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv-hgegVq0k [with comments] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134439770 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134399853 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131376472 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131374857 and preceding and following]
Bernie Sanders Tries To Say Something Nice About Trump
Published on Sep 8, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Hey, you can't blame the Vermont Senator for trying.
[originally aired September 7, 2017 (U.S. central time)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTIStPerVNw [with comments] [id.]
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Trump Waffles on DACA, Responds to Hurricane Irma: A Closer Look
Published on Sep 7, 2017 by Late Night with Seth Meyers [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVTyTA7-g9nopHeHbeuvpRA / https://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth , https://www.youtube.com/user/LateNightSeth/videos ]
Seth takes a closer look at how Donald Trump is exposing how unfit for the presidency he is through his handling of crises from all sides, from hurricanes to immigration reform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f4khpGnvcY [with comments]
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stashed September 7, 2017:
Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/facebook-says-it-sold-political-ads-to-russian-company-during-2016-election/2017/09/06/32f01fd2-931e-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html
Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html
New evidence emerges on how Russia attacked the U.S. election - Maddow segment 9-61 embedded
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/new-evidence-emerges-how-russia-attacked-the-us-election
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dzUY-ukFflOMmwMcWAeURjABdNyoM?ned=us&hl=en
The First White President
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
Nature's Disastrous ‘Whitewashing’ Editorial - J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century surgeon, widely considered the “father of modern gynecology - Thomas Parran Jr., for whom a hall is named at the University of Pittsburgh. Parran served as U.S. surgeon general between 1936 and 1948, during which time he oversaw the Public Health Service’s infamous Tuskegee experiment
Science's ethos of self-correction should apply to how it thinks about its own history, too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/an-unfortunate-editorial-in-nature/538998/
The Social Benefits of Swearing - for conix: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134400772
How profanity can help you seem more likable - and more
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-beloved-potty-mouth/538791/
Can Anyone Stop Burma’s Hardline Buddhist Monks? - Rohingya Muslim minority
Their anti-Muslim rhetoric poses a challenge for everyone from Aung San Suu Kyi to Pope Francis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/can-anyone-stop-burmas-hardline-buddhist-monks/538992/
How Did North Korea's Missile and Nuclear Tech Get So Good So Fast?
“They’ve been systematically underrated for years.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/north-korea-tech/538959/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3HIyrpV1IDlbEMFQwFz0V1wBuVLM?ned=us&hl=en
Trump, Schumer agree to pursue plan to repeal the debt ceiling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/07/trump-schumer-agree-to-pursue-plan-to-repeal-the-debt-ceiling/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d_wFfV8YZRXQjuMAqCUU40K32TEHM?ned=us&hl=en
Trump Jr. Says He Wanted Russian Dirt to Determine Clinton’s ‘Fitness’ for Office - sen jud interview
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/trump-russia-investigation.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/da1j-Ra3rQgB6dMRTuZK4emvUnmfM?ned=us&hl=en
Steve Bannon: Catholic Church Opposes DACA’s End Because It Needs ‘Illegal Aliens To Fill The Churches’
Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, gave his first major interview since being ousted from the White House.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-daca-immigration_us_59b13c33e4b0354e440fb247
Bannon: Catholic Church needs ‘illegal aliens to fill the churches’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09/07/bannon-catholic-church-needs-illegal-aliens-to-fill-the-churches/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3jx3S_AcUasIQMwUcDoVYzHWSJMM?ned=us&hl=en
Rodrigo Duterte’s son is accused of involvement with massive drug deal
It comes after some of the bloodiest violence yet seen in the Philippines' war on drugs.
https://thinkprogress.org/rodrigo-dutertes-son-accused-involvement-drug-deal-7b31b40cef6a/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dTjvyCWWFjUdUcMml_MNkg2b-VxOM?ned=us&hl=en
Spain to charge Catalan MPs over plans for independence vote
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-politics-catalonia/spain-to-charge-catalan-mps-over-plans-for-independence-vote-idUSKCN1BI1GQ
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d1yN8QRQtNiCJ7MdKn3s524wRXfNM?ned=us&hl=en
Bannon with Charlie Rose - 60 Minutes 9-10-17
Steve Bannon: "I'm a street fighter"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avfCush5UMI
Charlie Rose on Steve Bannon's "60 Minutes" interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODnuxBwNeAE
Steve Bannon on Trump's DACA decision, Catholic church
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpwCsYe_BZA
https://www.youtube.com/user/CBSNewsOnline/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/CBSThisMorning/videos
Bannon criticizes Catholic Church's response to Trump's plan for DACA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eUVHEeho2I
Bannon calls any Church leader who disagrees on DACA "just another guy with an opinion"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoG5zmDacFk
https://www.youtube.com/user/60minutes/videos
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charlie+rose+steve+bannon
The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html
more: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=+The+Fake+Americans+Russia+Created+to+Influence+the+Election+
Exclusive: Mueller seeks interviews with WH staff over Trump Tower meeting statement
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/07/politics/mueller-trump-air-force-one-statement-russian-lawyer/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d8ynCbu7qID7_EMTJQmKMMUWR3wNM?ned=us&hl=en
DeVos announces review of Obama-era sexual assault guidance - as unfair to accused
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/07/politics/betsy-devos-education-department-title-ix/index.html
Dear Colleague Letter
OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dgqiPHOZajepmhMBFRsN5tNLmndxM?ned=us&hl=en
Three men charged in kidnapping, rape of 15-year-old Alexandria girl
The [white] men kept the girl in captivity for 29 days before she escaped, swimming across a lake. - Minnesota
http://www.startribune.com/three-men-charged-in-kidnapping-15-year-old-alexandria-girl-assualting-and-raping-her/443082573/
Missing Minnesota Teen Jasmine Block Found Safe, Three Arrested
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/missing-in-america/missing-minnesota-teen-jasmine-block-found-safe-three-arrested-n799091
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dkN4GrwnhDJ2TjMXPKtdNQdQPJl6M?ned=us&hl=en
The President’s Son Admitted To An Amateurish Attempt At Collusion. He May Have Helped Bury His Father’s Presidency In The Process
This delicate legal situation is once again due almost entirely to unnecessary and unforced errors on the part of the Trump family.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-presidents-son-admitted-to-an-amateurish-attempt_us_59b1a56ae4b0c50640cd65ce
Ethics Watchdogs Say Kris Kobach’s Compensation From Breitbart Raises Questions
“If you’re getting paid by somebody to write about your official duties, that seems to me a clear problem,” an ethics expert says.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kris-kobach-breitbart-ethics_us_59b13f04e4b0b5e531040fe2
DOJ: Admitting Existence Of A Sessions Resignation Letter Would Violate His Privacy
HuffPost had filed a FOIA request seeking a copy of the alleged resignation letter.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-resignation-letter-trump_us_59b16c35e4b0b5e531045df7
Trump DOJ To Supreme Court: Making Gay Wedding Cake Would Violate Baker’s Rights
The Justice Department said artists can’t be compelled to create against their religious beliefs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-justice-department-gay-wedding-cake_us_59b1af6fe4b0dfaafcf69ee6
Anti-Gay Crusader Who ‘Married’ His Laptop Wants Alabama To Recognize Their Union
Well, no, not really. It’s a convoluted attack on marriage equality.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chris-sevier-computer-marriage-alabama_us_59b1b18be4b0b5e53104ebd3
Florida Sheriff Threatens To Check For Warrants At Hurricane Shelters
“If you have a warrant, turn yourself in to the jail - it’s a secure shelter.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polk-county-sheriff_us_59b1868ce4b0354e4410420e
Texas Provider Will Offer Free Abortions For Women Affected By Harvey
Whole Woman’s Health has clinics in Austin, San Antonio, McAllen and Fort Worth.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/texas-provider-will-offer-free-abortions-for-women-affected-by-harvey_us_59b18d8ee4b0dfaafcf65b92
When Pregnancy Almost Kills You
Hyperemesis gravidarum is in the news thanks to Kate Middleton, but moms say people still don’t get how bad it is.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-its-really-like-when-pregnancy-almost-kills-you_us_59b023c5e4b0354e440ea8ed
Dear Secretary DeVos
I’m having a little more trouble trying to figure out why you chose to go into education.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dear-secretary-devos_us_59b1ab86e4b0bef3378cdeb7
Kid Rock Goes Off In Politically Charged Tirade At Michigan Concert
The profanity-filled speech about Nazis and Black Lives Matter was caught on video.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kid-rock-goes-off-in-politically-charged-tirade-at-michigan-concert_us_59b1abe0e4b0dfaafcf696eb
Hulk Hogan’s Lawyer Is Now Going After Jezebel, Editors
Attorney Charles J. Harder helped Hogan and Peter Thiel take down Gawker last year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hulk-hogans-lawyer-files-defamation-suit-against-jezebel-editors_us_59b1a2bfe4b0dfaafcf68522
ABC Cops Use Apps To Spot Fake IDs
Underage drinkers are going online to buy high-tech phony IDs, and some state alcohol enforcement agencies are using apps to help spot them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abc-cops-use-apps-to-spot-fake-ids_us_59b145c0e4b0d0c16bb52a5c
original http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/09/07/abc-cops-use-apps-to-spot-fake-ids
The tiny Caribbean islands ravaged by Hurricane Irma are in trouble — and begging for help
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/07/the-tiny-islands-ravaged-by-hurricane-irma-are-in-trouble-and-begging-for-help/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.55fd66381a13
These Aerial Photos Show The Destruction Left In Hurricane Irma's Wake
One of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record has killed at least 10 people across the Caribbean so far.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/franciswhittaker/irma-from-above
Hurricane Irma: Roofs blown off, houses under water in Sint-Maarten - BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ3M39GkxcM
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/duLKzADc4t1GLWM5jfKIthyBIHwZM?ned=us&hl=en
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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