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Tag: birtherism
Melania Trump

How Polite Of Melania Trump

I don't care about Melania Trump's past life as a model. She has a right to do as she wants with her own body. Any attempt by liberals to shame her for that is an act of hypocrisy.

I don't care what she wears or how she looks. She is glamorous and beautiful, which has nothing to do with her character.

I would never mock her accent, because that's the stuff of racist right-wingers, the ones who shout at Latinos to speak "American" even as they show barely a passing familiarity with the English language.

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Republican Reaction To Kamala Reveals Same Old Pathologies

Republican Reaction To Kamala Reveals Same Old Pathologies

What was for most Americans a moment of inspiration — the ascent of Sen. Kamala Harris, a woman of African and Indian descent, to a national party ticket — has instead provoked paranoia and rage on the Republican right. Along with the usual petty insults spat by President Donald Trump, his minions in the media are returning to their habitual obsessions of nativism, racism and misogyny.

It is a repellent and buffoonish spectacle, but it is unlikely to make any impression on voters who don't already share Trump's narrow, delusional worldview.

In the barrage of confused attacks on Harris, there is much to be learned about the psychopathology of the far right. So-called conservatives have little interest in the senator's actual record in public office or views on substantive issues, only in assaults on her background and character. Somehow, they miss the irony of calling her "nasty" while they launch hundreds of these vicious broadsides.

From Rush Limbaugh and Joe Pagliarulo, we hear the insinuation that Harris somehow used her sexuality to rise to the political pinnacle she now occupies. They're just "putting it out there," as Pagliarulo smarmily intoned, but why bother? Only someone very stupid would believe that a romantic relationship that concluded decades ago elevated Harris from the district attorney's office to statewide office in California, a seat in the United States Senate, and then her party's vice presidential nomination. Life and politics obviously don't work that way.

The only reason to "put it out there" is to detract from Harris' impressive achievements, with the kind of innuendo that is never inflicted on men. These Trump toadies dismiss the Access Hollywood tape, the Jeffrey Epstein photos, the Stormy Daniels affair, and the multiple credible rape and assault allegations against their idol -- yet they're troubled by those dates that Kamala Harris once had with the mayor of San Francisco. (Let's not even delve into Limbaugh's own problematic personal life, which is colorful in all the wrong ways.)

From former George W. Bush administration flack Ari Fleischer, and sundry other self-styled white experts on African American affairs, comes the suggestion that Harris is somehow not truly Black (or at least not Black enough). Those old racial dog whistles were blown when Barack Obama first ran for president, too, because his mother was white and he grew up in the home of his white grandparents. Does anyone believe that Fleischer — a ludicrous figure on his best days — knows what will "excite" Black female voters, as he put it?

African Americans supposedly won't embrace Harris because her father was from Jamaica and her mother from India. Indeed, according to the pardoned felon and provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, Harris is really white because one of her ancestors was a white slaveholder.

Again, this is a profoundly idiotic jape. Where would Kamala Harris' paternal forebears have originated other than Africa? She is an American of African descent. And how many other Black Americans, like Harris, have a white slaveholder somewhere in their ancestry? Many millions, surely, and like them, that fraction of her lineage is tiny.

The plain truth is that like so many Americans, Harris is proud of the ethnic variety in her background. And like many Black Americans of mixed heritage, she has chosen to identify strongly with the Black community throughout her life. It isn't a contradiction but represents what David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City, likes to call "the gorgeous mosaic."

The unappetizing tableau of Republican race baiting wouldn't be complete without a reversion to "birtherism" — in this case, fake concern over Harris' eligibility for the presidency based on her parents' immigration status at the time of her birth. Desperate for clicks, Newsweek dredged up a right-wing law professor to claim that she just might not pass constitutional muster. It's a feeble argument, fully consistent with the professor's unimpressive, highly ideological resume. But is anybody surprised that the falsehoods flung at Obama for years are now aimed at the next person of color nominated for national office?

I'm not.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

How Conspiracies Became Trump’s Governing Ideology

How Conspiracies Became Trump’s Governing Ideology

On the far right, the racist conspiracy theory known as birtherism has faded into the background. The reactionary movement has moved on to new nefarious myths, including the QAnon miasma and claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci is using the coronavirus pandemic to undermine Donald Trump's presidency.

But journalist Adam Serwer, in a piece for The Atlantic this week, stresses that the importance of birtherism to the right wing goes way beyond their disdain for Obama — it is part of a broader ideology of white nationalism and white supremacy. And the prominence of conspiracy theories features in other articles published this week by the Atlantic, including one by Jefferey Goldberg and another by Adrienne LaFrance.

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Study Shows: It’s The Racism, Stupid

Study Shows: It’s The Racism, Stupid

Reprinted with permission from Andrews McMeel Syndication.

The scariest thing about Donald Trump’s presidency isn’t the steady stream of outrageous lies cascading from his White House or the cavalcade of offensive and ill-informed tweets, or even the clear nepotism and suggestions of corruption. His campaign’s possible collusion with Russia isn’t the most frightening thing. Nor is his reckless bluster toward North Korea and Iran.

The scariest thing about Trump’s presidency is that millions of voters continue to support him no matter what he does, continue to believe him no matter what lies he tells, continue to pardon his every transgression, no matter how dangerous or treasonous. (A June Associated Press-NORC poll shows that 75 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing.) If this great democracy is lost, history will show that the seeds of its demise were embedded in the troubling appeal of its 45th president.

Pundits and political scientists have already expended countless joules of intellectual energy to explain Trump’s election, with economic insecurity among the more popular answers. But several researchers who have pored over the data have concluded that anxiety over lost jobs and closed factories didn’t propel Trump into office.

An analysis of data from the American National Election Studies confirms what some of us have long suspected: Trump’s appeal lies in his implicit promise to restore white hegemony, to put black and brown people in their place, to return America to a bygone era of racial repression.

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College, has studied the ANES data and concluded that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal,” as he told reporter Medhi Hasan of The Intercept. “In 2016,” Klinkner noted, “Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.”

That hardly means that every person who voted for Trump harbors racist views. In this hyper-partisan era, many rank-and-file Republicans held their noses and voted for the GOP nominee, even if that meant supporting a celebrity TV host with no clue about how to run a country.

But those garden-variety Republicans are still culpable, not just for Trump’s election, but also for the racial animosity that fueled it. For decades, the GOP has pandered to the fears and resentments of those whites who are uncomfortable with a country growing more racially diverse.

Many Americans had hoped that President Barack Obama’s election was a watershed event that signaled the transformation of American politics, that a nation once scarred by racism had overcome its past. Instead, his election sparked a furious backlash, as racially resentful whites saw more clearly the demographic changes that would bring an end to their cultural and political dominance.

Let’s remember that Trump came to the national political stage as the birther-in-chief, promoting the outrageous lie that Obama was not born in the United States. That belief was important to those who couldn’t stomach the idea of a black man in the Oval Office. They preferred to believe a made-up tale that Obama was a usurper who had stolen the presidency.

It’s no coincidence that Trump campaigned on building a wall along the southern border or that he portrayed undocumented workers as drug dealers and rapists. His strategy also relied on painting all Muslims as terrorists and promising to keep Muslim refugees out of the country.

Those pledges are still a bond between him and his supporters. Trump can repeal Obamacare and toss hundreds of thousands of his supporters off the insurance rolls; he can cozy up to Vladimir Putin and share top-secret intelligence with him; he can stand idly by as robotic arms replace human hands on assembly lines and more jobs are lost. None of that matters as long as he builds a wall and bars Muslims.

This is a frightening time — and not just because a man with the temperament of a spoiled 3-year-old holds the nuclear codes. It’s a frightening time because so many of my fellow Americans think that’s fine — as long as the guy with the codes is white.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.