Tag: george floyd
Mike Johnson

Speaker Johnson's Strange Manipulation Of His Shadowy 'Black Son'

“Some of my best friends are Black” is a phrase that has become cliché, and deservedly so, since it is essentially a dodge. Folks uttering those words are looking for a free pass, credit for knowing what it means to be Black in America without doing the work.

By now, most people know that proximity does not equal understanding.

Most, but not all.

The new speaker of the House, GOP Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has been known to showcase the Black child in his family’s life over two decades, usually when his empathy on matters of race needs a boost. Johnson controls the narrative. He doesn’t want to infringe on the privacy of a now-grown man with a family, he says, so he won’t go into too much detail.

Just enough, though, to show he gets it.

I have nothing against any person of any race who wants to foster, mentor or teach any young person in need of guidance. I applaud the realization that all parties on both sides of such relationships have opportunities to learn and grow. At the same time, I think it’s fair that reporters question just how formal the relationship between congressman and child has been, and why this child is conspicuously missing from family biographies and photographs.

I also wonder about any story cut from the same cloth as The Blind Side, the simple tale of a wealthy white family “adopting” a deprived Black child, rescuing him from an ignoble fate and smoothing his way to football glory in college and the pros. That “just like a movie” story, which has been cited by Johnson as a template, was far more complicated, as the world has come to learn.

Johnson’s tale seems to be similar in many ways, with one particular problem common to these kinds of inspirational parables. They almost always place the white benefactor front and center, instead of the person who was a person before being molded by a Good Samaritan.

In the case of popular movie The Blind Side, a young Michael Oher was already a gifted, smart and hard-working young man and athlete with admirable Black role models, not the nearly mute cipher portrayed as a vessel for the Tuohy family’s largesse in an Oscar-winning film. Oher, in his own voice, said as much in books and when he took his “family” to court to sever a conservatorship that was never an adoption.

I don’t know much about Johnson’s ward, son, or however he would describe the man, also named Michael, except what I’ve learned when he makes a cameo appearance in a pithy yarn from the new speaker.

Reparations? Johnson is against awarding any kind of compensation to descendants of those discriminated against, locked out of an equal shot at the American dream for generations. He came to the conclusion not after a close examination of American history. No, rather than depending on the facts of the case, attorney-turned-lawmaker Johnson relied on Michael, who, he told a House subcommittee, thought reparations defied an “important tradition of self-reliance.”

Funny, I don’t know what the Johnsons’ four biological children think about reparations, or anything else.

After George Floyd was murdered, Johnson acknowledged the existence of a world that treated his two then 14-year-olds differently. Johnson said on PBS: “Michael being a Black American and Jack being white Caucasian. They have different challenges. My son Jack has an easier path. He just does.”

But that was so 2020. Since his recent promotion, to assuage a MAGA base who believes such talk makes him an “undercover Democrat,” as one conservative activist has put it, Johnson told Fox News’ Sean Hannity it wasn’t race so much as “culture and society,” that was the culprit, “a really troubled background” and “a lot of challenges.”

Seems like Johnson, while shielding the child who’s like a member of his family, doesn’t mind squeezing him into the most stereotypical The Blind Side frame, speaking for and about him.

Pretty much everyone could have seen that coming from a politician with Johnson’s mix of piety, judgment, and ambition.

It’s pretty rich that Johnson downplayed the role of systemic racism as he represented a state that in the past spawned the U.S. Supreme Court disgrace of Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine, and is now in court disputes on congressional districts that give African American voters a fair chance.

Where does Johnson stand on banning books that teach his son or any other child these Louisiana truths? Maybe we’ll soon hear from Johnson that “Michael” disapproves.

If Mike Johnson really wanted to know what African Americans feel, about anything, he could reach out to his constituents in the state’s Fourth District, which is about one-third Black.

In talking with residents of the Shreveport-Bossier area, The Washington Post and The New York Times found stark divides along party and race, which often walk together in the South, though no race is monolithic in opinion. Many white conservatives, including his mom, were quoted as loving Johnson’s agenda, and believing a spiritual hand more than an exhausted Republican House caucus eased his elevation to speaker.

Instead of listening only to that choir and the Black child who, in his telling, whispers in his ear on racial issues, Johnson should consider consulting dissenting constituents who tell him things he may not want to hear. Those citizens have far more experience raising Black children in a state and district with a history of racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, voting rights, criminal justice and so much more.

In showing humility and doing the work he was sent to Washington to do, Johnson might learn something — and finally give Michael that privacy.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Tucker Carlson Utters Racist 'Joke' About Tyre Nichols Killing

Tucker Carlson Utters Racist 'Joke' About Tyre Nichols Killing

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson managed to incorporate a racist “joke” into a recent segment of his show covering the murder of Tyre Nichols, Huffpost reports.

The host began his rant by targeting President Joe Biden’s recent decision to end the COVID-19 emergency, and claimed the White House’s decision means he’s forced to turn his attention to 29-year-old Nichols' murder last month.

Carlson then proceeded to take aim at Democrats, complaining that the party “needed an emergency, so they found one,” and that’s “white racism.”

"White racism is getting harder to find," Carlson lamented. "Very few unarmed Black men are killed by white cops these days. Where’s George Floyd when you need him?”

Contrary to Carlson's statement, Rolling Stone found that in 2023, police have already killed at least seven unarmed black people.

Watch the segment below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

#EndorseThis: Kimmel On Trump's 'Unfathomable' Order To Shoot Protesters

#EndorseThis: Kimmel On Trump's 'Unfathomable' Order To Shoot Protesters

Recovered from COVID, Jimmy Kimmel immediately weighed in on the latest weird revelations moment about the orange clown's presidency. Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, appeared on 60 Minutes last weekend to share what Kimmel called an “almost impossible-to-believe anecdote about Trump’s plan to handle Americans protesting outside the White House after the killing of George Floyd."

Esper said Trump wondered aloud, "Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” and that the president suggested bringing in troops to shoot the protesters.

“Well, in fairness, he said the same thing about Eric,” Kimmel deadpanned.

Of course Trump fired back at Esper's criticism, saying, “Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military.”

“Right," retorted Kimmel. "Captain Bone Spurs had to run the military for Mark Esper...And we know that’s a lie because unlike everything else he ran, the military didn’t go bankrupt."

Watch The Entire Segment Below:

Black Lives Matter protest

Busted: Seattle Police Spread Disinformation During Anti-Racist Protests

The latest police scandal in Seattle provides a crystalline example of how local law enforcement authorities have become toxic entities in modern urban areas—largely because it demonstrates, once again, that the city’s ranks have become populated with right-wing extremists who share an abiding contempt for the citizens they’re supposed to “serve and protect.”

An investigation by Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA) reported this week that city police, during George Floyd-inspired June 2020 protests against police brutality, engaged in a campaign of disinformation over police radio intended to convince leftist activists who had created an “autonomous zone” in the Capitol Hill neighborhood that a phalanx of far-right Proud Boys were marching around the city. The radio chatter heightened tensions within the encampment that eventually erupted in real-world gun violence.

The investigation, spurred by social media reports from leftist activists, found that on the night of June 8, 2020—just after police had abandoned its East Precinct Station on Capitol Hill and as activists were creating what they called autonomous zone they later renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP)—deliberately broadcast false verbal reports of a gang of Proud Boys marching around the downtown area.

The participating officers traded the false reports over the radio, saying: “It looks like a few of them might be open carrying,” and: “Hearing from the Proud Boys group. … They may be looking for somewhere else for confrontation.”

Activists monitoring police radio raised the alarm on social media, leading some of the CHOP participants to arm themselves. OPA Director Andrew Myerberg noted that while some of them may have brought guns regardless of the warnings, the disinformation “improperly added fuel to the fire.”

Moreover, key police leaders were aware of the disinformation campaign, even though it violated department policy. However, Myerberg also concluded that the four officers who participated may have used “poor judgment,” but were following guidance from their supervisors, who the report blames for spreading the false story.

The two supervisors it identifies as organizing and overseeing the disinformation network, as it happens, have both left the department in the intervening months. Chief Adrian Diaz will review the activities of the remaining employees.

Prior to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, many police departments—including Seattle’s—had generally amicable relationships with the Proud Boys, leading many of them to conclude that they could behave with impunity in those jurisdictions. This was notably the case in Seattle, which had been the scene of a number of Proud Boys protests before 2020, resulting (as in Portland) mostly in the arrests of leftist counterprotesters and relatively few far-right street provocateurs.

Seattle activist Matt Watson (who uses the nom de plume Spek on social media) first reported the police-radio hoax shortly after it happened, and was able to document the fake reports. His reportage went largely unnoticed until early 2021, when activist Omari Salisbury began digging into the matter. Salisbury’s requests for body-camera footage of the purported Proud Boys sightings led OPA to open its investigation.

Even after the police hoax in early June, real Proud Boys (led by Portland agitator Tusitala “Tiny” Toese) showed up at the CHOP and engaged in harassment of the activists there, as well as of residents in the surrounding neighborhood. Toese and a gang of his Proud Boy and white-nationalist associates entered the zone on June 15 and attempted to start fights and were largely prevented from doing so; they later were videotaped assaulting a man and destroying his cell phone on a neighborhood side street near the zone.

By the end of the month, there had been multiple incidents of gunfire within the zone and in its vicinity, resulting in two deaths. CHOP was shut down on July 1.

Seattle citizens’ fraught relationship with the city’s police department goes back decades, but has intensified since 2011, when the Justice Department opened an investigation into complaints by community leaders about its excessive use of force and its biased behavior while policing minorities, resulting in a federal consent decree under which the department has been operating since 2012. City officials moved in early 2020 to lift portions of that decree, but pulled back on those efforts after the June riots on Capitol Hill.

The presence of right-wing extremists on the force became an acute matter of public concern after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol—largely because six Seattle officers were identified as participants in that day’s “Stop the Steal” protests. Two of them were fired after an investigation found they had entered the Capitol that day.

“Misinformation, especially of this inflammatory nature, is totally unacceptable from our Seattle police officers,” newly elected Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a statement lamenting the “immeasurable” harm caused by the scandal. “This kind of tactic never should have been considered.”

“This misinformation from SPD led to a fortification of the East Precinct and weeks of violence against the people of Seattle,” Seattle City Council member Tammy Morales wrote on Twitter. “As @Omarisal says, it was a ‘strategy planned by the higher ups.’ We need an investigation outside City process and we need real accountability.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos