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Tag: racism
Donald Trump

Trump Smacks Media -- And They Invite Him To Hit Them Harder

In an infamous article from 1922, The New York Times introduced the United States to a rising German politician by insisting that "Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded." It would be nice to think that in the intervening century the nation’s largest media outlets have learned a lesson. And they have. They’ve learned to lean into it.

As Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson reported on Tuesday, a new study shows that the media is willing to cut Donald Trump infinite slack when it comes to using dehumanizing and threatening language toward everyone he sees as an opponent. Which is … everyone. Democrats. Republicans. Former members of his staff. Judges. The whole legal system. Steve Jobs’ widow.

But no one seems as eager to indulge Trump as America’s leading news outlets. It’s not just that they’re willing to look the other way when he attacks others; they are also eternally willing to bend over and take another one for team “objective journalism.” Except what they’re promoting isn’t anything like fairness, and what they’re protecting certainly isn’t some platonic ideal of truth.

The nation’s major media outlets are begging Trump to hurt them again. Hurt them good. Oh, and to destroy the nation while he’s at it.

Overnight, Trump attacked MSNBC. The reason for this isn’t particularly clear and doesn’t particularly matter. However, in this attack, Trump makes an overt threat against the network, its leader, and the whole concept of the First Amendment.

In response to Trump’s attack, NBC News has issued this heartfelt reply: silence. But then, why wouldn’t they? They also didn’t comment back in September, when Trump threatened NBC’s parent company and insisted they should be investigated for “Country Threatening Treason.”

Silence in response to Trump’s threats is what major media outlets do.

Trump already declared the free press “the enemy of the people.” He already put journalists in cages so that his supporters could jeer them as Trump pointed them out for mockery. He didn’t do these things in the early days of his 2016 campaign. He did them while occupying the White House. Trump stood behind the bully pulpit and regularly informed the American public that the media was their enemy.

Those journalists were in a cage for a rally that Trump held in 2018, far from any presidential election. That the link to that Iowa rally is from an Australian news outlet is not a coincidence, as the reporter from that outlet seems to be the only one who was shocked by the way journalists were being pointed out for threats and derision, or by how an undercover filmmaker approached the cage to whisper that he was too afraid to try and conduct interviews, or how they weren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom without being supervised by a member of Trump’s staff. By that point, American journalists following Trump seemed to have simply accepted this as their lot.

Just over a month ago, Trump threatened journalists with prison rape unless they gave up sources who were informing on Trump’s crimes. And those same journalists went back to work the next day, cutting Trump every possible break.

The biggest of those breaks is simply this: Acting as if because Trump espouses fascism, racism, misogyny, bigotry, and violence every day, it’s not news. This is the most ass-backward idea ever cooked up in a newsroom. The fact that Trump does it over, and over, and over is the news. Responsible, objective journalism isn’t ignoring Trump’s threats because he makes them regularly. The regularity of his vile statements makes them both worse and more newsworthy.

If the mass media treated the Son of Sam killings the way they do Donald Trump, they would have stopped reporting after the first victim. After all, it’s just more of the same thing, right?

Trump is out there attacking journalists every day. He’s out there spitting on the First Amendment every day. He’s doubling down on his attacks on democracy every day. And all major media seems to think about is how many more clicks, views, and ad dollars they will make if they can use silence and selective reporting to ease Trump over the line to the White House.

Every time Trump calls out journalists or a media outlet, the reaction seems to be the same. Rather than fighting back, or defending their reporting, outlets slink further into the placating corner. Or hire another former Trump official. They seemed genuinely more concerned about offending Nazis than fighting them.

News outlets appear willing to keep up the pretense of being objective, even when studies show that they are leaning on the accelerator for Trump. They’ll keep up that pretense even in the face of the absolute reality that, should their boost carry Trump back to the Oval Office, he will come for them. He will come for the “enemies of the people.” He will come for those guilty of “country threatening treason.” He will make the days when he only put reporters in cages and encouraged the crowd to scream at them seem like a fond memory.

Trump is dedicated to destroying democracy. He’s absolutely insistent on ending the free press. He is openly using Nazi propaganda and threatening to repeat the most despicable events in history. Even so, as Laura wrote on Tuesday:

There is no question, by the hard numbers, that the media is giving Donald Trump a pass. His dehumanizing rhetoric describing his political opponents as “vermin” that he will “root out” is a nonstory as far as the broadcast networks, cable news networks, and largest newspapers in the country are concerned.

Unless something changes, it will go on being a nonstory right up until the time Trump is telling them what stories are allowed.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Jason Aldean

Country Singer Jason Aldean Says His Lynching Song Isn't About Lynching (VIDEO)

Country singer Jason Aldean is denying that his vigilante violence anthem “Try That in a Small Town” is specifically an ode to lynching after filming the video for the song outside a courthouse that was the site of a brutal lynching in 1927. According to Aldean’s video production team, the Maury County Courthouse was merely a “popular filming location outside of Nashville” with no historical reference intended. But go figure, when a rabidly right-wing musician stands in front of the site of a lynching and sings about using his granddad’s gun in response to a litany of offenses including, “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face/Stomp on the flag and light it up,” he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Despite his various protestations of innocence, Aldean is likely thrilled with how this whole thing is going as he gets to play the victim while watching a frankly terrible song shoot to the top of the country charts. (It’s one of the less rousingly anthemic anthems you’re going to find—the tone is more of a whine. Honestly, when I first read about it I was imagining a much better, if still repugnant, song. Songs that make you want to sing along and simultaneously make you feel dirty about that are well within the wheelhouse of country.)

Aldean and his wife have repeatedly sought right-wing hero status, with his wife posting social media pictures of herself and their kids wearing anti-Biden clothes. In today’s political environment, with the Republican base defining itself through “own the libs” politics and flagrant bigotry, a song threatening violence in response to protests against the police is a sure winner, and one that almost guarantees Aldean a role at an inauguration concert if a Republican wins in 2024. He’s already drawn a defense from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Aldean is implicitly invoking right-wing white identity politics—not that he’d ever call it that—in which only small towns and rural areas are real America; religious affiliation, specifically as an evangelical Christian, is more about partisanship than faith; and where country musicians have cultural cachet because of their perceived association with rural areas (and whiteness).

And the song’s threats highlight the ties between right-wing white identity politics and violence. The two are basically inseparable, with the violence framed by narrators like Aldean as the right to self-defense of a people under attack, but in reality serving to affirm that they are the only group with a right to violence, and that violence to preserve their role as the embodiment of real America is legitimate and indeed necessary.

CNN’s coverage of a critical tweet by Sheryl Crow uncovers another dimension of this: “I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting,” Crow tweeted. “This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame.”

CNN noted, “Crow grew up in Kennett, Missouri, which has a current population of roughly 10,200. Aldean was born in Macon, Georgia, which has a population of about 156,000.” Wikipedia adds the context that Aldean spent summers with his father in Homestead, Florida — population 80,000. These are not small towns. Aldean is a poser trying to lay claim to the title of defender of small-town whiteness, even though he grew up in a fair-sized city and summered in a large suburb of Miami. But his effort shows the cultural power of the small-town narrative.

”There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music -- this one goes too far,” Aldean tweeted in response to the parallels being drawn between his lynching-flavored song and the actual historical lynching that took place where he shot the video.

About that: Michael Harriot dissected the claim that “[t]here is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it,” showing how the specific types of violence Aldean frames as reasonable cause to pull out granddad’s gun draw on longstanding myths about Black violence. Aldean didn’t have to work “Black people, I mean Black people” into his already tortured lyrics to get the point across.

And “there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage”? Sorry, Jason! Activist Destinee Stark found two examples in just the first 30 seconds of the video. One is a real picture of someone giving police the middle finger, but it happened not during a protest in the United States but at a May Day festival in Berlin, Germany. Another is an image of someone lighting a Molotov cocktail, but that one was professionally created as stock footage. In Bulgaria, by the way.

Aldean, like Crow, referred to his personal history as a survivor of a mass shooting. He was on stage at the Route 91 Music Harvest Festival in Las Vegas in 2017 when Stephen Paddock shot and killed 60 people and injured hundreds more. That’s not a kind of violence Aldean talks about wanting to run out of his imaginary small-town home. For one thing, it’s a lot harder to do macho posturing about how tough you’d be in response to violence if you admit that you can be killed from hundreds of feet away by someone you never see. For another thing, Aldean is committed to treating guns as the solution, not part of the problem.

It would not be possible to lift the history of lynching out of how Aldean’s song is received, either by its fans or its critics. But even if you could do that, it remains a promotion of vigilante violence. It remains a valorization of the protest of small towns, which are coded as white, in contrast to the protest of urban areas, which are coded as not-white, where the former has a legitimate right to violence that the latter can never have, even if the violence is simply words directed at a police officer. So even if you believe Aldean’s denials that he was intentionally invoking lynching, the song remains a gross, violent piece of white identity politics by a ridiculous poser.

Check out Destinee Stark’s breakdown of the imagery in Aldean’s video. It’s worth a watch:

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Greg Abbott

Abbott's Pardon Candidate Premeditated His 'Self-Defense' Murder Spree

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is planning to pardon Daniel Perry, the man convicted of murder for killing a Black Lives Matter protester at a rally in Austin in July 2020. Abbott is citing a “Stand Your Ground” law after Perry ran a red light and accelerated his car onto a street filled with protesters, then shot Garrett Foster, a protester who approached the car while openly carrying an AK-47. That Abbott wants to make Perry into a cause célèbre, given the bare facts of the case, is bad enough, but on Thursday, the Houston Chronicle released a 76-page filing by Travis County prosecutors that should really make Abbott think again, but probably won’t.

The filing includes page after page of social media posts and private messages filled with racism, violent imagery, and, tellingly, a strong preoccupation with exactly what counts as murder when it comes to killing protesters. The man did research on what he might be able to get away with—a search for “degrees of murder charges,” web history looking at Wikipedia on murder in United States law, a status posted about the distinctions between different degrees of murder and manslaughter, discussions of people who drove into crowds of protesters. Daniel Perry didn’t just happen to drive onto a street with protesters and then shoot and kill one of them. This was something he’d thought about a lot.

On May 31, 2020, Perry shows how he is thinking this through:

DANIEL PERRY: “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

JUSTIN SMITH: “Can you legally do so?”

DANIEL PERRY: “If they attack me or try to pull me out my car then yes.”

DANIEL PERRY: “If I just do it because I am driving by then no.”

So that’s the first question for Greg Abbott: Do you want to pardon the guy who not only murdered someone, but murdered someone after doing his research on different types of murder charges and showing a preoccupation with driving into crowds of protesters?

The second question for Abbott would probably involve some of the more overtly racist things Perry said and shared. Just one with the n-word, apparently, but you don’t need to use that word to be unbelievably racist, like when Perry shared “a meme with a photo of a woman holding her child’s head under the bath water and the text reads, ‘WHEN YOUR DAUGHTERS FIRST CRUSH IS A LITTLE NEGRO BOY.’”

Perry also compared Black Lives Matter protesters to monkeys at the zoo and said, speaking for himself, not sharing a meme, “To bad we can’t get paid for hunting Muslims in Europe.” How about that, Gov. Abbott? Still can’t wait to pardon him?

But that’s not all prosecutors want on the record about what Perry was up to online. They also have him searching for “good chats to meet young girls” and messaging with multiple underage girls, with the strong implication that he had a sexual relationship with one too young to have her driver’s license. This is the guy Greg Abbott wants to make into a heroic martyr of the right.

There are also some messages exchanged that you really want more context on, like this one:

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “He is now saying they threaten him.

”JUSTIN SMITH: “Probably. Sounds like he got kidnapped.”

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “Look just fix it.”

JUSTIN SMITH: “Literally how.”

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “By ensuring this never happens again contacting me and my father if he contacts you.”

JUSTIN SMITH: “I’m sorry.”

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “And tell me if the money shows up.”

That exchange goes on from there, concluding:

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “I am legally not allowed to talk about said issue anymore.”

OUTGOING MESSAGE: “I will hit you up on the DL.”

Daniel Perry was obsessed with protests, especially protests for racial justice. He was specifically interested in when it was permissible to kill protesters. He was also sharing racist memes, saying his own personal racist stuff, and hitting on teenage girls. This guy is a real prince. And Abbott isn’t the only Republican who has defended him:


Maybe Republicans will back away from Perry a little bit following the revelations in this filing, with their racism and obsession with teenage girls and evidence of premeditation. But that’s not a given. And even if they back away now, they were willing to go with him right up to murder. This is where we are right now: Major politicians in one of the major parties support murderers if the murderer is on their side politically and the victim was on the other side. It’s hard to see how you come back from that.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

DeSantis

DeSantis Bill Mandates Political Control Of Public Colleges

After a series of teasers, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released his detailed legislation to turn Florida’s public colleges and universities into right-wing indoctrination factories, and it’s as bad as he promised it would be. DeSantis is, on the one hand, moving to ban virtually any viewpoint he doesn’t like and, on the other hand, setting up a core curriculum that reflects his specific political agenda.

On the banned list: Not only whatever the people DeSantis puts in charge decide are “Critical Race Theory,” but literally all diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Majors or minors in gender studies. Any general education course that “defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Yes, DeSantis is attempting to write into law that any history that suggests the United States did not always fully live up to the “universal principles” of the Declaration of Independence (a document written by a slave-owner!) is not fit for inclusion as a general education course—the ones that students will be required to take. Those general education courses will be five courses designated within each of five areas (communication, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences) from which students must choose. The direct requirement of the bill would be history courses that didn’t admit to the existence in U.S. history of slavery or the internment of Japanese people during World War II.

“General education core courses may not suppress or distort significant historical events,” according to the bill, and yet they are also required to comply with the ban on anything that “defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The whole thing is about suppressing and distorting significant historical events.

All of the general education core courses are intended to provide “the education for citizenship of the constitutional republic”—constitutional republic being a big Republican buzzword to assert that the United States is not a democracy. Meanwhile, the core courses in communications “must afford students the ability to communicate effectively, including the ability to write clearly and engage in public speaking, through engagement with the Western literary tradition.” Heaven forbid students learn to communicate effectively, write clearly, and engage in public speaking through engagement with a non-Western literary tradition. We can’t have that!

This will be strictly enforced from above, by people DeSantis appoints for that purpose. Faculty—experts in their fields—will be radically disempowered, forced to teach within the limits DeSantis lays out, or else. The bill talks about “the cultivation of the intellectual autonomy of its undergraduate students,” but its meaning is clear: Faculty are defined as the enemies of intellectual autonomy, which properly belongs only to conservative students who don’t want to learn all that unpleasant stuff about race and gender.

The legislation would weaken faculty tenure, but what’s much worse is what it would do to faculty hiring:

Each state university board of trustees is responsible for hiring faculty for the university. The president of the university may provide hiring recommendations to the board. The president and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups.

These trustees will effectively be DeSantis political appointees—for instance, when he put six new people on the board of trustees at the New College of Florida, they included Christopher Rufo, the right-wing think-tanker whose attacks on public education have included being the architect of the campaign against “critical race theory” in schools; the superintendent of a religious charter school; a dean from Hillsdale College, a private Christian school; and the viciously transphobic president of a conservative think tank. That’s the type of people DeSantis is putting in charge of all faculty hiring in Florida’s public colleges and universities.

And no, this isn’t just a formality where the board won’t really exert control:

The board of trustees may delegate its hiring authority to the president; however, the president may not delegate such hiring authority and the board must approve or deny any selection by the president.

Even if the board doesn’t want to go through all the applications (a number that may shrink as academic jobseekers steer clear of Florida), it will have the final word on each and every person hired to teach Florida’s college students.

On Thursday, college students across Florida protested DeSantis’ plans for their schools.

“We want to take these classes and for the state to come in and say, 'Well, we might not want to allow you to have that' … At what point are college students going to be considered adults by the state of Florida?" Jonathon Chavez, president of College Democrats at the University of South Florida, told ABC News, adding, “We want to make our own decisions and our education, how we want to better ourselves. We think it's quite silly that the state would try to restrict that.”

“We’re not here to be spoonfed a sanitized version of history,” USF senior Andy Pham told the crowd at the protest. “If Black people, Indigenous people, all people of color have to confront racism every moment of our waking lives, white folks can certainly handle reading about it.”

Walkouts were also held at the University of Florida, Florida International University, Florida State University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Poly, New College, the University of North Florida, the University of Central Florida, Rollins College (a private liberal arts college in the state), and Largo High School.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.