Taking a knee-- a year later
The president is pretty selective when it comes to confronting people on Twitter. For example, when ESPN’s Jamele Hill called him out, he retaliated with a tweet that she should be fired by the sports network. When the new Miss America, a white woman named Cara Mund, did the same, he stayed silent. He took on Colin Kaepernick a week ago-- from the safe distance of a right-wing rally in Huntsville, Alabama. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, as well as a 2016 Trump campaign supporter, Rex Ryan, who is also a colleague of Hill at ESPN, issued statements saying they were disappointed in the president-- but there was no volley from Trump towards either of those men. NBA superstar Steph Curry said he wouldn’t go to the White House for a photo op with the president and the league champions, and Trump tweeted that he was rescinding the invitation Curry had already declined.
I tell you, if I wasn't already a believer in extraordinary coincidences, I would think Trump was most comfortable coming after people when they're black. As there are studies that show right-wing voters respond negatively even to political TV ads that feature black people, it’s hard to imagine that this could come back to bite him with his base.
The thing that gets me still about Trump is that he thinks he’s been elected to be our boss-- when his greatest achievement in life is actually gaining the privilege of us being
his boss. He's a top-down guy so when he wants embarrassing protests to stop, his gut tells him that the solution is to talk to their “bosses” and tell them what they should be doing to the protestors as a punishment.
Meanwhile, the story of the protests is getting warped by a media simmering in white supremacy. They are not protests against America and its military, or against Trump. They are protests against racism. The actor Jeffrey Wright pointed out the irony yesterday: If a knee in Freddy Gray’s back had upset White America as much as a knee on the ground, this would be over.
Upsetting opinions
Liberals need to be very careful about how far they’re willing to go to extend hate crime laws in the U.S. criminal code. In Europe, where virtually no country has a tacit free speech protection equal to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, these same laws have for some time been applied in instances when unpopular leftist views were being espoused. In France in 2008, a leftist activist named Herve Eon was fined 30 euro ($39) simply for holding a banner up to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s car that read “get lost, jerk.” Eon’s words were echoing precise ones spoken by Sarkozy a short time before to a French citizen that had refused to shake his hand.
One of the most draconian restrictions across several nations has been hate speech laws applied to activists that have promoted the economic boycott movement against Israel. In 2009, several activists in France were convicted of “inciting racial hatred” for applying boycott stickers to pieces of produce imported from Israel. Contrary to popular belief, countries like France, Britain, and Germany are not necessarily more democratic than the United States, and with stricter speech laws on the books, none of these countries has seen a decrease in neo-Nazi activism, white nationalism, or in hate crimes.
But it could happen here. Virtually the whole of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate believes that this boycott movement against Israel, an apartheid state, amounts to anti-Semitism, and such hate speech legislation has already seen light in legislative chambers. Also in Congress we have seen a frightening number of representatives (that is, a number greater than one) advocate publicly for denying First Amendment protections to Islamic radicals based on the Constitutionally-flimsy pretense that these individuals don’t believe in free speech themselves and therefore don’t deserve it. It’s not an outsized leap to imagine a “terrorist” label applied to Black Lives Matters activists. Fourteen states have already seen bills introduced that would attempt to add police officers to hate crime categories as a way of targeting BLM activists with imprisonment. Here in Iowa (as in five other states), the legislature has seen fit to criminalize the secret video recording of conditions inside large hog confinement facilities with these whistle blowers and secret recorders identified by many as “terrorists.”
After Charlottesville, there has been a mushrooming advocacy, visible online and elsewhere, coming from the left end of the political spectrum to have private tech companies, and even the state, limit the platforms for speech. The fundamental concept of free speech, however, is to allow an open marketplace of ideas so that the best ones will win. And since Charlottesville, we’ve actually seen a powerful push-back against the mainstreaming of overt white supremacist ideas, and even a weakening of the “alt-right” and neo-Nazi movements-- effectively by splitting them. The term “alt-right” has become a political liability within a very short period of time. A large subsequent rally mapped for the west coast was cancelled, young anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activists have figuratively sprinted away from the Nazis and the KKK that helped populate the Virginia rally, the Breitbart news agency has now disowned the “alt-right” label, and the most visible member of the alt-right movement, Steve Bannon, was fired by a president that is loath to accept criticism or admit mistakes. None of this happened because viewpoints were suppressed in the legal code, but by the fact that protestors were met on the street by a larger number of anti-fascist and left-wing counter-protestors. Few of these nationalists have likely changed their minds and they certainly haven’t gone away as a whole, but they have gone running away from their “brand,” having lost an enormous number of moderate sympathizers in their cause. This is the marketplace of ideas at work.
It shouldn’t be necessary to list all of the once-unpopular views-- opposing war, racism, sexism, and homophobia-- that now hold majority support thanks to our Constitutional protections. That document does not exist other than to protect minority rights from the tyranny of the majority. For liberals, abandoning the First Amendment is abandoning the greatest tool that exists in this country to fight injustice.
Nevertheless, she persisted-- in blaming everybody but herself
Hillary Clinton has retired to history as the woman who couldn't quite parlay her husband's marital infidelities into a presidential tenure of her own. Rather than ushering in the full consummation of her master plan, 2016 instead brought surprising and humiliating defeat before Alexander Hamilton's Electoral College and a divorce for the Weiner/Abedins. With the financial funnel to the Clinton Foundation now clogged perhaps for all-time by the two-time candidate's failure to grasp the United States presidency and then to parcel out weapons and munitions to tinpot dictators, Hillary has instead returned to the practice of pimping books to the upper-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party in her efforts to build a personal financial fortune.While she engages in that, Bernie Sanders moves forward a plan in the United States Senate to provide all Americans with health care coverage that's paid for by their taxes-- no copays, premiums, or deductibles.
Which direction should I direct my eyes?
The Intercept has
a well-timed report on the push-back against the Bernie/Elizabeth Warren single-payer plan by the health care-for-profit industry
. What's shocking, or maybe not so shocking, in the piece is how many of the lobbyists speaking up in opposition to health care as a human right are former congressmen-- and Democrats to boot. There's former Representative Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, now openly representing the American Hospital Association. And former Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, who now lobbies directly for Aetna, AFLAC, and Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals.
New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, a Democrat in the most modern definition of the word, puts Bernie on blast for "misleading" people with his life-saving plan. If you can make heads or tails of
Chait's argument, drop me a summary in the comments.
New York's Rebecca Traister and
Slate's Michelle Goldberg got a girlfriend's back as Clinton devotes several hundred pages in print to a lengthening list of people that are responsible for her electoral failures-- Sanders, who endorsed her to his own personal detriment; the New York Times, about which you could say the same; Vladimir Putin; Jill Stein; and Jim Comey-- none of them being her or a member of her campaign staff. Instead of writing about health care, or police shootings, or U.S. bombing campaigns that pause only to re-load, we get from both Traister and Goldberg's reviews that million dollar question: why isn't Hillary
even angrier?! Hmm. I just don't know. I hate Donald Trump. That I know. Let me click on this link. These two journalists both ask also-- point-blank-- why are people
so angry about Hillary's new book? It's a question that answers itself regarding a publication
that never gets around to addressing the military policies Clinton has enthusiastically endorsed that kill tens of thousands of innocents in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, and Somalia, and that relentlessly and ruthlessly betray the Democratic Party's attempts to brand itself honestly as
AN ENEMY of privilege, racism, and violence, even though the stated purpose of the book, by the title alone, is to tell us "What Happened."
Cognitive dissonance.
Complex questions, simple solutions
Here's a surefire way to avoid nuclear holocaust with North Korea-- don't fire first.
This is the obvious solution. Kim Jung-Un is not going to drop an atomic fireball on
Guam even if his nuclear reach stretches there. Do we really think that's a possibility? He bombs a remote island that affects the U.S.'s nuclear capability not in the slightest, and then we don't respond with a bomb directly on Pyongyang? That's stupid. All of the bluster is stupid. Our president is immature, insecure, and an emotional weakling, and Kim used to wear that crown.
---
"Now then: Boston and Philadelphia both claim to be the cradle of liberty. Which city is correct? Neither one. Liberty is only now being born in the United States. It wasn't born in 1776. Slavery was legal. Even white women were powerless, essentially the property of their father or husband or closest male relative, or maybe a judge or lawyer. Liberty was only
conceived in Boston or Philadelphia. Boston or Philadelphia was the motel of liberty, so to speak.
"Now then: The gestation period for a 'possum is twelve days. The gestation period for an Indian elephant is twenty-two months. The gestation period for American liberty, friends and neighbors, turns out to be two hundred years or more!
"Only in my lifetime has there been serious talk of giving women and racial minorities anything like economic, legal, and social equality. Let liberty be born at last, and let its lusty birth cries be heard in Kingston and in every other city and town and village and hamlet in this vast and wealthy nation, not in Jefferson's time but in the time of the youngest people here this afternoon. Somewhere I heard a baby cry. It should cry for joy."--- Kurt Vonnegut, 1990
