‘It’s race, class and gender together’: Why the Atlanta killings aren’t just about one thing
Here is what Christine Liwag Dixon, a Filipino American writer and musician, thought about after she heard that clip. She thought about how she was once offered money for a “happy-ending massage,” even though she is not a massage therapist and never has been. She thought about all the men who have told her they’re “into Asian women” and expected her to take it as a compliment. She thought about the time she went outside to call an Uber while her husband paid a restaurant bill and a group of men cornered her, one of them chanting “Me love you long time” while standing so close she could feel his breath on her neck.
She thought about how most Asian American women probably have a similar library of terrifying experiences. “To be hypersexualized,” she said in an interview. “To be treated as an object of sexual desire.”
Jeff Zeleny/CNN:
Biden and Harris to visit Georgia, a battleground that paved way for agenda
But the White House's plan to promote the Covid relief package took a somber turn after a rampage here this week killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. White House officials ended up canceling a planned evening rally intended to help explain the benefits of the law.
The President and vice president are instead set to meet with Asian American leaders. Still, the White House has stopped short of calling the shootings a hate crime, despite calls to do so.
While in Atlanta, Biden and Harris are also scheduled to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meeting with experts on the same day that the administration says it will hit its goal of administering 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine.
"We're going to beat this," Biden said Thursday. "We're way ahead of schedule, but we have a long way to go."
Amanda Carpenter/Bulwark:
Kevin McCarthy, Fetch
He now says he didn’t try to overturn the 2020 election. He’s a good boy! He’ll submit and play nice for belly rubs.
Maybe he’ll be sorting through bags of Starbursts to pick out only the colors that Trump likes—pink and red—to place in a special jar and ferry to Trump. Gone is any memory of the expletive-filled shouting match he had with Trump the day of the insurrection. Ol buddy, ol’ pal Kevin didn’t really mean it when he said Trump bore responsibility for the attacks that day. Because he quickly decided “we all” do, and flew down to Florida to make nice with Trump. He had to say sorry to his hooman. Why? Because McCarthy needs Trump’s help in 2022.
See, McCarthy is a good boy. He’ll play fetch. For whoever can give him a treat at any particular moment in time. Trump, donors—whoever. Just throw him a bone.
Woof.
WaPo:
More than 4 in 10 health-care workers have not been vaccinated, Post-KFF poll finds
Vaccination rates are particularly low among health-care workers who are Black, those in lower-paying jobs such as home health aides and those with less education. Partisan politics also play a role, with more Democrats saying they have been vaccinated and Republicans more likely to express uncertainty or concerns about the vaccines.
Alexander Vindman/Lawfare:
Can Litigation Help Deradicalize Right-Wing Media?
The right-wing media and its extremist media personalities have established a foothold and won the attention of millions. Those millions have now grown accustomed to sensationalized content untethered from the truth—often at the expense of individuals. The only means of breaking the cycle is accountability. Civil consequences, rather than governmental restrictions on First Amendment rights, could be a meaningful way to take what are fundamentally money-making ventures and demand truth from them, instill rigor in their reporting, and uphold accountability. Like a tabloid being sued and paying severe penalties, media companies and right-wing media personalities will claim that what’s at stake is freedom of speech. But defamation is not covered by the First Amendment, so this is, by definition, not true. And the generous standards in defamation law for purposes of protecting the press offer a true safe haven for good-faith actors even when they err. Putting companies in fear of the real costs in civil damages for slander, libel, and false claims that can cumulatively incite violence and that can individually harm actual human beings should have a restraining effect on their behavior.
Chrissy Stroop/Religion Dispatches:
I’M NOT HERE TO FIX EVANGELICALS, BUT TO SHOW THEM WHO THEY ARE: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR OF ‘WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM’
or readers of RD, Anthea Butler scarcely needs an introduction. Since 2009, shortly after RD’s launch, Anthea has contributed well over 100 pieces on topics as wide-ranging as the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and the Politics of African-American Hair, to Ronnie Dio and Dominionism. A professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Butler, whose popular Twitter feed is a must-read, is a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. She is also part of an emerging cohort of scholars, many with extensive personal experience in evangelical subculture, who have refused to whitewash the authoritarian nature of evangelicalism, a practice that pervades most scholarly and popular writing on the topic.
If asked to recommend only two recent books on conservative, mostly white evangelicals, I would recommend Kristin Kobes du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, for its unflinching look at evangelicals’ specific inflections of toxic masculinity over the last few decades, and Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, for its likewise unflinching exposure of the systemic and sometimes overt racism that pervades evangelical communities and institutions. Both books are thoroughly grounded in historical expertise, but both also occasionally venture into normative, even theological, discourse, which makes sense—both authors are addressing people they know well, and who let them down.
Ed Mazza/HuffPost:
Trump Supporters Turn On Him Over COVID-19 Vaccine In Uncomfortable CNN Segment
One Trump voter slammed him as “a liberal New Yorker” when asked about the coronavirus shot.
In Boise City, Tuchman entered a diner and asked if anyone in the room was ready for the shot. In a county where 92 percent voted for former President Donald Trump in November, Tuchman’s query was met with silence. Not even Trump’s endorsement of the vaccine made a difference.
“Trump is a liberal New Yorker,” one Trump voter declared. “Why would we listen to him either?”
Another diner flat-out said “no” when asked if Trump’s endorsement would get him to take the vaccine.
Other diners rejected both science and government. Tuchman found much the same attitude elsewhere in the community.