Reposted from My Substack
So just before this year’s Superbowl, you had tons of rumors of how Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift was part of a psyops operation against MAGAs who would announce her support for President Biden sometime during the game.
"The administration has what they consider a perception optics management team," said Kaplan. "And those are professionals that go out and identify those people who may be unsuspecting, whether with knowledge or without knowledge, to do these type of campaigns. Now it is quite possible, frankly, that Taylor Swift does not know that she is being utilized in a covert manner to swing voters. But the bottom line is that the Biden administration is savvy, identifying how many followers and how many voters, potentially, she can influence. With either right information or misinformation, she can swing the voters."
Trump has since attacked Swift claiming that he “made her a billionaire” - which didn’t happen until 2023 - and that she has been “disloyal” to him, even though she previously endorsed Biden, not him, in 2020.
Obviously, the game took place without any of that happening, because the game was not about Taylor Swift.
But then MAGAs have found something else in the game to complain about.
The Black National Anthem.
So before the game, there was a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which apparently got under the skin of documented racist Rudy Giuliani.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that he was personally insulted after what's known as "The Black National Anthem" was scheduled to be performed at the Super Bowl.
On Giuliani's Sunday WABC radio program, co-host Maria Ryan said she had a "beef" with the NFL.
"They're going to do what's called a Black National Anthem, and then America's National Anthem," she explained. "Please stop dividing us. We can't allow this. If you want to sing another song, that's fine. I don't care about that at all, but to call it Black National Anthem is dividing us. We're all American citizens."
Calling it the “Black National Anthem” is dividing us. Dividing us how exactly?
Why would you have to feel “insulted’ by Black people - who helped build this nation, including the White House and Washington Monument - having a moment? Why would he have a problem with that?
Maybe it’s because he’s a sexist, antisemitic homophobe.
Let’s start with the sexism, of which there’s plenty. One section of the transcripts show him referring to Dunphy as “big tits” and saying: “Come here, big tits … your tits belong to me. Give them to me … I want to claim my tits. These are my tits.”
In another section of the transcripts, Giuiliani says he gets turned on by how smart Dunphy is, and makes sure she knows this is rare for him. “I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she’s not attractive.”
Then there’s the homophobia and the antisemitic jokes. In one part of the tapes Giuliani calls Matt Damon a “faggot”. In another section he muses that “the way – the way natural selection works … Jewish men have small cocks because they can’t use them after they get married. Whereas the Italian men use them all their lives so they get bigger.” This came immediately after ranting about Passover. “They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time,” he said. “Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. OK, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.” (Alas, he didn’t provide any context on previous Red Sea partings.)
Then there are his many examples of Racism.
In September 1992, 29 years before the MAGA mob invaded the Capitol to try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College’s vote for Biden, several thousand off-duty police officers, enraged by Mayor David Dinkins’ plan to have an independent civilian board review complaints of police misconduct, tried to storm City Hall. The cops blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, rocking cars and jumping on them.
They were virtually all white, and many were drinking. Some carried caricatures depicting Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, engaged in various sex acts. One blocked Brooklyn City Councilmember Una Clarke from crossing the street to City Hall, calling her a “[racial slur] who says she’s a councilmember.”
Giuliani, speaking through a bullhorn on top of a car near City Hall, riled up the crowd, slamming Dinkins’ policies and leading a chant of “Bullshit! Bullshit!”
A Black transit cop named Eric Adams told reporters that it was “a drunk, racist lynch mob.”
Inciting a mob of white police to attack a black mayor. Check.
There there were his casually racist police policies.
Giuliani’s method was to arrest 19 people guilty of nothing more than drinking beer or bicycle-riding violations in order to nab one with an outstanding felony warrant. His myth is that only he had the guts to do what had to be done against the “element” — a racial euphemism of the era inevitably prefaced by “I’m not prejudiced, but…”
This went on to become known as his “Stop and Frisk” policies which would have police regularly harrass black and brown citizens 80% of the time even they would only issue citations for violations or arrests 5% of the time and frankly less frequently with citizens of color than with white citizens. They were making life more difficult for people of color 95% of the time and not actually putting any dent in crime at all.
Continued…
The Giuliani administration also pioneered many of the draconian police tactics used against protests in the 21st century: preemptive mass arrests, penning, paramilitary evictions of squats and helicopters hovering over peaceful protests. In 1998, he had subway service to central Harlem shut off on the afternoon of a relatively small rally by a Black supremacist offshoot of the Nation of Islam.
In December 1999, he tried to have homeless children taken away from their parents on the grounds that simply being homeless was evidence of neglect — which inspired the Rev. Al Sharpton to declare at a Union Square rally, “If Giuliani had been the mayor of Bethlehem, he would have said Joseph and Mary were unfit parents and put the baby Jesus into foster care.”
[…]
New Yorkers had soured on that by early 1999, after the police killing of Amadou Diallo. Giuliani’s support had always been racially polarized. His races against Dinkins in 1989 and 1993 were both close citywide, but he got less than one-sixth of the vote in heavily Black districts, generally less than one-third in Latino ones and more than five-sixths in overwhelmingly white areas.
White voters carried him to reelection in 1997. But the killing of Diallo, an unarmed Guinean peddler shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet after cops shouted for him to show ID, catalyzed attitudes that Giuliani had gone too far. The killing of Patrick Dorismond in 2000, shot after he angrily told an aggressive undercover cop that he didn’t sell weed, punctured Giuliani’s political future — along with him announcing that he was seeking a divorce on TV before he’d informed his wife.
So when we hear Giuliani complain about a song “dividing us” — we have to question who actually did the dividing in the first place?
Then again the song for years has been performed along with “America the Beautiful” and was originally written as a song to commemorate the birth of President Lincoln.
But Giuliani is not an outlier and was not alone, former Fox and NBC host Megyn Kelly also weighed in on her disgust for the “Black National Anthem.”
"The so-called Black National Anthem does not belong at the Super Bowl," wrote Kelly, who has previously generated controversy for insisting that Jesus and Santa Claus are white and defending blackface exhibitions. "We already have a National Anthem and it includes EVERYONE."S
But again, Kelly does not have clean hands when it comes to making racist bigoted statements. She had loudly and angrily proclaimed that “Santa Claus” is white, even though St. Nicolaus who was the inspiration for Santa Claus - was not white - and Jesus according to the bible had “hair like wool, and skin the color of brass.”
Kelly is also on record for saying that there’s “nothing wrong with blackface” which is what got her bounced off NBC.
Shockingly, John Fugelsang does not agree.
"It does come back to the fact that Megyn was not a fan of anything that does not cater to her whiteness," he said. "I will give 100 bucks to anyone who can show me a tape of Megyn Kelly ever calling a white lawbreaker a 'thug' or an 'illegal'."
He then compared her to the super-white cartoon royal Elsa of Arendelle.
"I don't want to be too hard on her — I thought she was great as queen Elsa in 'Frozen,' continued Fugelsang. "But at the end of the day, the worst part about Megyn Kelly, if she were to come out and say that 'It was a great game, and Usher did a good job and I like the halftime show' — her base would kill her. They would call her woke. They would call her critical race theory.
"Hate is what she has to sell. It's all she's got."
Now, about the issue of the “Star Spangled Banner” being for “everyone”, that can only be believed by someone who knows nothing about Francis Scott Key - who was a slave owner - or about the third verse of the Anthem, which attacks slaves and free black men who had been drafted by England as Marines during the War of 1812.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So, for the record, it’s not exactly for “everyone.”
All of these are examples of White myopia. The myth that they themselves are the “norm". They are the be-all and end-all of everything and everyone. Daring to merely acknowledge anyone else is offensive, while they can openly denigrate and bash anyone they like. Talking shit about Black people and Jewish people is just fine. But having Passover is annoying. Having a “Black National Anthem” is an attack. Jesus being a brown Palestinian, or Santa Claus being a brown man from Turkey is unthinkable.
Everything has to be co-opted by whiteness. Everything has to be oriented around being white. Our clothes are made to look good on White People’s bodies. Our food is grown to taste good and be nutritious to White people. Our medicines are designed to work best, for White people. Facial recognition technology is made to work best for White people’s faces. Everyone has to worship the idea of white people, who are awesome and holy, far more God-like than the rest of us.
Made in His image.
And then they wonder why the rest of us are upset and perturbed, but then I suspect they merely consider it being jealous because we’re not white.
Honestly, I never considered “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to be my personal anthem. That was a church song that was fine but merely honored God, not Black people in context to America to me. The song we used to sing at my Elementary School in South Central during the mid-70s wasn’t that.
What we sang was “We Shall Overcome.”
Imagine how Giuliani and Kelly would have reacted if they sang that before the Superbowl? A blatant and direct anthem against White Supremacy? They’d lose their God-Damned minds.
Because someday, we will.