So, Bill Maher has decided that a new affliction has beset the Left. He argues that we are infected with “Progressophobia” where we can’t see any positive achievements over the past 50 years.
He argues that instead of "Sexism being worse than it's ever been" and "racism being at an all-time high” — things are simply better since "a blow job is no longer a felony.” 35 states have legalized gay marriage, whereas there was a time when Ellen had to pretend to be straight. Disney celebrates Pride month, even Nascar does.
People used to go to prison or smoking pot, now it's legal in 43% of the country.
In 1958 on 4% of Americans approved of Interracial Marriage, now Gallup doesn't even ask the question anymore. The last time they did in 1987 it had 87% approval. In a country that’s 14% black, 18% of the incoming class a Harvard is black. Employees of color make up 47% of Microsoft, 50% of Target and 55% of the Gap all in an efforts to look as diverse as their TV commercials with “Jake” from State Farm, “Johnathon” from Colonial Penn and the new Facebook Groups commercials all featuring black people. [Admittedly representation is important, but it is more important than actual Justice?]
“It’s just ridiculous” to say that white privilege and power is at an “all-time high.” Not compared to the Tulsa Race Massacre, when the KKK marched in the streets of Washington DC without masks, when segregation and lynchings were rampant.
“For most of the country, the most unhip thing you can be today is a racist.”
Yeah, then exactly why are so many state governments currently hellbent on implementing racism directly into our society?
Maher argues that Derek Chauvin’s fellow police didn't back him up, which was almost never the case. However, he ignores here the fact that until the video was released they did back him up, completely. The original police report was completely fabricated claiming that George Floyd had a “medical event” after which they called EMT’s and then he subsequently died in the ambulance. The local prosecutor refused to take on the case, it took intervention by the Governor to bring in Attorney General Ellis to do the prosecution.
If the Governor hadn't acted, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution. Just as the prosecutor in the Breonna Taylor case didn't even ask the Grand Jury to consider any potential liability for police firing the bullets that killed her, instead he filled charges for bullets he fired into her neighbor's apartment which hit no one.
There are still dozens of cases every year where unarmed black people are killed by cops without reason or justification and usually, there is no investigation and there is no prosecution. The Federal Government is not authorized to investigate these cases of potential police misconduct unless they can find specific evidence of racial animus. They weren't able to find that in the Rodney King case until he found the text messages between officers which joked about "Gorillas in the mist.”
Generally, all they have to do is not drop the “N-word" and they're fine.
Black men jogging down the street aren't safe from being chased and randomly gun down, you can't be in a car with loud music without being blasted, you can't play with a toy gun in Walmart without someone lying to 911 about you and getting you killed, you can't be a registered gun owner without a cop blowing you away.
No, it’s not as bad as lynching — it's basically the same exact thing only with the color of authority.
Rather than respond to this with any measure of empathy or understanding the GOP has lashed out at BLM protestors, conflating them with letters rioters, and accusing them of being “Marxist Terrorists" when in fact much of the protest violence has been coming from the anti-government group the Boogaloo Bois.
Federal authorities have charged a Texas man with alleged ties to the violent “Boogaloo Bois” anti-government extremist movement in connection with violence in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd.
A federal criminal complaint alleges Ivan Harrison Hunter, 26, of Boerne, Texas, was identified as the person in a May 28 video shooting 13 rounds from an “AK-47 style semiautomatic rifle” into the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct building.
[...]
In September, federal prosecutors charged two alleged “Boogaloo Bois” members, including a Minnesotan, for trying to conspire with an international terror group as part of a plan to “use violence against the police, other government officials and government property as part of their desire to overthrow the government,” according to the Justice Department.
Those men were allegedly on the scene during the civil unrest in the Twin Cities after Floyd was killed with witnesses telling the FBI the pair were heavily armed.
During the first week of unrest in Minneapolis, Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials warned about outsiders and extremists who might be coming to Minnesota and using the protests as cover to foment violence.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Boogaloo Bois movement started in antigovernment racist online chat rooms early in the last decade. The term “boogaloo” is associated with a race war or second civil war.
Alex Newhouse, who studies the movement at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College in Vermont, wrote that administrators of Boogaloo social media forums actively supported the anti-racist and Black Lives Matter protests.
But Newhouse also says this support is solely opportunistic, and that the Boogaloo Bois see Black Lives Matter a “temporary ally or even a useful tool for sparking violence against the state.”
GOPers have loudly complained that “dozens" of people were killed during BLM protest, but the actual number is 19 -- and many of them were protestors killed by accident, police and counter-protestors.
James Scurlock, 22, Nebraska: A violent encounter with a white bar owner, Jake Gardner, during a protest in Omaha on May 30 led to the death of 22-year-old Scurlock, who is black. Surveillance footage shows Scurlock jumping on Gardner; the Douglas County Attorney’s Office determined that Garner acted in self-defense and he will not face charges.
Barry Perkins, 29, Missouri: The St. Louis resident was reportedly run over and killed by a FedEx truck while attending a protest on May 30.
Italia Kelly, 22, Iowa: Kelly was shot and killed around midnight on May 31 while leaving a protest outside a Walmart in Davenport, Iowa.
Marvin Francois, 50, Missouri: Francois was fatally shot after a protest in Kansas City on May 31, with police reporting his killers were three men attempting to steal his car.
Jorge Gomez, 25, Las Vegas: Gomez was shot by officers during a protest that turned violent on June 1; Gomez was armed and allegedly pulled a gun at officers.
Robert Forbes, 55, California: Forbes died on June 6, a few days after he was struck by a car while peacefully protesting in California City.
While they claim BLM is "dangerous” thousands of people, many of them open white supremacists and racists attacked the U.S. capitol on the theory that the 2020 election was "rigged" in major cities which are all predominantly - Black.
Washington (CNN)Ever since Joe Biden was declared President-elect earlier this month, the Trump campaign has made a target of cities, falsely accusing them of voter fraud and corruption.
But not all cities. Really just cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee -- cities that either are majority Black or have large Black populations.
"You knew if you lived in Philadelphia. Unless you're stunod -- that's an Italian expression for stupid -- unless you're stupid, you knew that a lot of people were coming over from Camden to vote," he said. "They do every year. Happens all the time in Philly. ... And it's allowed to happen because it's a Democrat (sic), corrupt city, and has been for years. Many, many years. And they carried it out in places where they could get away from it."
Such claims are dangerous and bad not only because they're
free of facts -- but also because they
use the same racist messaging that's defined the Trump administration for the past four years.
[...]
And yet, the Trump campaign has said little about suburban voters. Instead, it's stuck to rhetoric
as old as Jim Crow, rhetoric that most leaders of the Republican Party are nurturing with their silence: that Black votes shouldn't count.
The contempt for Black voters' political power is more than rhetoric, though. For the Republican Party, which has grown increasingly allergic to rules and reality, it's also a driver of strategy.
"This is perhaps the most consequential election for African Americans and people of color since the election of 1860, or at least since 1960 or 1964," the University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor
Bertrall Ross said in September. "What we're seeing in the (Trump) campaign now is the same voter suppression practices we have seen historically to target African Americans and other people of color. But this time, those who promote voter suppression will have the pandemic as both a justification for voter suppression practices and a tool to support the practices."
Thousands of people — almost entirely white people -- stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn a democratic election largely because too many Black people vote. This was yet another attempt at the Tulsa Sized Massacre. Killing members of Congress and the Vice President was the goal.
You have to admit, that is some pretty fraking racist shit.
21 States are currently implementing legislation to block the teaching of “Critical Race Theory" or frankly, history, in their public schools.
Tennessee’s legislature is the latest red state to block the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, as a number of Republican-led states have taken steps to limit or ban such “woke philosophies” from becoming part of the curriculum.
The Tennessee bill, which came at the end of the legislative session, would ban schools from teaching that “the rule of law does not exist, but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.”
“That is the very definition of critical race theory,” Republican state Sen. Brian Kelsey said, according to The Tennessean. “I was subject to this teaching 20 years ago in law school and know it very well, and that is the very definition of it.”
Republicans in Texas are also moving ahead to forbid the teaching of “woke philosophies” like critical race theory, arguing that “traditional history” should be taught in classrooms.
A Senate bill, authored by GOP state Sen. Brandon Creighton, says that “no teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs.”
That and a bill in the House would ban teachers from teaching “anti-racist” material, and from receiving private funding or material for teaching the controversial 1619 Project.
Critical Race Theory is a graduate study of how facially neutral laws can be and have been implemented in a method that produces a disparate racial impact. It has nothing to do with personal animus between one racial group and another, it's doesn't promote “embarrassment” or “jealousy” between racial groups. It isn't taught in K-12 schools.
This is a clear power grab to block the teaching of actual history when there are racial impacts and consequences, it's government reaching down into the schools and muzzling teachers from addressing the truth.
One thing they could teach is that truthfully, is that Abraham Lincoln was essentially a racist. Yes, he was. He believed that the White Man was superior to African Slaves. he argued against Slavery as an institution, but he had no special love for black people and had proposed sending them all back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation didn't really "Free the Slaves", it was more of a military ploy and ultimatum to the South to get them to surrender by threatening to take their slaves away and put them in the Union Army.
On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Lincoln didn’t actually free any of the approximately 4 million men, women and children held in slavery in the United States when he signed the formal Emancipation Proclamation the following January. The document applied only to enslaved people in the Confederacy, and not to those in the border states that remained loyal to the Union.
But although it was presented chiefly as a military measure, the proclamation marked a crucial shift in Lincoln’s views on slavery. Emancipation would redefine the Civil War, turning it from a struggle to preserve the Union to one focused on ending slavery, and set a decisive course for how the nation would be reshaped after that historic conflict.
The new declaration of the Juneteenth Holiday as the “End of Slavery" is erroneous since it frankly did nothing of the kind. Under the Emancipation Proclamation, all counties in the US which were not in a state of rebellion were able to keep their slaves. Those additional persons weren't freed until the passage and ratification of the 13th Amendment which itself didn't totally end slavery either because it contains a fairly large loophole.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So America will have no slavery or involuntary servitude unless you've been convicted by a court.
Just think for a moment, we all know from documentation that more white people use and sell drugs, but somehow our jails wind up filled with black people. What a coincidence?
The overwhelming increase in incarceration, attributed to the drug war, has disproportionately impacted Black communities. In 2011, Blacks were incarcerated at a dramatically higher rate than Whites (5–7 times) and accounted for almost half of all prisoners incarcerated with a sentence of more than one year for a drug-related offense (Carson and Sabol 2012). Accordingly, researchers and policy analysts have sought to understand both the causes and effects of the nation’s war on drugs and its implications for racial equality (Ghandoosh 2015; Travis, Western, & Redburn 2014; Alexander, 2012; Drucker 2013; Mauer 2006). They have explored racial bias in the criminal justice system and criminal justice outcomes, including police practices, arrest rates, convictions, sentence lengths, diversionary opportunities, and community supervision; judicial policies and laws such as precedent-setting court cases and mandatory minimum sentences; and media trends and their influence on public opinion. This literature demonstrates greater likelihood of Black involvement in the criminal justice system through policing practices and sentencing policies for drug-related crime, differences in sentencing practices and case processing, and the heightened disadvantage Blacks face once they are removed from their communities, and upon return, as labeled felons and drug offenders.
Black people are receiving sentences that are 5-7 times longer than White people FOR. THE. SAME. CRIME. This is not an accident. This is not “dumb luck." This is the plan. This is "disparate impact.” The bigoted systems that implemented chattel slavery continue to exist within our justice system and are using black bodies as a commodity in the private for-profit prison system where corporations make millions from incarcerating black and brown men, and occasionally forcing them to do manual labor for pennies on the dollar.
The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same.
Another perfect example of how laws can be implemented with a racially disparate impact is to focus on the 43 States that have recently passed voter suppression laws intended to block minorities from voting.
In 43 states across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Even more proposals have been introduced since then.
Proponents say the provisions are necessary to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections after the 2020 presidential contest, when then-President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud convinced millions of his supporters that the results were rigged against him.
But in most cases, Republicans are proposing solutions in states where elections ran smoothly, including in many with results that Trump and his allies did not contest or allege to be tainted by fraud. The measures are likely to disproportionately affect those in cities and Black voters in particular, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic — laying bare, critics say, the GOP’s true intent: gaining electoral advantage.
The rush to crack down on voting methods comes after many states temporarily expanded mail and early voting in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to the largest voter turnout in more than a century. The changes reshaped both who turned out and how they voted, with an astounding 116 million people — 73 percent of the electorate — casting their ballots before Election Day, according to The Post’s analysis.
This isn't “like" Jim Crow, it is Jim Crow.
Prior to passage of the Voting Rights Act — which remains neutered and Republicans continue to block it's restoration — facial neutral rules such as poll taxes and literacy tests were used to block the vote for minorities. Even then they claimed — falsely -- that “it's not racial”, but the tests were crafted either to be impossible to answer or to have two valid answers to every question so that it was entirely up to the opinion of the person validating the test as to whether anyone would pass or not.
No, being gay is no longer a crime. Yes, the LGBTQ community is often celebrated and welcomed. Except that the Supreme Court just ruled that the right to discriminate for religious organizations is greater than the human and civil rights of LGBT people when they ruled that a Catholic Adoption Service had the right to refuse same-sex couples. Just as the Supreme Court previously ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that a “religiously owned" company had the right to refuse to pay for their employee's contraception on the basis that it was "abortiaphasic" — which is a nonsense term.
We also have many states banning Trans athletes from women's sports.
(NewsNation Now) — Lawmakers in several states have introduced bills this year that would ban transgender women and girls from competing on women’s sports teams.
In the first five months of 2021 alone, five governors signed bills banning transgender individuals from sports in some capacity.
There’s no authoritative count of how many trans athletes have competed recently in high school or college sports. Neither the NCAA nor most state high school athletic associations collect that data.
Transgender adults make up a small portion of the U.S. population, about 1.4 million, according to the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law that specializes in research on LGBTQ issues.
There are also states that are banning doctors from treating Trans children.
Arkansas has become the first state to ban gender-affirming treatments and surgery for transgender youth, after lawmakers overrode the governor’s objections to enact the ban on Tuesday.
The state’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, had vetoed the bill on Monday following pleas from pediatricians, social workers and the parents of trans youth who said the measure would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide. The ban was opposed by several medical and child welfare groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.
However the Republican-controlled house and senate voted to override Hutchinson’s veto.
Overall the frustrating lack of action and seriousness to address police violence and murder, the growth in states measures to block black people from voting and to block even the open discussion of our racial history while the SCOTUS continues to grant an open door to religious discrimination is not exactly the "worst it's ever been."
There were many individual black people who got ahead, who accomplished much, who became rich and famous right in the middle of the worst elements of Jim Crow. One or a few people doing well doesn't mean that racial discrimination and violence hs gone away.
It's the worst it's been since the last worst - which IMO was in 1968 when the Watts riots erupted. In the last year we've had hundreds of riots, so it's not substantively all that different when you look below the surface.
The conflict has been with us constantly, only the thin veneer of “normality” of it all has changed.
And now we have a black guy as “Jake” from State Farm.
Yes, of course, there has been progress, a great deal of progress. But you have to realize that the better things get, the more concentrated and intense the resistance to that progress becomes. The more you push forward, the more viciously the opposition pushes back.