We start today with Charles Blow of The New York Times writing that those racist recordings by a few members of the Los Angeles City Council which, yesterday, resulted in the resignation of Council President Nury Martinez, weren’t simply concerning racist speech but also political power.
In the recordings, the Council president, Nury Martinez, who resigned as Council president on Monday and resigned from the Council on Wednesday, offered the most egregious comments. She insulted people in the crudest, most racially offensive ways, comparing a colleague’s Black son to a monkey and appearing to insult Oaxacans — people from the disproportionately Indigenous Oaxaca region of Mexico — by calling them “little short dark people” who are “ugly.”
But what disturbs me most is the racial, ethnic tribalism of her political calculations. After all, the recording is of a meeting to discuss the city’s once-in-a-decade redistricting process. This is a meeting about power, about who can be helped — or hurt — by how districts are drawn[...]
To be clear, I believe in representative distribution of political power. Los Angeles is nearly half Latino. There should be strong, unapologetic Latino political power in that city. In fact, underrepresentation is a problem that continues to plague the Latino community. [...]
That imbalance must be remedied. The problem this recording poses is that the people on the call seem to see power among the city’s constituents as a zero-sum game, and in that game, they openly disparaged other groups because of their identities.
Xochitl Gonzalez of The Atlantic says that Latino anti-Blackness only furthers white supremacy. (Since Gonzalez’s newsletter is for subscribers only and the bulk of the commentary is about the LA City Council, the excerpt that I chose here is an anecdote with a powerful moral.)
An anecdote: I went to junior high school in a racist, predominantly Italian American neighborhood that I believe—given that a mob of white teens lynched a Black kid there while I was a student—I can safely describe as such. In school, there were the “cool kids,” who were Italian, and then there was “everybody else”—including the “Spanish kids.” Because many of the Italians weren’t “allowed” to socialize with us, we formed a clique of our own, and I eventually found love with a Dominican boy whom I would make out with on a corner after school. In 2022, we would describe my novio as Afro-Latino; in 1990, he was just Dominican.
One day, we came out of school to find the streetlamps plastered with makeshift “wanted” posters with a photograph that showed me and him kissing. The crime he was “wanted” for was his being Black and my being “something else.” Kids at school couldn’t invite me over because I was “Spanish,” but, according to the person who made the poster, I was white enough to be in “danger.” In reality the only person in danger was my Black novio. We stopped making out near school. Racism both brought us together and then pulled us apart.
Here’s a news flash to non-Black Latinos—from a person who, you can scroll up and confirm, looks pretty caucasian: Your “whiteness” will always be relative. You can utter as much garbage as you want about Black people; you can vote Republican; you can lead the Proud Boys. You will never “achieve” whiteness. The “gift” bestowed upon Italians and the Irish isn’t happening for us. So, you can discriminate against Black people and Afro-Latinos all you want. It won’t make you white. It just makes you a racist person of color. A Brown Clayton Bigsby. A fool.
Thursday at 1PM, the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol will hold what is likely to be its final committee meeting. Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany of The Washington Post gives us a preview.
During Thursday’s hearing, the committee plans to share new video footage and internal Secret Service emails that appear to corroborate parts of the most startling inside accounts of that day, said the people briefed, who, like others who spoke to The Washington Post, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive records and conversations. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in June that Trump was briefed on Jan. 6 that some of his supporters were armed for battle, demanded they be allowed into his rally and insisted he wanted to lead them on their march to the Capitol.
Surveillance footage the committee plans to share was taken near the Ellipse that morning before Trump’s speech and shows throngs of his supporters clustered just outside the corralled area for his “Stop the Steal” rally. Secret Service officers screened those entering who sought to get closer to the stage. Law enforcement officials who were monitoring video that morning spotted Trump supporters with plastic shields, bulletproof vests and other paramilitary gear, and some in the Secret Service concluded they stayed outside the rally area to avoid having their weapons confiscated, according to people familiar with the new records.
Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters from an American Substack about the Alex Jones verdict.
Today, a jury in a civil trial in Connecticut determined that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems, the parent company of his “InfoWars” network, must pay $965 million to the families of eight of those murdered at Sandy Hook and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. A previous decision in a similar case left Jones with an order to pay almost $50 million to the parents of one of the other Sandy Hook victims, and a third Sandy Hook damages trial is pending.[...]
Jones was not at the court today. He was broadcasting, making fun of the proceedings, and begging his followers for money, promising it would not go to pay the damages because he had declared bankruptcy and, in any case, he intended to appeal.
What we are seeing is what happens when the MAGA narrative meets a legal system that requires sworn testimony and recognizes perjury as a crime.
Jones and InfoWars pushed the lies that fueled the rise of today’s Republican extremists, and Jones is a prominent Trump supporter who was part of the events in Washington on January 5 and 6, 2021. Tonight, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended him, saying that “all he did was speak words,” and suggesting the case against him was “political persecution.” Like others on the right, Greene suggests this case is about free speech, when in fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution protects us only from the government silencing us. It does not stop legal responsibility for damage our words cause, for which Jones has been found liable. A jury—not the government—has assigned the $965 million award to those whose lives Jones harmed.
Stephanie K. Baer of Buzzfeed writes about the oral arguments before the Supreme Court that could change the way artists create art,
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., v. Lynn Goldsmith stems from the foundation’s licensing of one of Warhol’s prints to Vanity Fair for a commemorative issue about Prince following his death in 2016. After seeing the magazine cover with the print depicting the musician’s face and the backdrop in an orange tint, Goldsmith, who is best known for her portraits of rock icons, was sure the image infringed her copyright. Decades before, she’d licensed her black-and-white photo of Prince to Vanity Fair so it could provide the image to Warhol as a reference to create an illustration for a 1984 issue. But she never knew that Warhol created 15 other silkscreen paintings, prints, and drawings of Prince based on her original photograph.
The central question of the case has been whether Warhol needed Goldsmith’s permission, which he wouldn’t have if his works fell under fair use, a legal doctrine that aims to protect freedom of expression in criticism, news reporting, and other areas. An appeals court previously ruled in Goldsmith’s favor, and now the matter is in the Supreme Court’s hands.
In a lively hearing peppered with references to Lord of the Rings, TV shows, the "Mona Lisa," and Justice Clarence Thomas’s taste in music, the justices seemed dismissive of a lower court’s holding that judges shouldn’t try to "ascertain the intent behind or meaning of the works at issue” when trying to determine the purpose and character of a work — something that’s part of the fair use test. But it was unclear whether they believed the foundation’s argument that the Warhol prints substantially transformed the meaning of the original photograph was strong enough to outweigh the copyright claim.
Only on Thursdays, apparently, Justice Thomas replied. I could say a whole lot of things but I won’t.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post points out that Kanye West’s approach to the fashion industry was a prelude specifically to his antisemitic comments and, more generally, to some of his worst overall behaviors.
Fashion was the prelude to this latest conflagration, the one that sparked the antisemitic comments that got West locked out of social media and that had him preaching a two-hour self-aggrandizing sermon to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. During West’s recent Yeezy fashion show in Paris, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “White Lives Matter,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.” He had a similar shirt as part of the presentation. West told Carlson that the shirt was his way of simply stating the obvious. One wishes this was true.
The words cannot so easily be separated from the racially fraught context out of which they grew, the degree to which they have been weaponized by white supremacists and, ultimately, the untrustworthiness of the messenger. West has never simply stated anything. He speaks in elliptical phrases and provocative suggestions. They are laced with umbrage and suspicion and paranoia.
The fashion industry, with which West has had a long and abusive relationship, seems especially capable of enraging him. He is the domineering interloper intent on telling the industry all the ways in which it displeases him. It’s the business that he set out to conquer with unbridled love and intent. He wasn’t stealthy in his wooing of fashion; he came at it with lusty desire and presented himself earnestly to its most influential gatekeepers.
Mike Freeman, writing for USA Today, points out that former Auburn football coach and current U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville is probably not alone in holding rancid racial views while relying on Black athletes to make millions of dollars off of their labor.
Tuberville spent decades as a college coach, both at the University of Mississippi and Auburn. How many college football coaches are like Tuberville? How many do what he apparently did: make millions off the labor of Black athletes while apparently hiding their disdain for those same Black people?[...]
It's unfair and inaccurate to say all white college football coaches feel the way Tuberville does. But if you think it's just a small amount of college coaches, you're a fool. You haven't been paying attention.
Last year UT-Chattanooga fired an assistant coach for a horribly racist tweet about Stacey Abrams, who is now running for governor of Georgia. Former TCU football coach Gary Patterson used the N-word with his players. He's now an assistant coach at the University of Texas.
Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy has had numerous issues with race. University of Iowa football players sued the school for racial discrimination. There was the resignation of Cale Gundy. There was the embarrassingly tone-deaf use of a Trayvon Martin photo by Ohio State to enforce the team's rule prohibiting use of hooded sweatshirts.
Jeremy Shapiro of WarOntheRocks argues that we may be on the path of nuclear war.
As the war has moved against the Russians, they have drawn numerous red lines to warn the West against escalation. The Russians called the provision of long-range rocket systems near the Russian border “intolerable,” warned against the admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO, and threatened that any attack on Crimea would “ignite judgment day.” In each case, the crossing of these Russian red lines by Ukraine, the United States, or Europe generated some sort of response but fell well short of Russian threats.
As Russian red lines have proven very pink, they are increasingly questioned in the West. Numerous Western commentators now assert that Russia is a paper tiger and dismiss Russian nuclear threats as “bluster.” The most recent Russian red line warns against the provision of long-range missile systems to Ukraine. The Russian government says that if the United States crosses this line, it would become “a direct party to the conflict.” Given all of the red lines already crossed, however, it is doubtful that U.S. decision-makers see such threats as very meaningful.
The problem that the Russians have had in their signaling is that their decision to escalate likely revolves around the progress that the Ukrainians make on the ground, not on any discrete action (such as the provision of new weapons systems) that the West might take. The likelihood of escalation, in other words, has stemmed from developments on the battlefield, not from the crossing of some arbitrary red line. Experts on the Russian military have long suspected that Russian nuclear signaling is an elaborate bluff meant to instill fear and caution in a weak-willed Western enemy. But events in Ukraine and the possibility of a catastrophic military loss may have changed that calculation. Nobody really knows. It is likely that the Russians don’t know either.
Finally today, Jessica Elgot, Peter Walker, and Pippa Crerar of the Guardian write that some Tory MPs have already had enough of Prime Minister Liz Truss.
On the day of her first parliamentary showdown since the Conservative party conference, MPs renewed serious conversations about the prospect of replacing her. The prime minister has pledged to step up engagement with restive MPs with a series of round tables over the next week.
No 10 has publicly denied there is any new examination of the tax cuts announced in the mini-budget, including tweaks to the timing of the income tax cut or a reevaluation of the cancelled corporation tax rise.
The former chancellor Sajid Javid and the chair of the Treasury select committee, Mel Stride, voiced fears about the current approach and suggested the Treasury would need to look again at the measures announced by the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, last month.
At a meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee, MPs described her performance as “just appalling” and raised serious concerns about mortgage rates and polls showing a hefty Labour lead.
It’s all just a sign of the times.
Have a good day, everyone!