Just like the charge of “socialism” against Democrats, the charge of “racism” has far too often been used as the go-to argument against the policies of Republicans and conservatives. It’s become so common that it has become essentially meaningless. That’s an argument that was used just last week by White House adviser Stephen Miller in defending criticism lobbed at several of Donald Trump’s bigoted tweets.
[Chris] Wallace played clips of Trump promoting “birther” conspiracy theory, describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.
In response, Miller dismissed “racist” as “a label that has been too often deployed by the left [and] Democrats in this country to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with.”
Unfortunately for Miller, the statements he is trying to defend here, such as the attacks on members of Congress as being from “crime-infested” places and the argument that they should “go back where they came from,” simply don’t make sense in any other context except as a racist trope. There isn’t an honest, legitimate policy point to be made here, just that “minorities live in crime, poverty, squalor” and they don’t deserve to be in America at all. It’s pure unadulterated white nationalism and supremacy—straight, no chaser.
There have been times throughout history when the “racism” charge has been deployed a little too quickly and a little too easily. But this isn’t one of those times.
The reporting is that Trump only attacked Rep. Elijah Cummings because he had issued a subpoena for his daughter Ivanka’s emails, since she and husband (and Trump adviser) Jared Kushner have been both been using a private Trump email server while working in the White House.
According to people briefed on the discussion who spoke to the Times, several White House officials agreed during a recent meeting with senior staff that rhetoric wasn’t helpful, but said they didn’t know if they could or should try to stop the President. While there have been recent reports that the ramped up rhetoric is a new campaign strategy, these officials dismissed that notion, according to the Times, arguing the derision would end up hurting him with moderate voters.
Trump was privately complaining about Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) all weekend, three advisers told the Times. They said Trump’s main source of frustration with the congressman of color stemmed from the House Oversight Committee’s decision to subpoena White House officials for their use of personal accounts for work-related business. The probe is believed to specifically target Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both senior adviser who have admitted to using personal accounts for official business.
Why did Trump go after Cummings like this? Well, for the same reason that he went after Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley ,and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It had nothing to do with the where they “came from.” It was because they had been so vocal and effective in their criticism of his inhumane border policies.
Rather than admit that it’s actually legal to use a personal email account while working for the government (as long as you also comply with government records requests and ensure that any email that involves your official business is also copied or forwarded to a government account so it can be recorded), Trump instead decided to lash out at Cummings, attacking his city for being vermin-infested and ultimately calling him “Racist” for apparently no reason at all. This is a “kill the messenger” tactic by smearing them with a charge which is almost entirely made up in order to discredit what they have to say. Trump really doesn’t know anything about any of these people he attacks, other than what he can see: their race. This frankly, is his go-to move.
Recently columnist Michelle Goldberg said on MSNBC: “[Trump] believes he won because he was willing to say terrible things about immigrants and Muslims and people of color and the Archie Bunker demographic responded to that. He believes that about his base.” She continued: “He believes far more than Hillary Clinton ever did, even though she used the word ‘deplorables,’ it’s Donald Trump who truly believes his base is deplorable.” Attacking Cummings and the others is a means to an end. He distracts and retaliates against the subpoena issued against Ivanka (which he won’t let her honor until he’s forced to by a court) and he also in the process intimidates any other congressional committee chair and manages to yet again energize his base who, simply put, love this shit.
Let’s recall that Jared Kushner once defended Trump’s birtherism by claiming that he was only doing it because Republicans were dumb enough to fall for it.
His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is also a senior adviser to the president, allegedly told a former editor of the newspaper he once owned that the billionaire real-estate mogul didn't believe his own "birtherism" claims, and only made them to charge up Republicans because they are "stupid," GQ reported.
During a discussion on how to cover Trump, the former New York Observer editor, Elizabeth Spiers, claimed she told Kushner that she had serious problems with Trump's repeated claims that Obama was not born in the U.S., to which Kushner allegedly told her: "He doesn't really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they'll buy it."
Just like his attacks on Obama then, Trump’s attacks on Cummings, Omar, Tlaib and the rest are more of the same: Attack the black person and attack the immigrant in order to get his base to cheer, and also chant “send her back.” Just like “lock her up” against Hillary Clinton, because she had a private mail server and supposedly didn’t comply with a congressional subpeona for the emails on that server. Just like Ivanka and Jared, neither of whom should have ever been granted a security clearance in the first place.
When confronted more recently with questions about Trump’s racism, Kushner defended it by claiming it wasn’t “real racism.” But when the subject of his birtherism came up Kushner struggled to distance himself from it by repeatedly saying he “wasn’t involved in any of that.”
“You can’t not be a racist for 69 years and then run for president and be a racist,” the senior adviser told Swan. “And what I’ll say is, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer from real racism in this country.”
When asked if Kushner thought Trump’s so-called birther conspiracy theory was racist, he repeatedly said, “Look, I wasn’t really involved in that.”
Kushner also avoided answering the question of whether he thought Trump’s campaigning on a Muslim ban was an example of the president’s religious bigotry, saying: “I think the president did his campaign the way he did his campaign.”
The simple fact is that Trump is and has been a racist for his entire life, largely because his father was a racist as well. I’ve previously noted the examples and litany of their bigotry, and it is quite long.
Who exactly didn’t know this after his claim that Mexicans are “rapists”; his attempt to ban Muslims from entering the country; his reference to “shithole countries”; birtherism; his calling for the death penalty against the Exonerated 5 from the Central Park Jogger case; his being sued twice for housing discrimination; his father saying “You know I don't rent to n*ggers”; his father being arrested at a 1927 Klan riot; the Polish Gang and his encouraging clients of his modeling agency to violate immigration laws; saying Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s judgement can’t be trusted because he has Mexican heritage; saying that Gold Star Mother Ghazala Khan didn’t speak at the DNC for cultural reasons; claiming there were “fine people” on both sides of a violent alt-right attack on Charlotesville, including those who support keeping the favorite flag of the Klan on public and state property; “I don’t like black guys touching my money”; trying to convince The Apprentice first season runner-up Kwame Jackson that he should share his win with a white guy; repeatedly using the n-word backstage at The Apprentice; saying “black people are too stupid to vote for me” and “Haitians all have AIDS”; and finally, his use of a phrase that’s literally in the EEOC manual as a prime example of discrimination, when he told four U.S. citizens who happen to be members of Congress to “go back to the [crime-infested countries]” they came from?
If you are to accept Kushner’s “real racist” framing in defending Trump, one has to wonder exactly what that would look like out in public? Is there anything that looks more like a “real racist” than Trump’s spittle-flecked rant in defense of the neo-Nazi gangs who staged a riot in Charlottesville?
Again, even if you accept Trump’s excuse that he did “condemn” those neo-Nazis (whom he didn’t even mention until his second try), he still tried to claim that there were some “very fine people” who somehow weren’t neo-Nazis, but still apparently stood in ideological solidarity with those neo-Nazis and their support for keeping monuments that celebrated the state’s right to implement systematic subjugation and terrorism against certain parts of the population for profit. Those monuments had been used to celebrate the rise of the KKK in the early 1910s, and to intimidate and terrorize the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Yet he somehow found a way to put blame on the “alt-left,” who were only defending themselves from a violent neo-Nazi invasion.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump later asked. “Do they have any assemblage of guilt? What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
“I’m not finished, fake news,” Trump said as members of the media pressed him on his moral equivalency.
“If you were honest reporters, which in many cases, you are not, many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump later said. “This week, it is Robert E. Lee … is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
This tactic of turning the argument around to attack those who were on the receiving end of the bigotry isn’t just an accident. It’s the plan.
Kushner claims that Trump isn’t racist, apparently because he doesn’t go around dropping the N-word every five seconds and he’s been occasionally nice to a black person once or twice in his life, like Kanye or A$AP Rocky. But really that argument means that he’s something much much worse than just merely racist: It means that he’s willing to take and use racist tools and use them to his own benefit. He’s willing to excuse racism, rationalize racism, pander to racism, justify racism, promote racism, and turn that racism into a weapon against his political opponents. If he’s not a racist, he’s a racism publicist, a racism promoter, a racism cheerleader, a racial arsonist and a bigot booster.
Sure, he’s not a “real” racist — whatever that is — but he thinks the primary central base of the GOP is racist and he’s more than willing to pander to them in order to manipulate them to his side. He supports and repeats the bigoted bullshit that they believe, so they therefore support him. It’s a symbiosis of suck.
And that includes the “real racists” like David Duke, who are literally all in for Trump.
David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, is unambiguous about what Saturday’s alt-right and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, means to him: It’s the fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s vision for America.
“We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said from the rally, calling it a “turning point.” “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”
The “real racists” feel that Trump is on their side, so what side does that put the GOP on?
The other problem with Kushner and Miller’s defense of Trump’s blatant racism here is that they mischaracterize why the “racist” charge comes up. People aren’t using it as a cudgel just to discredit the opposition’s argument. It comes up so often against the GOP because they themselves so often push policies that are based in bigoted concepts. The very idea of banning all Muslims from entering the nation because of the fear of a few who might happen to have been radicalized jihadists—even those who are Shia and are being targeted by the jihadists who are largely Suni—is bigoted, and dumb, at it’s core. The idea that there was ever anything wrong with former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is bigoted, because it suggests that an African American who was as smart and articulate as Obama couldn’t possibly have been a descendant of former slaves and had to be a direct foreign transplant. Closing the border is largely about preventing the browning of America, not preventing crime or preventing terrorism.
There comes a point where it’s not just a political dodge to say something is “racist”: it’s the God’s honest truth. Trump attacks various congresspeople of color from Rep. Ilhan Omar to Rep. Cummings and the entire city of Baltimore, arguing that the city is “rat infested” when his own father was arrested in 1976 for the deplorable conditions of his buildings in Maryland.
Fred Trump failed to pay for repairs mandated by local officials in Prince George County, where he owned apartment buildings in Seat Pleasant — and his housing license was revoked, preventing him from signing leases with new tenants.
The elder Trump agreed to fly to Maryland to meet with local officials on Sept. 29, 1976 — and he was arrested on arrival.
“We probably haven’t issued four arrest warrants in the past five years,” said Joseph Healey, the county’s housing inspector supervisor, at the time of the arrest.
The Trump Organization, whose president at the time was Donald Trump, essentially stopped making repairs on those buildings after white residents fled to the suburbs and the apartments were largely rented out by black tenants.
So it was the Trump family and organization itself who were the ones responsible for the poor conditions that their black tenants found themselves in, and this isn’t just a story from the ‘70s. Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and family have continued this same practice in their properties in Baltimore, where they have a rodent problem.
The Washington Post pointed out on Sunday that rental properties in Baltimore owned by Kushner Companies, the real estate company formerly led by Jared Kushner before being appointed White House senior advisor, have been hit with a series of complaints by tenants who say that their buildings’ management has often failed to carry out basic upkeep and maintenance.
The Post cited a joint 2017 investigative story by the New York Times and ProPublica, which detailed how tenants experienced mold, water damage, raw sewage leaks–and yes, mouse infestations.
Families likes the Trumps and the Kushners along with racial red-lining and white flight from the cities to the suburbs — as noted by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on Reprations — are exactly why there are pockets of urban blight in our inner cities, these are the ethnic traps that black and brown people have been herded into for decades. Blaming black people for the conditions they were deliberately manipulated into is just adding insult to the injury.
On MSNBC, Trump housing official (and very special black friend for Brett Kavanaugh) Lynn Patton squirmed when she was asked if Baltimore being “rodent and rat invested” is her responsiblity to deal with. She said in response that she doesn’t have responsibility for Baltimore, she oversees New York and New Jersey. But when asked about Trump’s responsibility, she says it’s actually the mayor’s fault.
“What about Baltimore though, specifically?” Jones pressed her.
“The president gave Elijah Cummings’ district $16 billion last year,” said Patton.
“But I’m asking you specifically, as someone who oversees HUD, you have a lot of residences that are in Baltimore,” said Jones. “What do you say to the people who live in Baltimore that take offense to that?”
“I don’t know why they would take offense,” said Patton.
“He called the city vermin-infested, is it vermin-infested?” said Jones.
“It is vermin-infested,” replied Patton.
“A lot of those buildings are buildings that you oversee, though,” said Jones. “Isn’t that your responsibility? Is that your responsibility to oversee?”
“It’s not mine, actually,” said Patton. “I oversee New York and New Jersey.”
“Okay, but I’m asking, is that the Trump administration’s responsibility to make sure that these buildings are not vermin-infested?”
“No, it’s actually run by the mayor,” said Patton, implicitly contradicting Trump’s claim that Cummings was to blame for the state of Baltimore.
“But he’s the president,” said Jones.
So, exactly what has Cummings got to do with any of that? Nothing.
Patton’s boss, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, then went on the white nationalist favorite Tucker Carlson program to defend and excuse Trump’s racist bullshit about “rat infested Baltimore,” even though it literally is his responsibility.
“As a pediatric neurosurgeon, I spent many hours, sometimes operating all night long, trying to give children of Baltimore and other places around the world a second chance at life. And usually we were successful,” Carson told Fox News host Tucker Carlson Monday, as The Washington Post reports.
[...] “But a few days later, I was in a horrible dilemma, because some of those kids had to go back into homes in East Baltimore that were infested with rats and roaches and ticks and mold and lead and violence,” Carson said. “And I didn’t want to send them back. Sometimes I would even consider, you know, extra tests so they could stay in the hospital an extra day or two.”
Carson is literally now in a position to do something about the problem that he notes here, but instead is spending all his time and energy massively cutting funding for HUD.
The plan unveiled Monday is less detailed than the equivalent proposals HUD has put out each of the past two years when the budget season wasn’t marred by a government shutdown, housing policy experts said. Closer analysis of how this year’s plan might differ from those precedents will have to wait until HUD releases full program-level specifics in the coming weeks.
But despite the fuzziness, the broad contours of the budget released Monday are consistent with longstanding Trump administration themes concerning the agency and its mission. It would impose rent hikes on the poorest tenants of publicly-subsidized rental housing, zero out all funding for the Community Development Block Grants program, and retreat from federal responsibilities on housing construction and maintenance in both urban and rural communities.
“They’re willing to pay for increases they want to the defense budget on the back of America’s poorest families,” Sarah Mickelson of the National Low Income Housing Coalition told ThinkProgress. “We’re in the midst of this housing crisis and Trump wants to walk away from America’s commitment to housing and increase rents on poor families.”
Though HUD portrays itself as seeking to increase funding for various programs, the spending it proposes would actually be 18 percent below what Congress gave the agency for 2019. The difference reflects how unpopular Trump and HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s proposals were with lawmakers. Even when fellow Republicans had more influence in the budget process, Mickelson said, the executive duo couldn’t sell ideas that appear again in this year’s budget, such as the cancellation of the Community Development Block Grant program, cuts to rental assistance, and a major retreat from public housing maintenance and other federal responsibilities.
He’s the guy actually in charge of the Housing Department, and he’s spent his time gutting that department and making things worse rather than better. Instead of prosecuting discriminating slum lords (like Trump was in the ‘70s) or Kushner, he’s turned a blind eye.
Like Kushner, Miller, Patton, Carson, and the entire GOP have been forced into the position of having to defend the racism that is obviously at the center of Trump’s statements and policies, and they all have to try and deny and deflect from that racism. It doesn’t matter what’s in his heart anymore. It doesn’t matter if Trump is a “real racist” like David Duke (who actually claims he’s not racist also). It matters that they are all on the same page, with the same agenda and the same goals.
When asked whether he thinks Trump supports him, Duke said he doesn't know what Trump thinks of him.
"Donald Trump has to run his own campaign; I have to run my own campaign," he said.
"I don't know if he's with me or not but I would hope that he and others would realize that the same lies they make about him is what they say about me," he said. "I've always said that I'm for equal rights for all people, but I also believe that European-Americans shouldn't be facing discrimination either."
He was confident that Trump backers in Louisiana would support his Senate run.
"We've already polled inside the Trump voters, and we know that we're going to carry 75 to 80 percent of those who are going to vote for Trump," he said.
Steve asked, "You think Trump voters are your voters?"
"Well, of course they are!" Duke said. "Because I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well."
Just as Duke claims, the majority of the GOP doesn’t believe that there is rampant discrimination against people of color anymore. They think that the majority of discrimination is against white people.
In the survey, 85 percent of registered voters said that African-Americans face discrimination to some degree. That view was shared by 95 percent of Democratic respondents and 78 percent of Republicans. Eighty-two percent of independent voters agreed.
Partisans also broadly agreed that Hispanics face societal bias. Eighty-one percent of the entire sample said that Latino Americans experience discrimination, a view that was shared by 92 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents and 72 percent of Republicans.
Respondents were much more divided over whether people of European descent encounter bias in American society.
A significant majority of Republican voters, 75 percent, said that white Americans are subject to discrimination. Most independents, 55 percent, agreed.
Democrats differed strongly with only 38 percent saying that whites faced discrimination. Sixty-two percent of Democratic respondents said that European-Americans face almost no discrimination or none whatsoever.
Overall, 55 percent of respondents said that white people must deal with societal bias. White voters were much more likely than Hispanic or black respondents to agree. Sixty-two percent of white respondents said that European Americans experience discrimination while 38 percent said they face none or almost none.
Republicans also don’t think that saying the N-word is a bad thing.
The Post reports that just one-third (33%) of Trump voters now consider it racist to use the n-word. By comparison, 86% of Hillary Clinton voters believe it is racist to use the n-word.
Tesler provides graphs that show just over the past three years Republicans find the use of the n-word decreasingly offensive. Democrats, and at a faster rate, increasingly find it offensive.
Further illustrating the difference in how Trump voters view race, less than one in four Trump voters disagreed with this statement:
“I prefer my close relatives marry spouses of their same race.”
63% of Clinton voters disagreed with the statement.
Former GOP analyst Tara Setmeyer has recently said that GOPers will defend Trump until he uses the “N-Word,” but it appears now that the majority of the Republican Party would not have a problem with that. They’d be just fine with it. They would come up with an excuse for it, then they would defend it and argue that he was merely beiing “politically incorrect.” It would be proof that he’s really “one of them,” because I mean really who doesn’t mutter “fcking n*ggers” under their breath every once in a while, right?
Again, it has to be said that there’s something worse than a “real racist”: It’s the person who stands by and ignores that racism. Excuses that racism. Justifies that racism.Enables, empowers, and collaborates with that racism. “Real racists” like David Duke are indeed rare—but racism enablers and collaborators are, frankly, pretty common.
The larger problem with racism either “real” or enabled isn’t just the hatefulness of it. As I wrote last week, studies indicate that conservatives tend to have an overdeveloped amygdala, which heightens the tendency to be directed by fear-based emotions.
Brain scans show that people who self-identify as conservative have larger and more active right amygdalas, an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear. This aligns with the idea that feeling afraid makes people lean more to the right.
One 2013 study showed conservative brains tend to have more activity in their right amygdalas when they're taking risks than liberals do.
Groundbreaking research that Yale psychologists published in 2017 revealed that helping people imagine they're completely safe from harm can make them (temporarily) hold more liberal views on social issues.
The authors of that study said their results suggest that socially conservative views are driven, at least in part, by people's need to feel safe and secure.
Racism is the result of flawed thinking. I’ve long argued that holding a negative or positive view of a large group of unique individuals, who each have their own qualities, is a part of confirmation bias run amok.
Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.
Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. Thus, we may become prisoners of our assumptions. For example, some people will have a very strong inclination to dismiss any claims that marijuana may cause harm as nothing more than old-fashioned reefer madness. Some social conservatives will downplay any evidence that marijuana does not cause harm.
A person suffering from confirmation bias doesn’t think they need to learn the facts about individuals. Instead, they look at a general trait like their hair, facial features, skin tone, racial heritage, or economic status and assume that’s all they need to know. They are wrong. But this doesn’t end with racial issues. This type of flawed thinking extends to how they process all sorts of other information, such as the impact of tax cuts for the rich and their skepticism about climate change, in a way that matches the way criminals deny their own behavior, as noted by criminologist Ruth McKie.
From my background studying criminal behaviour, I found something striking about the way Trump justifies inaction on climate change. Through his own words, the president’s arguments mimic patterns in criminal behaviour that criminologists call “techniques of neutralisation”.
Criminologists contend that criminals use techniques of neutralisation to help deny or justify a crime they have committed. These five techniques were first defined in 1964 from the types of arguments given by young people in the criminal justice system when justifying their actions.
- Denial of responsibility – it is not the offender’s fault.
- Denial of injury of harm – the crime does not cause significant harm or may have positive results.
- Denial of victim – there is no clear victim.
- Condemnation of the condemner – the offender criticises the criminal justice system to avoid criticism of the offender.
- Appeal to higher loyalties – deviant behaviour was in aid of a greater good or to benefit someone else.
We can see this same pattern at work with how Trump and generally other racialists respond to accusations of bigotry on their part. They go from denying that they are responsible for any racism (as we’ve seen from Kushner and Miller as they defend Trump) to claiming there is no harm, and then to counter-attacking against those who have accused them (such as Trump’s attacks on “the Squad” for criticizing his immigration policy) right down to the claim that his policies of are all part of a “greater good.” This pattern of behavior is problematic because it is deeply dangerous. It not only denies and ignores the rights of individuals, it denies and defies basic facts and reality, leading to behaviors and actions that are a greater threat to the nation and the world.
These actions include cancelling the Paris Climate Change Accords and the Iran nuclear deal entirely out of spite.
We’re past the point of having a valid debate over “if” Trump uses racism as a weapon and a tool in his policies: he does. We’re past the point of arguing whether or not that is an effective method for motivating the Republican Party: it is. If it weren’t, Trump would have never been a viable candidate for the White House, and he would have never been able to win the nomination or come anywhere near close enough for Comey and the Russians to push him over the top.
Republicans of course, deny all of this and claim—like Miller—that this is just Democrats trying to de-legitimize their arguments. They say that Democrats only use the “racism card” because they lack any ideas of their own. However, when we bring up Medicare for All, a living wage, or the Green New Deal they immediately scream “socialism”and pretend that’s some kind of valid claim. They claim that the Republican Party is good for black people because unemployment is low. However, they ignore that the racial wage gap has brown worse under Trump, not better.
One of the most striking features of U.S. racial inequality is just how stubborn the wage gap between black and white workers has remained over the last four decades.
That trend was evident in EPI’s new State of Working America (SWA) Wagesreport, which highlights trends in wages across the wage distribution, by education, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity.
Overall, the findings indicate wages are slowly improving with the growing economy, but wage inequality has grown and wage gaps have persisted, and in some cases, worsened. In this post, I will highlight one particular worsening wage gap and look at it from multiple dimensions. Since 2000, by any way it’s measured, the wage gap between black and white workers has grown significantly.
The findings here support the important research by Valerie Wilson and William M. Rodgers III, which shows that black–white wage gaps expanded with rising wage inequality from 1979 to 2015. Where their report is incredibly comprehensive, the trends outlined here are rudimentary, but reinforce the same basic truths.
They ignore that their rhetoric is openly enabling discrimination in housing and jobs, intimidation such as Permit Pattys and BBQ Bettys, as well as police violence, mass-murdering hate crimes, and terrorism. They ignore that hate crimes have hit a new high for the decade. They claim that “no one has been better” for African Americans, even though Trump’s level of support from them can be counted on just one hand, as was noted by Jelani Cobb.
“Let’s start with the actual numbers,” Cobb began. “He is saying African-Americans love him and we’re so grateful for what he is doing, yet somehow it seems somehow African-Americans themselves are unaware of this. His approval rate with black voters is 5 percent — cinco, this many.”
“Beyond that, Elijah Cummings’ approval ratings have consistently been high,” he continued. “So that doesn’t seem to add up to the face of it. There is the other question about him alleging corruption, which is also so strange.”
Being paid so poorly that you have to hold down two or three jobs would bring down the unemployment rate, but that does nothing to help people in the long run. It’s also turning out that the “great economy” they credit to Trump is slowly being crippled by his erratic and irrational trade policies.
They say that the GOP is the “party of Lincoln,” but that hasn’t been true for over century. Long ago it became the party of cast-off Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond, who ran against Truman on a segregation ticket. It became the party of Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act because of the public accommodations portion of the bill that didn’t allow “whites only” lunch counters, hotels, and bathrooms anymore. That happens to be a provision that Sen. Rand Paul still opposes. It became the party of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, where their goal was to attract “negrophobe southern Whites” who had been Southern Democrats. Today, thanks to GOP-implemented voter suppression and gerrymandering, they dominate the South even though the population in those states are majority black who vote 90 percent for Democrats.
And now we know that not only was Nixon a raging racist bigot: So was Reagan, as has been revealed by a new recording from the Nixon Library.
“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries, damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan said while Nixon laughed.
“Real racists,” excluding people like Duke, don’t usually advertise. They keep what they really feel and think hidden. They keep it in the closet and only share their true feelings with people that they trust and think will sympathize. Reagan didn’t show this side of himself to basically anyone except Nixon, who was also a racist. Trump doesn’t show this side of himself—unless he’s talking to his base.
Republicans are a party that has common cause with bigots, that is in solidarity with white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. Regardless of whether they’re “real racists” or not, they’re on the same page, and they have the same agenda.
It may hurt their feelings to say that. It may infuriate them. They may say that we’re “playing the race card”—but it’s the truth. Are all members of the GOP racist or neo-Nazis? Hell, no.
But they do support what “real” racists and neo-Nazis believe. So even though there may be a distinction between them, there really isn’t much of a difference.
Sunday, Aug 4, 2019 · 3:58:09 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
This is an update including the events of the last few days.
Let me be completely clear here that I am not casting a blind blanket of accusation over all members of the GOP for being “racists” or “white nationalists” — far from it. I would not deign to make the same type of mistake that is exactly the kind of broad brush that bigots use against other generalized demographic groups. That’s dangerous not only because it’s unfair and wrong, but also because those type of unfair accusations are exactly what fuels the hate and outrage of many in the GOP. Calling them “Racist” is exactly what is setting them off and exactly what Trump uses to help rally these people to him.
They have turned the phrase “Deplorable” into a badge of honor, and I have to say that Hillary Clinton was wrong to say that half of Trump supporters were in a “basket of Deplorables” because at the time the facts and figures that it wasn’t about 50 percent of Trump supporters who were racially biased against minorities — as I wrote three years ago Clinton was only half right that Trump supporters are a basket full of bigots — it was about 60-70 percent of them according to a Reuters poll said about the racial view of Trump supporters back in 2016.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump are more likely to describe African Americans as “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent” than voters who backed some Republican rivals in the primaries or who support Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.
[...]
Nearly half of Trump’s supporters described African Americans as more “violent” than whites. The same proportion described African Americans as more “criminal” than whites, while 40 percent described them as more “lazy” than whites.
In smaller, but still significant, numbers, Clinton backers also viewed blacks more critically than whites with regard to certain personality traits. Nearly one-third of Clinton supporters described blacks as more “violent” and “criminal” than whites, and one-quarter described them as more “lazy” than whites.
Even a poll on Redstate had similar results.
The dataset includes a series of feeling thermometer questions, which ask respondents to place various groups and political figures on a scale from 100 (Very warm or favorable feeling) to 0 (Very cold or unfavorable feeling)….Trump supporters are more likely than supporters of other Republican candidates to have negative feelings towards feminists, Muslims, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians, and Transgender people. In contrast, Trump supporters have far warmer feelings towards whites than supporters of other candidates.
Again, this was Trump supporters compared to other Republicans. Now those other Republicans have essentially left the party in disgust and become indepedents — so all that’s left are the Trumpsters.
I’m not saying it’s all Republicans who feel this way because that’s obviously not the case, but it’s not none of them either.
And in fairness, this issue is broader than Trump supporters and it’s roots are much deeper. Since I originally wrote this diary there have been three mass shootings by what appear to be white supremacists in Gilroy, California that killed 3 people, El Paso, Texas which killed 20 people and Dayton, Ohio which killed 9 people. That’s 32 people in less than one week.
Mother Jones maintains a spreadsheet of mass shootings which goes all the way back to 1981 and not counting #ElPaso or Dayton yet because those are too recent, according to my analysis it indicates that since 1981 they have 10 Asian Mass Shooter incidents with 55 Wounded, 99 Fatal Victims, 19 Black Mass Shootings with 89 wounded, 108 Fatalities. 10 Latino Shootings with 33 Wounded, 44 Fatal Victims, 10 Muslim/Other Incidents with 123 wounded, 134 Fatalities and 63 White Mass Shootings with a total 1053 wounded, 537 Fatal Victims.
As of this morning the total for White Shooters since 1981 is now to 65 incidents (57 percent of total) and 1118 Wounded (78 percent of total) and 566 fatalaties (59 percent of total). Trump likes to say that Black and Latino communities are “crime-infested” but when it comes to this type of mass murder and terrorism they are only 16 percent and 8 percent of the incidents, caused 6 percent and 8 percent of the wounded, and 11 percent and 4 percent of the fatalaties. Muslim shooters including the Pulse Nightclub, San Bernadino and Fort Hood attacks are only 8 percent of incidents, 2 percent of the wounded and 14 percent of fatalities.
Admittedly, this doesn’t include the attacks on 9-11, but then it also doesn't include the Oklahoma City bombing either or the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics by Army of God member Eric Robert Rudolph not to mention the dozens of bombings, firebombings and murders that have been implemented by other members of that radical anti-Abortion, anti-Gay terrorist group such as Paul Hill, Shelley Shannon, Scott Roeder, MIchael Bray and James Kopp.
Obviously, there are many more one on one shootings all over the nation and that’s true, mass shooters are only 2 percent of these events, however the overwhelming number of gun deaths are suicides including 47,173 in 2017 and those also overwhelming involve white males (69.67 percent), not blacks, Latinos or Muslims. .
Yes, there is a high rate of urban gun violence and the total number of murders for black (7,881) and white (6,576) people for 2016 were very similar, while the rate of violence victimization by economic status are also the same between black and white people.
For the period 2008–12— Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000). Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000). The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels. Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000). Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per 1,000). Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).
At the same time the poverty rate for blacks is more than twice the rate for whites
A census report on poverty rates for various racial and ethnic groups found poverty widespread among American Indians, blacks and Hispanics. Nationwide, during 2007 and 2011, which encompasses the recession and the immediate aftermath, 43 million Americans — or slightly more than 14 percent — lived in poverty. But not every group was impacted equally. The poverty rate was 27 percent for American Indians, 26 percent for African Americans and 23 percent for Hispanics.Among whites and Asians, less than 12 percent were poor. The federal threshold for poverty is about $11,500 in annual income for an individual and about $23,000 for a family of four.
So it’s arguable not that blacks are “more violent” than others, but that poor people due to their circumstances may encounter higher rates of violence, and a higher percentage of black people happen to fall into that group for many reasons that are just as out of their control as they are for anyone else. Taken overall, the high rates of urban shootings by black people are an abberation — and probably more linked to desperation of poverty and the availabilty of handguns — when compared to the overall pattern of national murder, suicide and killings by white people.
However, Trump uses completely bogus grossly exaggerated racist crimes stats generated by white supremacist websites or lame bogus lazy statistical analysis by Steve King to justify his arguments and attacks on people like Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Cummings, and to justify the cruelty of his immigration policies.
The killer in El Paso wrote a racist screed online that attacked immigrants — which might as well have been the text of a Trump stump speech — then he drove 600 miles from Allen, Texas to the border community of El Paso which happens to be one of the safest cities in the nation to attack and murder immigrants.
Similar indications of bias are now appearing for the shooters in Gilroy and Dayton although those cases are still developing. This has all the hallmarks of Stochotastic Terrorism, and people should clearly be able to say so — even if it hurts the fee fees of the Trumpsters.
Is it unfair to “politicize” these killings so quickly? Well, how long did the Trumpsters wait to politicize the murder of Mollie Tibbets because her killer happened to be an undoccumented immigrant? Ten Seconds? Five?
Let’s be honest ‘Send Her Back” is a threat. It’s an attempt to intimidate, harrass and terrorize an immigrant into being so afraid to stay in America that she runs away in fear. It's exactly what the El Paso terrorist was trying to achieve because the point of terrorism isn’t just to kill and maim, it’s to generate fear in the people who are being targeted.
And by the way, there is currently no law against domestic terrorism — so white nationalist are treated in a completely different manner than someone who had been radicalized by ISIS online, rather than radicalized by David Duke, Gavin McGinnis, Daily Stormer, 8Chan or Trump. Just saying.
