Justice trump style.

We learned a lot today about where we will be going for the next four years.

Jeff Sessions is one of the most powerful men in America. He is the attorney general and he runs Donald trump's justice department.

 So let's take a look at what he has been up to since taking office. 

"It is hard to believe this is happening, but it’s real: The US Department of Justice is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at now–Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year.

According to Ryan Reilly at HuffPost, Code Pink activist Desiree Fairooz was arrested in January after she laughed at a claim from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) that Sessions’s history of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

Sessions, in fact, has a long history of opposing the equal treatment of all Americans under the law. He has repeatedly criticized the historic Voting Rights Act. He voted against hate crime legislation that protected LGBTQ people, arguing, “Today, I'm not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don't see it.” And his nomination for a position as a federal judge was rejected in the 1980s after he was accused of making racist remarks, including a supposed joke that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.”

Given this history, Fairooz laughed at Shelby’s claim.

But federal prosecutors have pushed forward with the case against Fairooz. As Reilly reported, prosecutors argue that “the laugh amounted to willful ‘disorderly and disruptive conduct’ intended to ‘impede, disrupt, and disturb the orderly conduct’ of congressional proceedings.” In court, they have tried to emphasize that the laugh was extraordinarily disruptive, with a US Capitol Police officer claiming that Fairooz laughed “very loudly” and people in the hearings turned around when they heard it.

Fairooz’s defense, meanwhile, has argued that her laughter was a reflex and not meant to disrupt the hearings. Fairooz was also in the back of the room, and her laughter had no noticeable impact, based on video of the hearings, on Shelby’s introductory speech for Sessions.

The trial will continue at the Superior Court in DC this week. If convicted, Fairooz faces a fine up to $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment for the laugh-related charge. She is also charged with another misdemeanor for “allegedly parading, demonstrating or picketing within a Capitol, evidently for her actions after she was being escorted from the room,” Reilly reported.

Fairooz has a history of disruptive protests. During protests over the Iraq War, she put fake blood on her hands and confronted then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

This time, however, Fairooz claims she was not trying to be disruptive — but merely laughing. " [Source]

So she will be prosecuted for laughing, but.......

"The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Alton Sterling, whose videotaped shooting by police in Baton Rouge last summer prompted unrest across the city, and is planning to reveal in the next 24 hours that it has closed the probe, according to four people familiar with the matter.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Sterling family had yet to be informed by the Justice Department of the decision, and it is unclear how and when the department will announce its findings.

“We have not heard nor received an update and are unaware of any charges that may or may not be filed,” said Ryan Julison, a spokesman for the Sterling family’s attorneys. “We have not received word, nor has the family been given any notice of upcoming updates regarding this case.”

The case will be the first time under Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the department has publicly declined to prosecute officers investigated for possible wrongdoing in a high-profile case, and officials in Baton Rouge have been girding for a possible reaction there." [Source]

I bet former President Obama did not know that Beauregard Sessions would be running the justice department.

So to recap: laugh during Mr. Session's  confirmation and you get prosecuted. Shoot an unarmed man to death, and you are not. Got it.

What a country.

A potential attorney general from the bottom of "the swamp."

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is a good ole boy from Alabama, and he has, to put it mildly, led an interesting life.

Mr Sessions, thanks to president elect trump, is now on the cusp of becoming the lead law enforcement official in this country. Talk about the "fox guarding the henhouse.

 This is a guy who was voted down for a federal Judgeship because he was deemed too racist to sit on the bench. The senate saw him for what he was back then, the question now is will he be able to show his former colleagues that he has had a come to Jesus moment.

 "The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony during hearings in March and May 1986, that Sessions had made racist remarks and called the NAACP and ACLU “un-American.”

Thomas Figures, a black assistant US attorney who worked for Sessions, testified that Sessions called him “boy” on multiple occasions and joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying that he thought Klan members were “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.”

On why he never spoke up against Sessions’ alleged use of the term, Figures testified: “I felt that if I had said anything or reacted in a manner in which I thought appropriate, I thought I would be fired.”' [Source] 

Many black organizations are calling for the president elect to reconsider this selection because they know that throughout his legal and political career he has done and said some questionable things as it relates to minorities.

"Another accusation that came up was that Sessions had once allegedly approached an opponent at the conclusion of a court hearing and angrily used a racial slur.

“It is suggested that you stated to Mr. Wiley at the conclusion of a particularly contentious hearing back in 1981, ‘Do not worry,’ or ‘do not be too happy’…’John,’ meaning Archer, ‘will be watching you and the n*gger,’ referring to the only black commissioner in Mobile,” Senator Joe Biden said in the hearing.

Sessions immediately denied that this had happened, saying, “that is an absolutely false statement,” The Huffington Post reports."

I don't think so, Senator. You are an older republican white man from Alabama. Just a thought here, but I am guessing that you have dropped that word a time or two.

Sadly,tough, you will get through the nomination process, because tribalism will trump (no pun intended) decency every time.


*Pic from youtube.com

White unity.

   I have to give it to old white men of a certain age, they sure know how to stick together.

Add Mitt Romney to the growing list of republicans who seem to have forgotten their morals and common decency after Donald trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become president elect, trump.

Romney called trump every name in the book, and declared to anyone who would listen that he is not unfit to be president, and yet, amazingly, he is considering taking a position in his administration. I mean he called the man a "danger to democracy" for crying out loud. And yet, he would still choose to work for him and carry out his policies.

I can't believe that the trumpets are excited about this move, either, After all, wouldn't Mitt Romney be one of those folks in the swamp that trump wants to drain? We can go ahead and add people like Bob Corker, Jeff Sessions, and Newt Gingrich to that list while we are at it. There is a lot of garbage in that swamp.

Anyway, thank goodness for my peeps who continue to give me hope that there are voices of decencyber and dissent in this country. Not only are they out there, but they are writing eloquently about it.

h/t to my law school classmate, Amy, for turning me on to the following story. 

"It is time for the country to heal, time for us come together.

Or so people have been telling me since last week when democracy laid the biggest egg in American history. Well, here is my response: I have no interest in seeing this country heal. And I refuse to come together.

Understand: If this were just about politics, I’d never say something like that. No, I’d do what you’re supposed to when the candidate you favored is defeated. Suck it up.

But my anger is not about any given policy of the new president. No, it is about him, about the election of a fundamentally unsound, unserious and unfit man, a misogynist who brags about sexual assault, a bigot cheered to victory by the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea how to “heal” woman hating and no desire to “come together” with the Klan.

I am similarly impatient with those who say we must give the new president a chance to lead and hope for his success.

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Is that what Republicans did for Barack Obama when they gathered on the night of his inauguration and plotted a conspiracy of obstructionism to cripple his presidency? Is it what Donald Trump did when he spent years questioning the veracity of an ordinary birth certificate?

More to the point, the call to let Trump lead and hope for his success fails to address obvious questions: Where is he leading us? How are we defining success? Should we applaud even if he “leads” us into another unnecessary Middle East conflagration? Are we expected to be happy if his “success” comes in criminalizing abortion?

Frankly, I won’t cheer him even if he is not a disaster. In the unlikely event the man who considers global warming a Chinese hoax took action to stem that threat, I’d be happy, yes. On the improbable chance the man who swore to repeal the Affordable Care Act crafted something better, I would be glad, sure.

But at the end of the day, the man who did those things would still be a misogynist and a bigot.
Forgive me — or don’t; I really don’t care — if that remains a deal breaker for me. I refuse to participate in this process of organized amnesia, to cooperate in normalizing a man who stands for everything America should not". [Read more]

I think Leonard Pitts, Jr. has done a pretty good job of summing up my feelings.

Of course, now that the usual suspects are rallying around our president elect, all the racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic things that he said in the past will be forgotten. It's kind of typical of how we treat bad actors and acts here in America: We try to purge everything from our memories and pretend that it didn't happen.

That, of course, will be a  little harder with president trump, because for the next four years, no matter how hard we try, we will not be able to escape him.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article114982043.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article114982043.html#storylink=cpy

Disavowing Duke.

 Unfortunately for some of my black brothers and sisters jigging can carry a burden. In the case of folks like Pastor Mark Burns, jigging for the likes of Donald trump can cause a crisis of conscience.

Knowing what he knows about David Duke , it is making it tough for him to keep supporting a man who has refused to disavow him and his endorsement.

So now, as any good house Negro would do, Pastor Burns is trying his best to rehabilitate his master to the masses by helping him do a little damage control.

"COLUMBIA, S.C. — Pastor Mark Burns is planning to have a talk with Donald Trump about the Ku Klux Klan on Sunday.

 

Burns is one of a number of black pastors who supports Trump’s presidential campaign and met with him last December. Since then, Burns has been traveling the country and speaking at Trump’s rallies. Yahoo News called him on Sunday to ask about Trump’s interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in which Trump declined to condemn the KKK and former KKK grand wizard David Duke. Burns, who was at an airport flying between Trump campaign events in Tennessee and Alabama, said he had a “brief conversation” with Trump about the issue on Saturday night and planned to discuss it further at a meeting Sunday.

 

“We do have a meeting today about that very thing. … We’re leaving one rally and flying to … Huntsville,” Burns said. “We had a brief conversation last night prior to this interview. … We were going to discuss some things that need to be spoken so that he continues to be a unifier and be a president for all the people.”

 

Burns said he “absolutely” will be advising Trump to explicitly denounce the KKK.

 

“That’s one of the reasons why I am here, so I can help be that ear for Mr. Trump to make sure, you know, that he is coming across, because obviously … he wants everybody’s vote. Obviously, he wants to win. We want to win,” Burns said. “We want him to become the next president of the United States. But at the same time, he is not going to endorse any hate group, any hate group. And so, if that means coming out and saying, … ‘I don’t stand behind what the KKK stands for or what David Duke stands for,’ then that is what he’s going to do and say. That’s our advice.” [Source]

 

My "advice" to you Pastor is to stop jigging and save your breath. Donald trump knows exactly what he is doing.   

 

Finally,  there has been a lot of cases of killings in the news lately. We all know about the despicable acts of Cedric Ford, the man who took out the rage he felt after getting  served with a Protection From Abuse Order on innocent citizens and co-workers.  

 

Then there is that Uber driver in Michigan, the slaughter of that family in Washington by a family member, and the tragic way a rookie police officer lost her life on the first day of the job while responding to a domestic violence call in Virginia.

 

All these killings are sad and horrific, and they all have a familiar theme. 

 

A friend of mine who happens to be a homicide detective here in Philly, once told me that over 90% of homicides occur because of love or money. And my life experience tells me that this is true. It always comes back to those two things. Whether it's a drug dealer killing a rival for moving in on his corner, or a husband --or boyfriend--- being angry because his relationship isn't turning out the way that he wants it to.

 

Sadly, I suspect that we will soon learn that the Uber driver in Michigan killed for one of those reasons as well. If he didn't,  his actions might be the most disturbing of all.  

 

*Pic from salon.com

 

   

 

 

 

  

 

     

 

 

Will "hillbilly paranoia" doom the GOP?

Take it away Drew Magary.

"A few weeks back, I was watching a documentary about the Ku Klux Klan, because I will watch pretty much anything that’s about the KKK, serial killers, or Hitler. And the reason that the KKK eventually faded out of the American mainstream was not only because they were a legitimate terrorist organization, but because they were so needlessly VISIBLE. People in the KKK quickly realized that there wasn’t much advantage to parading around in hoods and inviting massive public scrutiny when they could simply wear plain clothes, spend the rest of their lives being quietly racist, and get away with it. And so the KKK became a punchline while real racism took on a subtler but no less effective guise, a guise that lingers to this day.

Donald Trump is not a subtle man. The only surprising thing about Donald Trump’s announcement yesterday—in which he demanded a magical anti-Muslim forcefield established around the American border—is that he didn’t make the announcement months ago. After all, keeping out dirty FURRINERS, or even Americans who kinda LOOK like dirty FURRINERS—has long been the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign platform. This is not a man who disguises his intentions, and that has earned him a fervent and devoted following from Americans who pride themselves on being just as blunt about their beliefs as he is…“We need to get the Muslims out of the country, before they start killing our families!”

 

Make no mistake: There’s a fairly sizable portion of the American electorate that supports that take, and you can go a long way in this country by courting them, in subtle ways if you prefer. Donald Trump isn’t stupid. He knows that keeping American citizens out of the country solely for their religious beliefs is neither Constitutional nor practical. But he knows what works. He knows there’s a solid voting bloc out there cheering him on to up the stakes every successive week, and they won’t desert him. He’s only gonna get crazier from here.

 

And you know what? I’m still rooting for him to win the nomination. I’m rooting for his candidacy like I used to root for mass chaos in college football's Bowl Championship Series. I want him to sweep the primaries and make a porn star his veep and get a primo convention slot that results in mass chaos and lots of urgent backstage maneuvering to kick him out of the party. I don’t want him to branch off and run as an independent. I want him to be VISIBLE. I want him to be the standard bearer. Filthy rich GOP donors know that a Trump nomination would essentially doom their party, and that’s exactly what those fuckers deserve, now and forever.

 

Because if you think the prospect of Trump’s leadership is terrifying, I have bad news for you: You already have MANY elected leaders who are just as bad, if not fucking worse. Like Texas congressman Louis Gohmert. Or New York loony toon Peter King. Or any number of Tea Party members who have won by exploiting the same kind of hillbilly paranoia that Trump is currently whipping into a froth. Trump’s great sin is that he is so terribly PUBLIC with his courtship, while the rest of GOP has quietly dined out on these people for ages now.

 

It’s way past due for this scam to be blown wide open. This is the braying, gullible 20 percent of the American population that has stonewalled a great deal of our progress and DESERVES to be left behind, in the dust. In a lot of Trump thinkpieces (like mine!), you’ll see writers attribute the Trump phenomenon to anger. “Say what you will, these people are angry!” And today, more than ever, I could give half a shit about that anger. Are you angry America isn’t what it used to be? EAT SHIT. I don’t care that you’re mad it’s not 1951. I don't care that an immigrant coder stole your job at the wagon factory. I don’t care that your only solution for your plight is to SEETHE about it. I don’t care that your American ideal is booting out half the population while arming yourselves to the teeth. The sooner you people die off and have your political influence quashed, the better. You deserve to have your political movement burst into flames in front of a live television audience. You deserve to blindly follow your idiot pied piper into oblivion."

[More]

 

Go on and drop the mic young fellow.

 

Can you say brokered convention boys and girls? *fingers crossed*

 

*Pic from newsweek.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Trump needs a running mate.

I wonder what our friend David Duke is up to these days. The Donald could sure use him right about now. My man must be thinking that he will be needing a running mate soon since there is a very good chance that he could win the GOP nomination for president.

Lately Donald has been acting like Duke's soul-mate, and he has been doing his best to reach the same base that almost carried Duke to the Governor's mansion in Louisiana.

The latest sign that Donald is either a flat out racist or someone who is embracing the Lee Atwater school of political strategy is his ignorant and bigoted tweet about crime created by some American Nazis. Or, better stated, the tweet endorsed by his campaign.

Here is what Mother Jones had to say about it:

"The fascinating thing is that instead of a blaming the tweet on a subordinate—something they haven't been shy about doing in the past—the campaign has chosen to stay silent about it. They have apparently made the political calculation that it would be worse for Trump to acknowledge not sending the racist tweet than to endure a few days of stories about how racist he is. 
It's 2015, and if you're running for the Republican nomination for president, saying racist things doesn't hurt your poll numbers. "

Yep, that's kind of scary.

Now might be a good time for a little cut and pasting of Paul Waldman's article in the Washington Post:

"As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump had quite a weekend. First he claimed on Saturday that “I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as [the World Trade Center] was coming down.” Confronted with the fact that this is completely false, Trump insisted on Sunday, “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations…that tells you something.

Then on Sunday he (or someone from his campaign) tweeted out a graphic with phony statistics purporting to show how murderous black people are (and illustrated with a picture of a young black man with a bandana over his face, pointing a gun sideways, gangster-style).

Both of these happenings are receiving plenty of attention in the media today. The problem is that the media doesn’t know how to handle this kind of blatant race-baiting from a leading politician.
And just to be clear, it is race-baiting, and nothing else. In neither case is there even the remotest connection to some kind of legitimate policy question. When Trump says falsely that thousands of people in Jersey City (which has a large Muslim population) were celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center, he isn’t making an argument about Syrian refugees. He’s simply saying that you should hate and fear Muslim Americans. When he tries to convince people that most white murder victims are killed by black thugs (again, false), he isn’t arguing for some policy approach. He’s just trying to foment racism and convince racists that he’s their guy.

So how do the media deal with this? One thing they don’t do is call it by its name. The first approach is to report on it as just another campaign controversy (“Trump takes heat for tweet about black murder rates“). That kind of story sticks to the who-what-where-when approach: Trump tweeted this, he was criticized for it, here’s how it was inaccurate, here’s Trump’s response. Any value judgments that appear will be spoken by Trump’s critics (though not his primary opponents, who for the most part are dancing around any criticism of what Trump said).

The second approach the media takes is to address Trump’s comments through fact-checking, something we have gotten pretty good at. Interestingly enough, fact-checking as a formal genre of journalism can be traced to another campaign that prominently featured Republican race-baiting, the 1988 election. In the wake of that election, many news outlets felt they had been manipulated by George H.W. Bush’s campaign into not only focusing on distracting issues that had little or nothing to do with the presidency, but also into becoming a conduit for ugly attacks with little basis in fact. Over the following few years, many decided to institutionalize fact-checks, at first for television ads in particular, and later for all kinds of claims made in politics. Eventually sites like Politifact and FactCheck.org were created, and major news organizations like this one devoted staff solely to fact-checking.

In the process, journalists acquired both an understanding of how to separate the accurate from the inaccurate from the subjective, and a language to talk about different kinds of claims. While there’s plenty of slippage — you still see claims that have been proven false referred to as “controversial” or “questionable” — the existence of the fact-checking enterprise has allowed reporters to be clearer with their audiences about what is and isn’t true.

So if you want a fact-check of Trump’s claims, you’ll have no trouble finding it (here’s the Post’s). What you’ll have to look harder for is reporting that puts what Trump said in a context that goes much deeper than the campaign controversy of the week.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that there’s a simple template reporters should follow, one that will allow them to easily separate the merely “controversial” from the clearly racist (though wherever the line is, passing on phony statistics about murderous black people from neo-Nazis is definitely on the other side of it). But they wouldn’t violate any reasonable conception of objectivity by making the nature of Trump’s arguments clear.

When David Duke nearly won the governorship of Louisiana in 1991, it was reported in the national media as a story about racism, with a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan garnering a majority of the white vote as he lost a runoff election. Few in the media hesitated to call Duke a racist, in large part because even at the time he was perceived as representing yesterday’s racism,antiquated for its explicitness (even if Duke did try to clean up his views for the campaign).

Trump represents one face of today’s racism (though not by any means the only face). It simultaneously insists that Muslims can be good Americans, and accuses them of hating America and says their places of worship ought to be kept under government surveillance. It says that some Mexican-Americans are good people, and says most of them are rapists and drug dealers. It says “I think I’ll win the African-American vote” and then tries to convince voters that black people are murdering white people everywhere."[More]

That sums up Mr. Trump to a tee. If he becomes President Trump America Americans will get  just what they deserve.

Pic from salon.com/By Burt Steel of the Associated Press. 

Teaching Dylann's history.

I have a lot of love for the Color Of Change folks, and I think that they do important work by keeping us focused on issues that matter.

They recently sent me an e-mail which I am going to share with you because the s**t is that serious.

  "Dear Wayne, 

Schools should be a place for learning, not spreading racist ideology. But not in Texas. This fall, five million children across Texas were given textbooks that profess the same toxic and distorted view of history professed by Dylann Roof and defenders of the Confederate Flag.

These textbooks omit, sanitize, and downplay how horrible slavery was and glorify historical figures who defended slavery. All because the Texas State Board of Education has an agenda to promote a neo-Confederate ideology.  

And if the Texas State Board of Education has their way, future textbooks could be even worse than they are right now.¹ Future textbooks could remove altogether any references to Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Codes- the foundation for modern day prison labor exploitation. The half-truths and omissions in these educational materials will teach a new generation of children a deliberately distorted view of American history and the story of race in our country.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we put factual and accurate educational materials about Black history in school libraries across Texas, we can give countless students access to the resources they need to learn the truth. Join the fight to get books about Black history directly into the hands of children across Texas.

The harm that these textbooks do is real. Not only are these whitewashed textbooks inaccurate and racially damaging, they even hurt the academic performance of both Black and white students. Studies have shown that both Black and white students who are exposed to negative racial stereotypes about Black people perform significantly worse on standardized tests.²³

The intentional whitewashing of the story of the Civil War happens as early as grade school and not just in the books you read. Right now there are 29 schools in Texas named after generals like Robert E. Lee. There are textbooks and educational videos that glorify politicians like John C. Calhoun, who believed that owning, abusing and exploiting Black humans was key to achieving the American dream and was the architect behind the enforcement of the Indian Removal Act. Too often, the stories and truths of all the Black and Brown folks that built this country are either censored or completely left out of the books we consume from early on in life."

I don't usually do this kind of thing, but... OK, I will go ahead and give the COC folks some love. 

 Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU. 

 

Pic courtesy of Martin/Flickr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leroy's act of kindness.

 I must be a terrible person, because the picture that you see above is generating all kinds of kumbaya buzz, and I, unfortunately, don't get it.

Yes, I see the black man who happens to be a police officer helping the old klansman suffering from a heatstroke. Good for Mr. Smith. That was a very kind and professional thing to do. I suppose that as a first responder his professional instincts just kicked in.

Sorry, I would have had to call someone else to help the old fella.

But this is the thing with most black people that folks in the majority will never understand: we are such a forgiving people.  No matter how much you crap on us we are still willing to help you and show you compassion. Eve if you are a virulent racist whose death in the South Carolina heat would not have been a big loss to humanity.

Field, you are such a cynical asshole. Why can't you find it in your heart to love even those that hate you?

Sorry, I wasn't built like that. When it comes to the good book I am not down with Matthew 5:39, I am more of an eye for an eye kind of guy.

Anyway, not surprisingly,  Leroy Smith is getting all kinds of twitter love.

"@bijancbayne @RobGodfrey @robgreeneII This kindness chokes me up. How do SC people find that well of caring in the midst of so much hatred?"

 

"not an uncommon example of humanity in SC: Leroy Smith helps white supremacist to shelter & water as heat bears down. pic.twitter.com/GoF23r3mRe"

 

"@imraansiddiqi @RobGodfrey I hope he changes his ways after this episode of humanity at its finest. Well done to the police officer."

 

Mr. Vegas

 

 

"@MrVegasMusic

I would do the same as the police officer! Love conquers all! "Black police officer, assisting KKK member, after heat stroke"

 

Kyle Skoumal @kyle_skoumal

"Lets take a moment to respect and try to be more like this black police officer helping a KKK member with sun stroke. "

And on and on it goes.

Nothing like turning the other cheek, showing "humility", and taking the high road to make you a hero in the eyes of your fellow Americans.

Mr. Smith is a true son of the South. His fellow South Carolinians should be proud.   

*Pic from independent.co.uk





 
  

  

"Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era."

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we will learn about the angry white male.

"Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s.

Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

A large proportion of the extreme right wing are military veterans. Several leaders served in Vietnam and were shocked at the national disgust that greeted them as they returned home after that debacle. “America’s failure to win that war was a truly profound blow,” writes William J. Gibson. “If Americans were no longer winners, then who were they?” Some veterans believed they were sold out by the government, caving in to effeminate cowardly protesters; they can no longer trust the government to fight for what is right. Bo Gritz, a former Green Beret in Vietnam, returned to Southeast Asia several times in clandestine missions to search for prisoners of war and was the real-life basis for the film Rambo. He uses his military heroism to increase his credibility among potential recruits; one brochure describes him as “this country’s most decorated Vietnam veteran” who “killed some 400 Communists in his illustrious military career.” In 1993 Gritz began a traveling SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) training program, a rigorous survival course in paramilitary techniques.

Many of the younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game, serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed they were entitled to be hailed as heroes, as had earlier generations of American veterans, not to be scorned as outcasts. Now a guy like Bo Gritz symbolizes “true” warrior-style masculinity, and reclaiming their manhood is the reward for signing up with the Far Right.

THE CLASS ORIGINS OF RACIAL POLITICS

Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men. All of the men I interviewed—all—fitted this class profile. When I compared with other ethnographies and other surveys, they all had the same profile as well.

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the “urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about “welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen spelled CLASS.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.


That’s certainly what I found among them. Most are in their mid-thirties to early forties, educated at least through high school and often beyond. (The average age of the guys I talked with was thirty-six.) They are the sons of skilled workers in industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’ legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small shops squeezed out by Walmarts and malls. These young men face a spiral of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight and at worst complicit in their demise.

And they’re right. It is the lower middle class—that strata of independent farmers, small shopkeepers, craft and highly skilled workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs—that has been hit hardest by globalization. “Western industry has displaced traditional crafts—female as well as male—and large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the independent farmer to the status of hired hand,” writes journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. This has resulted in massive male displacement—migration, downward mobility. It has been felt the most not by the adult men who were the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and skilled workers, but by their sons, by the young men whose inheritance has been seemingly stolen from them. They feel entitled and deprived—and furious. These angry young men are the foot soldiers of the armies of rage that have sprung up around the world.

What’s important to note is that they are literally the sons. It was their fathers who closed the family store, who lost the family farm. Some are men who have worked all their adult lives, hoping to pass on the family farm to their sons and retire comfortably. They believed that if they worked hard, their legacy would be ensured, but they leave their sons little but a legacy of foreclosures, economic insecurity, and debt.

It was their status next to their father’s and grandfather’s names on the cabinetmaking storefront that said “Jones and Sons.” These were businesses that came not only with the ability to make a living, but came with dignity, with a sense of craft pride, a sense that you owned your own store or farm, owned and controlled your own labor—even employed some other people—and that this economic autonomy had been a source of great pride in the family for generations. In a near-throwaway footnote in his classic study of identity development, “Childhood and Society” (1950), Erik Erikson locates the origins of young men’s anger in a multigenerational story:

In psychoanalytic patients the overwhelming importance of the grandfather is often apparent. He may have been a blacksmith of the old world or a railroad builder of the new, and as yet proud Jew or an unreconstructed Southerner. What these grandfathers have in common is that fact that they were the last representatives of a more homogeneous world, masterly and cruel with good conscience, disciplined and pious without loss of self-esteem. Their world invented bigger and better machinery like gigantic playthings which were not expected to challenge the social values of the men who made them. Their mastery persists in their grandsons as a stubborn, an angry sense of superiority. Overtly inhibited, they yet can accept others only on terms of prearranged privilege.

“It wasn’t my daddy’s farm,” said Andy, “it was my granddaddy’s, and his daddy’s, and his daddy’s. Five generations of Hoosier farmers.” Generations of Hoosier men, who worked the farm, supported a family, made a living with dignity. They proved their masculinity in that most time-honored way in America: as family providers. And it was their fathers who lost it all, squandered their birthright. Instead of getting angry at their fathers, Andy and his comrades claim the mantle of the grandfathers, displace their rage outward, onto an impermeable and unfeeling government bureaucracy that didn’t offer help, onto soulless corporations that squeezed them mercilessly. By displacing their anger onto those enormous faceless entities, the sons justify their political rage and rescue their own fathers from their anger.

Some can’t do it. Some of the sons—and the fathers—turn their rage inward. We have already discussed the wave of suicides that rippled across the American heartland in the 1980s and 1990s—spawning widespread concern and a series of Farm Aid concerts to raise awareness. The number of suicides in America’s Midwest was higher in the 1990s than during the Great Depression; suicide was the leading cause of agricultural fatalities for two decades—by far. Men were five times more likely to kill themselves than die by accident. “To fail several generations of relatives (both backwards and forwards into those unborn descendants who will now not be able to farm), to see yourself as the one weak link in a strong chain that spans more than a century, is a terrible, and for some, an unbearable burden,” writes Osha Gray Davidson. “When a fellow in a steel mill loses his job, he has basically lost his paycheck,” a physician at the University of Iowa explained. “When an Iowa farmer loses his farm, he’s lost the guts of his life.”....

....So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America’s small towns who can’t make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.

WALKING THE PATRIOTIC CAPITALIST TIGHTROPE

You might think that the political ideology of the white supremacist movement is as simple as their list of enemies: put down minorities, expel immigrants, push the women out of the workplace, and round up and execute the gays and the Jews. But it’s not nearly so simple. Actually, they have to navigate some treacherous ideological waters and reconcile seemingly contradictory ideological visions with their emotions.

There are three parts to their ideological vision. For one thing, they are ferociously procapitalist. They are firm believers in the free market and free enterprise. They just don’t like what it’s brought. They like capitalism; they just hate corporations. They identify, often, as the vast middle class of office workers and white-collar employees, even though that is hardly their class background. (They’ve a fungible understanding of class warfare.) “For generations, white middle class men defined themselves by their careers, believing that loyalty to employers would be rewarded by job security and, therefore, the ability to provide for their families” is the way one issue of Racial Loyalty (a racist skinhead magazine) puts it. “But the past decade—marked by an epidemic of takeovers, mergers, downsizings and consolidations—has shattered that illusion.”

Aryans support capitalist enterprise and entrepreneurship, even those who make it rich, but especially the virtues of the small proprietor, but are vehemently antiurban, anticosmopolitan, and anticorporate. In their eyes, Wall Street is ruled by Jewish-influenced corporate plutocrats who hate “real” Americans. Theirs is the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of producers—not financiers, not bankers, and not those other “masters of the universe” whose entire careers consist of cutting the cake ever more finely and living on the crumbs. It’s Andrew Jackson’s producerist attack on the “parasitic” bankers. It is “the desire to own small property, to produce crops and foodstuffs, to control local affairs, to be served but never coerced by a representative government, and to have traditional ways of life and labor respected,” writes historian Catherine Stock.

White supremacists see themselves as squeezed between global capital and an emasculated state that supports voracious global profiteering. In the song “No Crime Being White,” Day of the Sword, a popular racist skinhead band, confronts the greedy class:

The birthplace is the death of our race.
Our brothers being laid off is a truth we have to face.
Take my job, it’s equal opportunity
The least I can do, you were so oppressed by me
I’ve only put in twenty years now.
Suddenly my country favors gooks and spicks and queers.
Fuck you, then, boy I hope you’re happy when your new employees are the reason why your business ends.

Second, the extreme Right is extremely patriotic. They love their country, their flag, and everything it stands for. These are the guys who get teary at the playing of the national anthem, who choke up when they hear the word America. They have bumper stickers on their pick ups that show the flag with the slogan “These colors don’t run.”

The problem is that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live. They love America—but they hate its government. They believe that the government has become so un-American that it has joined in global institutions that undermine and threaten the American way of life. Many fuse critiques of international organizations such as the United Nations with protectionism and neoisolationism, arguing that all internationalisms are part of a larger Zionist conspiracy. Some embrace a grand imperial vision of American (and other Aryan) domination and the final subjugation of “inferior races.” [More]

It's a long article, but it is worth reading. I suspect that your perception of the article will depend on your race, your gender, and your political affiliation.

In other words, a lot of you won't like it. But that's fine. This is what makes America great: the ability to debate various issues, no matter how sensitive or complex.

Most of us can live with that. Most of us. There are some who, as the author articulated above, are having a hard time adjusting.

*Pic from salon.com