Tag Archives: racism

Political Rants

Standing upright.

This one is for Ilhan Omar, who is currently bearing more than her share of attention from Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign to re-elect his sorry ass on the bodies of brown people everywhere. It’s hard to know where to begin, but I think it needs to be said first that Trump appears to be deliberately inciting violence with his various ignorant statements and tweets regarding this first-term congressmember. He may be an ignoramus, but I suspect he knows what effect his words can have on the disturbed, the deranged, and the prone to violence among his supporters and admirers. We have seen the results in Pittsburgh, in Florida, and elsewhere. Targets of Trump’s tirades are descended upon by legions of social media trolls, including some trigger-happy bottom-dwellers like would-be pipe-bomber Cesar Sayoc.

Rep. Omar is an ideal target for Trump, as many have pointed out. She’s (1) a Muslim, (2) black, (3) an immigrant / refugee, (4) someone from “a shithole country”, (5) a woman, and (6) defiant, outspoken, and unafraid. He is on a hyper-tear regarding Israel-Palestine, probably owing to the recent election campaign in Israel, so Ilhan Omar’s comments about AIPAC – nothing the likes of which hasn’t been said by Thomas Friedman, without sanction – become a source of joyous rebuke for the orange-faced menace. When he hits Rep. Omar, he’s hitting all of these things at the same time. The fact that his venomous denunciations are further amplified by Murdock-owned media should come as no surprise. Neither should the pusillanimous behavior of many of Ilhan’s colleagues in the Democratic party.

The bigot-in-chief and his principal target

Seriously, people like Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Max Rose, and to some extent even my own recently elected representative, Anthony Brindisi, act as enablers in this hate campaign against Omar. They roundly criticized her over the AIPAC comments, and went so far as to draft a resolution condemning antisemitism that was clearly aimed at her. Even now, as she receives credible death threats from crackpots worked up by Trump and his allies, they say little or nothing. Max Rose complained about the CAIR speech on MSNBC, sounding as though he roughly agrees with the president that Ilhan was somehow being disrespectful of those lost on 9/11, a claim based literally on nothing. When they do this shit, they open the door to demonization and death threats.

This isn’t about politics in the narrow sense. This is about standing up for what’s right. And in that sense, #IStandWithIlhan all the way.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Walls and bridges.

Another new year, but still the same bullshit: Trump wants to make one of his rhetorical flourishes a reality because he’s afraid of losing his base, and he wants us to pay for it. Welcome to sunny Mexico, my friends. The various pundits and politicians go back and forth on whether Trump’s wall is actually a wall (as the president has said many times) or a metaphor for something called “border security”, which everyone seems to agree with but no one can define. I think they’re missing the obvious answer – Trump is talking about a real “wall”, but the fact that he talks about it is itself a metaphor. He wants to build a big wall that will represent the separation barrier between white and brown people.

On the white side of historyThis is the program Trump inherited from other Republicans like Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and many more.  Obama’s first term, in particular, was an extreme accommodation to it as well. That’s likely because the big lie about invading armies of dark people is an effective distraction for disaffected workers. The bipartisan neoliberal economic experiment that’s been underway for the last forty years is a total failure for working people in this country; Trump is working to deepen that failure, and the only way a politician can maintain some measure of popularity while conducting these deeply unpopular policies is by encouraging working-class white people to blame brown people for all their troubles.

Of course, the lie needs to grow more elaborate with every passing year, reaching remarkable levels of implausibility and ridiculousness and yet they still draw on the old, familiar themes: criminality, disease, uncleanliness. Trump doesn’t dog whistle this stuff – he just says it right out loud. Dog whistles are too subtle to work these days, I suspect. You need a bull horn to drown out the din of an economy that enriches only the rich, despite their claims of full employment. Many millions are out of the workforce and no longer counted; millions more have taken poorly paid jobs or are driving Uber. Wages are stagnant. Trump needs his wall to keep you from noticing how badly this system sucks. If you’re suffering, it’s because of those bad hombres.

We need bridges, not walls. We need to make common cause with workers and families on both sides of our borders. And we need to hold our politicians (of either party) to account when they try to drive us apart.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Racism works.

The surest sign that Democratic voters put a dent in the Trump administration this past Tuesday was the fact that Trump termed the election as a victory for him personally. It was, of course, anything but. His incoherent, rambling press conference on Wednesday lurched from the usual bragging to open hostility to the press to suggestions that he would triangulate with Congressional Democrats on legislation and quite a bit more. Trump, of course, came armed with cherry-picked, extremely contrived and narrow statistics that spoke to the historical uniqueness of his mid-term “victory”, claiming that the only Republicans who lost were the ones that refused his “embrace”. (He’s conveniently forgetting the apparent one-term loser Claudia Tenney, who fully embraced him and had the entire Trump family visit her district – including the hair hat in chief himself – at various points during the campaign in a desperate attempt to cling to her seat.)

Voter supression poster childrenThat said, among my biggest disappointments on Tuesday night was the failure of Andrew Gillum to win the Governorship in Florida – not for want of trying, I should add. I could say the same for Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Two tantalizingly close races, which suggests that a bit more GOTV might have put them over the top. Or perhaps not. After all, about a million voters have been dropped from the rolls in Georgia over the last few years, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Abrams’ opponent. That’s one way to ensure victory. Another is not to allow them to register in the first place, as has been the case with ex-felons in Florida, though as of Tuesday we now know this will change.

Then of course there are the overtly racist tirades offered by our crackpot president, warning of dark, diseased people menacing our southern border from hundreds of miles away, suggesting that two eminently qualified black candidates for governor are somehow not ready for the job, calling Gillum a crook, etc. Add that to the usual racist nonsense that goes on around election time (e.g. clumsily  offensive robocalls from white nationalist groups), and it may have been enough to keep either candidate from going over the 50% mark. (Then there’s voter I.D. laws and the like, but I’ll stop there.)

I know people want to believe that good triumphs over evil, even if it sometimes takes a little while. That’s seldom the case.  When good people do nothing, evil does as it pleases. If we let racism prevail, it sets a toxic precedent that is hard to reverse.

luv u,

jp