An Old Favourite, Updated

Enjoy this searing indictment:

Strong Evidence Of Trump's Racism

The CBC's Neil Macdonald has written a searing assessment of Donald Trump that leaves little doubt that the Americans elected a racist president. His starting pint is an interview conducted by the NYT of one Derek Black, a former white supremacist nurtured since childhood by a family that embraced racism; his father started that shrine to hatred known as Stormfront.

... the arc of the interview was that eventually Derek Black went off to college out of state and found himself contending with educated people who would systematically shred the studies and pseudo-science Black cited in support of his beliefs that, for example, there are IQ differences between races.

In short, Black himself received a humiliating education, decided white supremacy was a fringe movement for ignorant, angry people and publicly abandoned it. In return, his family basically disowned him.

After the terrible events of Charlottesville, Black expected a full-throated denunciation by all politicians, despite the fact that the 'protesters' had used code words well-known in racist circles, such as "protecting our history and culture."

That Donald Trump did not immediately denounce the marchers (though he read a boilerplate repudiation from a teleprompter on Monday), said Black, was "weird" and was taken as somewhat of a victory by his racist former fellow travellers, some of whom had shouted "Hail Trump" at the rally.

Then came Trump's news conference on Tuesday, Aug. 15, when he said that some of the marchers in the white nationalist rally were "very fine people" and focused on criticizing the counter-protesters and those who wanted to take down the statue of Lee.

Ask yourself this: how in heaven's name do "fine people" find themselves among torch-waving men shouting about non-white minorities and "blood and soil?" (Look up the provenance of that slogan). And why would a fine person not bolt at the first chant of "Jews will not replace us?"

Trump then said: "You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name [Emancipation Park]."

Now. Look at those last three words: "to another name." Donald Trump, president of the United States, not only thought there were fine people among the white supremacist marchers, he refused to say "Emancipation Park."

The consequence of this abysmal failure of national leadership was far-reaching:

Derek Black, listening in a coffee shop, said Trump's words "took my breath away."

The president had, in his view, validated the white supremacist messaging strategy in a stroke.

What they heard, he said, was "Donald Trump thinks we're fine." All the people who just needed a little extra nudge, to be told their son would be denied university because of affirmative action, or that an immigrant would take their jobs, had just been nudged.

Black called it the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement. David Duke and other white supremacists rejoiced. They've crawled out from under their rocks and are basking in their president's complicity.

To fight an evil, one must first be able to name it. Trump's conscious choice not to denounce racism in any credible way, along with his pardon of convicted racist Joe Arpaio, leaves little doubt that a racist is now occupying the White House.

I Remain Transfixed

Until relatively recently, I did not think I would live so long as to see this climate-change future.

Sixty-two Years Ago Today

On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in a horrific racist crime that reverberated throughout the world.

In April of this year, Jazz Night in America recorded Wadada Leo Smith performing a portion of his original composition "Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless" while canoeing down the Little Tallahatchie River in Glendora, Miss.

Here is the 360˚ VR video of that composition:

For Your Sunday Consideration

Thanks to my friend Gary, who sent me this:

Part 11 - Echoes Of History: 1955 And 2017

In Part 1, I discussed the murder of Emmett Till, the exoneration of his murderers, and the tactics used by the racists of 1955 Mississippi to try to discredit both the NAACP and the entire trial. Efforts went so far as to suggest Till had not been murdered at all but was in fact living in Detroit, part of an elaborate scheme by the NAACP to embarrass the South and discredit its traditions.

Fast forwarding 2017, it is apparent that not much has changed in the racist camp, now known as 'White Nationalists'or the'alt.right', euphemisms that do little to obscure what they really are. Following the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that became abundantly clear.

There was, of course, the now infamous press conference by Donald Trump which seemed to use the time-honoured, disingenous and quite cowardly tactic of arguing for a moral equivalency between the swastika-bearing white supremacists and the many who showed up to oppose them.

"What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at, as you say, the 'alt-right,' do they have any semblance of guilt?" Trump asked. "What about the fact they came charging with clubs in hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do."

He added: "You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now."

From the never subtle or nuanced Trump, it was an obvious and rather pathetic display of his leanings. Other efforts can sometimes be more subtle. And that subtlety often comes in the form of presenting the racists as victims of intolerance and 'liberal' hypocrisy rather than as perpetrators of hatred. Consider, for example, two of the aggrieved memes circulating widely on the Internet:



Of course, racist strategy goes far beyond such memes. In the Charlottesville violence, the torch-bearing supremacists presented themselves as full-throated Americans marching in favour of free speech and the preservation of historical monuments, yet their real motives are clear to most. As Patrick Sisson recently wrote:

“The Charlottesville protesters revealed what we know to be true about these monuments: They are monuments to white supremacy, and the threat that we’ll tear them down is a threat to their ideology and movement.”

Those not certain of this need only to listen to the chants of Charlottesville 'protesters.'

Casting doubt on the veracity of events is also a time-honoured racist tactic. As noted in Part 1, there were dark hints that the NAACP had engineered the 'killing' of Emmett Till as a tactic to advance their cause. That very same approach was recently used by Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka who, in answering why his leader did not make any comments about the August mosque bombing in Minnesota, discussed Trump's need to have all the information about the bombing (a restraint he has never practised in attacks initiated by Muslims) before offering a public statement to ascertain it wasn't a "fake hate crime."

"We've had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left," he said.

In Till's day, there were efforts to present the NAACP as a communist-infiltrated organization whose purpose was to upend American society. Efforts are also underway today to conflate those involved in clashes with the supremacists as hypocrites and violent thugs:

Then there was the shocking, disgusting Twitter post by Jason Kessler, the far-right activist who organized the Charlottesville march, to denigrate and slander the 32-year-old woman killed by a hate monger during the demonstration:

“Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist,” the post said. “Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.”

Or consider the smear campaign uncovered by the BBC:

Far-right activists are using fake Twitter accounts and images of battered women to smear anti-fascist groups in the US, an online investigation has revealed.

The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.

One image shows the slogan "53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this", above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol.


The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women's Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.

How about this one, another picture promoted on a false Twitter account:


This is the kind of post that could go on almost ad infinitum with examples of racist strategies. Rather than prolong it, I will recommend that you check out two articles that are quite instructive: Michael Coren's recent article, Lessons on how to confront fascists, and How I Became Fake News, Brennan Gilmore's account of what happened to him after he posted his video of the car heading toward and killing Heather Heyer.

But I will close now with the hope that people will be more critical in their thinking and not let their biases blind them to such basic tasks as checking the bona fides of news sites, especially those that abound on the Internet, go to multiple legitimate sources of information, not fall down the rabbit hole of mindless conspiracy theories and, most importantly, use the brains they were born with to constantly assess and reassess the best approximations of the truth we can have in this life.

Oh, and just one more thing. Lest we feel smug and think racism and discrimination are things that afflict only our southern neighbour, this disquieting video from Manitoba should be a source of shame for all Canadians:

UPDATED: A Glimpse Of The Religiously Insane

Behold.

UPDATE: Unless you can stand more of Paula White's sanctimonious and unhinged hypocrisy, I suggest you start the following at the 3:40 mark to savor Roland Martin's relentless take down of her and her fellow crazed evangelicals: