#..same for woodrow and harrys

[invited-anarchy]

paint tool sai is Fun and totally did not make me want to burn something once

in other words while sai is fun and all to use, it was pure suffering to figure out since i didn't think looking stuff up was a good idea

anyway, jake :]

still figuring out anatomy and stuff, so apologies if it looks a bit odd!!

[mariacallous]

Over the past three and a half years, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has faithfully echoed her boss, U.S. President Joe Biden, by invoking pretty much the same hegemonic worldview that every American president has embraced since World War II. As Harris put it in a 2023 speech—quoting a favorite phrase of Biden’s—“a strong America remains indispensable to the world.”

But the United States may be downgraded to a humbler status if Harris is elected president in November, based on the thinking of her chief advisors.

In their written work, Harris’s national security advisor, Philip Gordon, and deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, have sketched the outlines of a new worldview in which Washington frankly acknowledges its past excesses and dramatically lowers its ambitions. Or as Lissner put it in An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order, the 2020 book she coauthored with another Biden administration official: The United States should give up on strategic primacy and the “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order.’”

Instead of seeking to remain the unquestioned hegemon, the United States should seriously downsize its global role, wrote Lissner and her co-author, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who is currently Biden’s National Security Council director for East Asia and Oceania. It’s past time for Washington to discard the “messianic” goal of transforming the world in its image—the United States’ basic policy approach going back to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Instead, it should ratchet down to a much narrower role: merely preserving an open global system in which the United States can prosper.

“As the unipolar moment wanes, so too must any illusions of the United States’ ability to craft order unilaterally and universally according to its own liberal preferences,” Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote. “Insisting upon the United States’ international leadership role but departing from reliance on primacy as the cornerstone of a messianic liberal mission, a strategy of openness departs from post-Cold War liberal universalism, Cold War-style containment, and the traditional alternative of retrenchment.”

This new approach would mean a lot of accommodation of autocratic and illiberal regimes and a discarding of ideological crusades or containment strategies—all in the pragmatic interest of keeping trade open and bolstering cooperation on critical issues such as climate change, future pandemics, and artificial intelligence regulation. To put it simply, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper argued that policies of containment and hegemony should be supplanted by the far more modest goal of ensuring an “accessible global commons.” The United States has one critical task left as the “indispensable” superpower, they wrote: It is “the only country that can guarantee an open system.”

Gordon would likely agree—at least about leaving behind, at long last, the messianic strain in U.S. foreign policy. His own 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, is a fierce dissection of various failed U.S. efforts in the region dating back 70 years to the CIA-orchestrated ouster of Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh.

Though he lumped in Afghanistan—which is technically in central Asia—with the failed U.S. interventions in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria, Gordon was right to see a common theme: regime change almost never works. And like the proverbial lunatic who tries the same thing over and over thinking he might get a different result, U.S. policymakers never seem to learn the right lessons, he argued.

In every case, from 1953 (Mossadegh), to two disastrous episodes in Afghanistan (the 1980s and post-9/11), to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to fitful efforts in Egypt, Libya, and Syria after the 2011 Arab Spring, Gordon identified a pattern.

“As different as each episode was, and as varied as were the methods used, the history of regime change in the post-World War II Middle East is a history of repeated patterns,” he wrote, “in which policymakers underestimated the challenges of ousting a regime, overstated the threat faced by the United States, embraced the optimistic narratives of exiles or local actors with little power and vested interests, prematurely declared victory, failed to anticipate the chaos that would inevitably ensue after regime collapse, and ultimately found themselves bearing the costs—in some cases more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives—for many years or even decades to come.”

Gordon noted that critics, especially the few remaining neoconservatives in Washington, would argue that in some cases regime change had worked very well. This is most notably true in the case of postwar Germany and Japan. But he argued persuasively that these were unique circumstances: two highly advanced countries after a devastating world war. And had it not been for the strange annealing effect of the subsequent 40-year-long Cold War, even the successful transformations of Germany and Japan might not have worked as completely as they did because U.S. patience would have grown thin very quickly—as it has in subsequent cases. A faster U.S. withdrawal from Europe and Japan might well have undercut the effort to fundamentally change Berlin and Tokyo.

Grim and exhaustive as Gordon’s assessment is, it actually understates the case for change. That’s because, added all together, these failed U.S. attempts at transformation contributed mightily to the growing obsolescence of the current liberal international order that so concerns Lissner and Rapp-Hooper.

The history that Gordon recounts is a history that keeps on giving. Today the number-one menace keeping the United States tied down in the Middle East is the very same Islamic Republic of Iran that rose to power fueled by its opposition to the American “Great Satan,” produced by the 1953 coup and empowered by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a U.S. Army study completed in 2018 found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in George W. Bush’s Iraq war—the exact opposite of what Bush and his neoconservatives sought.

The vicious spiral set in motion by these misguided policy choices undermined U.S. legitimacy—or its primacy, to use Lissner’s and Rapp-Hooper’s term—as global overseer. The unnecessary and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq, and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted, laid the groundwork for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan (which led to Biden’s declaration in August 2021 that he was putting an end to “major military operations to remake other countries,” which of course put the president in accord with Gordon’s advice). The Iraq catastrophe also exposed U.S. military vulnerabilities on the ground in the worst way, tutoring Russia, China, and the rest of the world in how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles projected an image of panicky U.S. retreat, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin may have drawn encouragement to invade Ukraine. (Putin also invoked the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq to justify his own aggression in Ukraine.)

As counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen wrote in his book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, also released in 2020, the rising challenge to U.S. hegemony from countries such as China and Russia is linked to the United States’ “repeated failure to convert battlefield victory into strategic success or to translate that success into a better peace.” Over the past two decades, the lone superpower has allowed itself to get bogged down in a “seemingly endless string of continuous, inconclusive wars that have sapped [its] energy while [its] rivals prospered,” Kilcullen wrote.

And so the postwar international system, at least as once conceived, went down the tube as Beijing and Moscow began to declare that U.S. hegemony was no longer acceptable to them.

Beyond that, these failures helped to create the deep divisions in the American polity that led Lissner and Rapp-Hooper to conclude that traditional U.S. leadership is no longer tenable. Together these titanic errors of policy also helped to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism.

There were, to be sure, other U.S. failures that undermined U.S. legitimacy as global leader, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote—especially the 2008 financial disaster generated by Wall Street greed and the fecklessness of Washington regulators. But it’s clear that—far more than any fundamental flaws within the international system itself—it was largely the excesses of America’s postwar agenda and the arrogance with which it was pursued that squandered the world’s trust.

Gordon didn’t go quite as far as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper in his conclusions. Known as a passionate trans-Atlanticist—he served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration—Gordon acknowledged that “the regime change temptation will never go away.” He wrote: “The bias of American political culture, resulting from the country’s record of achievement and belief in its own exceptionalism, is to believe every problem has a solution.” Rather than reconfiguring U.S. policy entirely, he suggested that in most cases when it comes to rogue regimes “the best alternative to regime change looks a lot like the Containment strategy that won the Cold War.”

So where does this all leave us? There’s no use trying to unwind history and restore the old system. In many ways, despite their different conclusions, Gordon’s and Lissner’s books fit together like two big pieces of a puzzle: Thanks to the policy disasters detailed by Gordon (in which he took part, as a National Security Council official under then-President Barack Obama), some sort of humbler approach, along the lines proposed by Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, may be needed. And this strategy will likely be bipartisan to some degree.

Indeed, in their writings there is little doubt that Gordon and Lissner—the two chief foreign policy advisors to the woman who could soon be the next U.S. president—are in the process of codifying, perhaps for decades to come, the anti-interventionist impulse becoming ingrained in both political parties.

If Trump is elected instead of Harris, of course, he’s unlikely to embrace Lissner’s strategy of openness—at least not openly. (Trump continues to rhetorically demean U.S. allies and tout new tariffs as his main foreign-policy instrument.) What Trump is likely to do, however, is to continue to downgrade the United States’ global policeman role. Trump was instrumental in setting in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan and, as Gordon wrote, also eager to pull out of Syria. Indeed, it is striking that after five years of dithering by Obama over whether to help the Syrian rebels, it was Trump who best put his finger on the problem. He questioned why the United States was helping to topple Syria’s dictatorial leader, Bashar al-Assad, when, as Gordon quoted Trump as saying, “Syria was fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s prescriptions may be ambitious, but at the same time they are refreshingly modest in scope. Nothing has gotten Washington into more trouble over the decades than its continuing eruptions of hubristic policy. These extended from Wilson’s quixotic desire to make the world “safe for democracy” after World War I to then-Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz’s uber-hawkish defense policy guidance from 1992, which embraced a frank post-Cold War policy of preventing the rise of rival military powers. It was this sort of thinking by Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives that later helped justify the Iraq War.

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s open world concept also jibes with the changing calculus of our times: In economic terms, the divide between left and right wing is all but gone; instead, as Fareed Zakaria wrote in his 2024 book, Age of Revolutions, for the two political parties the old left versus right divide has been replaced by a struggle between those who want to keep the United States open to the world versus those who want to close it down more than ever. It is no accident that trade skeptics on the progressive left in the United States have come to lionize Trump’s former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, for his tariff policies. (In his 2023 book, No Trade is Free, Lighthizer makes a point of thanking U.S. union leaders and acknowledging Lori Wallach—a progressive trade expert—as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”)

So Lissner and Rapp-Hooper may have chosen just the right battlefield to die on—or not. If we can salvage some degree of openness, we can save something of the old system. As they wrote: “Openness does not, of course, incorporate the totality of American strategic objectives. Other threats, like nuclear proliferation, disease, or terrorism, may menace vital U.S. interests. Yet closed spheres of influence—whether exercised regionally or in particular domains—present the greatest danger to the United States’ security and prosperity” because they preclude necessary international cooperation.

Another fundamental problem that Lissner and Rapp-Hooper hint at is that the United States may no longer be up to the task of fully managing the international system it created. There is a growing mismatch between the complexity of this world system and the level of knowledge in the U.S. populace because of laggard education and dysfunctional political systems. Americans may simply no longer understand the system—how global free trade works, how military alliances keep them safe—well enough to maintain it. At the very least, Americans now have very little sympathy for that system.

The United States’ domestic polarization may also wreak havoc on some of the solutions Lissner and Rapp-Hooper propose. The authors propose a plan to “harness the private sector for national advantage” and bring the tech sector and Washington closer together. “The next administration should consider elevating the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a National Emerging Technology Council (NETC) on par with the National Security Council and National Economic Council,” they write. Yet the leaders of the United States’ tech sector have long tried to keep their distance from Washington—especially on defense policy–except for a few oddball pairings such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Perhaps the most fundamental question is whether the international system is really as obsolete as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper suggested. Yes, many problems the duo analyzed four years ago remain, including the increasing irrelevance of the World Trade Organization. But some of their views are dated. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper tended to echo the fears of Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who warned in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Competition Without Catastrophe,” of the menace of “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance.” Similarly, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote that “China is at the forefront of a new model of ‘techno-authoritarianism’ that could confer considerable competitive advantages.” Yet in the four years since the book’s publication, it’s become far clearer that China under President Xi Jinping has only fallen behind thanks to this new model, with its economy seriously stagnating and Xi pleading for more foreign investment.

Moreover, in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington has been forced to revert, to some extent, to its old role of global enforcer. This has proved especially true as the European Union has fallen behind the U.S. economically. As the Carnegie Endowment concludes in a new report that highlights how difficult it is to bring about strategic change in U.S. foreign policy, “the administration’s response to that crisis has been to expand America’s security role in Europe and thereby create a new status quo.” Much the same can be said of the United States’ role in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as Biden found himself sending carriers and submarines to the Mediterranean and forced to defend Israel from the air.

Yet we are also clearly moving into some kind of a new anti-interventionist era wherein Washington’s default mode—regardless of who occupies the White House—will be to stay out of global conflicts wherever and however possible. And it seems likely that if Harris wins, Gordon and Lissner will be major players. Gordon, to be sure, is more of a traditionalist who would be reluctant to tamper too much with the United States’ global security role. But it’s noteworthy that Lissner had a significant role drafting Biden’s national security strategy—and yet she chose to join the vice president’s staff in 2022 to influence policy for the next generation.

Asked whether Harris embraces Gordon’s and Lissner’s views, an aide to the vice president said only that Harris “is advised by a range of people with diverse views, and their previous writings reflect their personal views. Anyone looking to understand the vice president’s worldview should look at what she has said and done on the world stage.”

As for Harris’s current superior, perhaps Biden’s most enduring legacy—one that a President Harris would surely continue—will be that he sought to conduct a sort of halfway-house foreign policy that bridges the global policeman era and this new era of restraint. Biden has also attempted to find a workable compromise between the old consensus on globalization and the emerging cross-party consensus in favor of protectionism and industrial policy. As foreign-policy expert Jessica T. Mathews argued in Foreign Affairs, Biden has “unambiguously left behind the hubris of the ‘unipolar moment’ that followed the Cold War, proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.”

At the same time, however, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Biden has often gone back to invoking the old postwar view of the United States’ role, calling the United States the “arsenal of democracy” (FDR’s phrase) and declaring that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”

And given the ongoing crises around the world—especially in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly East Asia if the Taiwan issue heats up—it’s highly questionable whether the United States can adjust downward when there is no other major power that even comes close to approaching Washington’s global sway. If it can, then maintaining global openness may be a worthy—and perhaps achievable—goal.

[darkmaga-retard]

As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual scams to make people believe this election will be different. At last week’s Democratic National Convention, idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism.

But idealism has a worse record in Washington than a thieving New Jersey senator. “Idealism is going to save the world,” President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed shortly after World War I left much of Europe in ruins and paved the way for communist and Nazi takeovers. Wilson’s blather provoked H.L. Mencken to declare that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts…they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.”

The same verdict could characterize today’s political rogues. On the closing night of the convention, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised that “we will choose a better politics, a politics that calls us to our better selves.” And how can Americans know they are fulfilling their “better selves”? By swallowing any hogwash proclaimed by their rulers in Washington.

Kamala Harris is being touted for bringing idealism back into fashion after the supposedly tawdry Trump era. But we heard the same song-and-dance with Barack Obama.

[agentfascinateur]

What Marwan Bishara thinks an honest Herzog would say to Congress today:

I am honoured to speak to you today at the 75th anniversary of my country’s independence. It is an honour that neither I nor my country deserves.

Throughout our history, your steadfast and generous support has made Israel what it is today. President Woodrow Wilson supported the 1917 Balfour Declaration at the behest of the British Empire, committing to our future Jewish state – a commitment made by those who did not own the land to those who did not live on the land, against the will of those who did live on it.

And it was President Harry Truman who first supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan to carve that land into a Jewish and Palestinian state, and the first to recognise Israel only 11 minutes after its establishment in 1948. Since then, we have been telling each other how our nations were founded by persecuted migrant communities on the basis of European Enlightenment; how they created strong, vibrant modern states, civilising the savage, and how we have dominated global and Middle East affairs.

We tell each other a tale of how they founded two righteous, God-fearing models to emulate, like “shining beacon of hope” and “light unto the nations”; of sharing common liberal, democratic principles, and of our persistent pursuit of peace.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we should admit that we have also copied the worst of imperial Europe. We share a dark past of settler colonialism, war, ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants and a persistent history of racism and discrimination including slavery in the Americas, and apartheid in Palestine.

Our success was made possible through the blood and tears of countless victims. We’ve treated our nemeses as warmongers, our critics as enemies, and our enemies as modern-day Hitlers, but no other states have waged as many wars, or embarked on as many military interventions in the past eight decades as we have.

These similarities between our two nations continue to cast a long shadow over our bonds and behaviour.

Since our birth, Israel has had no better ally than the United States. Period. Even though, we have not always been gracious or reciprocated – while generally following in your footsteps, befriending your friends and denouncing your foes.

Whenever the world ganged up on our “Jewish state”, America came to the rescue. When Soviet bloc nations joined Muslim and other developing nations to condemn us for our bellicosity, it was the US that defended us and placated our foes with vigour and zeal. And when Europe joined the international outrage, the US was the only major power ready and able to stand by Israel and block international censures by vetoing consequential UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel.

Indeed, with the exception of that one “mistake” under Jimmy Carter, when Washington voted against Israeli settlement expansion, the US has routinely vetoed efforts to condemn Israel at the United Nations Security Council, blocking more than 40 such resolutions.

And this week, when a US Congresswoman – one of your own – called Israel racist, you, dear members of Congress, quickly shut her down by proclaiming in a resolution that Israel is not racist. Though I might have put it differently, she was essentially right, you are wrong.

Thanks to you, we have become more confident and assertive. With your military and economic aid that reached some $200bn, we have built a formidable military machine, that allowed us to double down on the repression of the Palestinians, and humiliation of the stubborn Arabs, who refuse to accept our pretence that our culture is superior to theirs, and that our settlement of their land is ours by right of a brief sojourn here a few thousand years ago.

When my late beloved father Chaim spoke to you as president of Israel in 1987, he boasted of our peace accords with Sadat of Egypt. And I am inclined to walk in his shoes and do the same; to boast of our Abraham accords with several Arab autocrats.

But unlike him, I can no longer keep silent as our military and civilian occupation mutates into an apartheid system in the Middle East. I do not say that lightly; I say it with a heavy heart. I do not say it out of pity for the millions of Palestinians, most of whom stubbornly linger under occupation and in refugee camps, I say it out of pity for my people and what’s become of us as decades-long occupiers and dispossessors. Our chutzpah is self-defeating. Our hasbara is wearing thin.

I never was a particularly brave or charismatic parliamentarian and head of the opposition. But that stops now, knowing I will never again have a better platform to address your people and mine. We may have become rich and powerful but we’ve never been so divided, so fanatical; so morally bankrupt.

Friends speak truth to each other. Good friends speak the bitter truth. It befalls upon you, once again, to save us from ourselves. To free us and the Palestinians from an entrenching system of apartheid that is bound to lock us in hatred and violence for decades to come. There is little I can do, as a ceremonial president, other than to speak out.

So, I urge you to condemn racism and apartheid today, as you condemned apartheid in South Africa, albeit belatedly in the past. And I urge you to push us to come to terms with the Palestinians, who soon will become the majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Do not believe a word Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says about the Palestinians; he has made a career out of trafficking in fear.

Like my two predecessors, I also believe we have a peace partner in President Mahmoud Abbas; perhaps the last peace partner. We must stop undermining him, as we will never be as lucky with a strong yet accommodating leader.

My father boasted of our liberal democracy and respect for human rights, albeit for Jews only, considering that in our Jewish state, the right to the land, the right to settle (return), and the right to self-determination is for the Jewish collective.

But even this communitarianism has eroded with time, culminating in a government of hyper-nationalists and religious fanatics that is demonstrably bent on destroying our Jewish democracy and squashing our liberal values.

Hundreds of thousands of my fellow Jewish countrymen and women have taken to the streets every week to protest against new illiberal legislation that is bound to chip away at our institutions and freedoms, and destroy any hope of future peace and democracy in the Jewish state.

This destruction will happen if you, members of this august symbol of constitutional democracy, continue to outbid yourselves in appeasing us as we stumble towards religious autocracy. Your intentions to invite our lying, cheating prime minister to speak here for a record fourth time will only make things worse.

President Biden is right to be concerned and to warn our government of going down this road. So should you. It is a dangerous road that is bound to destroy the fabric of our society.

I urge you to be brave and principled, for a change. It is liberating, as I have discovered.

[ramrodd]

How did FDR's New Deal impact American politics and the success of conservative candidates? Was it a significant factor in the rise of conservatism during Reagan's presidency?

COMMENTARY:

The New Deal basically kept Republicans out of power until LBJ bailed out as POTUS, Because of the Trotsky-inspired political stategy of the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, America was as close to blowing up in a Russian Revolution kind of way in 1968 as we needed to get until Project 2025 and January 6, And LBJ reaslized that just his re-election could be enough to set it off in exactly the same way Project 2025 is threatening to do if Trump isn’t installed as dictator.

The Plumbers were a consequence of the New Deal. The New Deal was their first head-on assault of DEI performance technology to replace the white supremacist culture of Woodrow Wilson in DC and the corporate cultues of the Fortune 500 as they woud have been constituted in 1933, The Be All You Can Be culture of the military is DEI performance technology, It’s the business I’m in, The Democrats were replacing the lingering elements of the Tory Socialism of the Crown that persisted with the failure of Reconstruction and expressed culturally as domestic terrorism crimi,nal organization and political deviancy such as Project 2025 and the Nazification with which Putin is contending,

I’m related to Woody, I am from the League of Nations, BLM side of the family, Wilson federalized the Negro Problem William F. Buckley presented in rebuttal to Jamens Baldwins Critical Race Theor proposal, Conservatives hate Critical Race Theory because it identifies the source of the Negro Problem as being the original sin of the Presbyterian Church USA, Willaim F. Buckley’s defense of Woodrow Winson’s Jim Crow Birht of a Nation Racism as a Mental Illnesss bigotry and structural racism,

We cannot eliminate whie supremacy, We can neutralize its spiritual poisons and limit its occurance, It’s Free Will: the law of averages perscribes it,

The anti-DEI campaign by Elon Musk and his cronies is a defense of white supremacy to the challenge of DEI as the intended social contract of the Declaration of Independence, We left the Tory Socialism of English white supremacy behind at Yorktown and replaced it, by law, with the Democratic Sociialism of the US Constitution as an instrument of the Pursuit of Happiness of We, the People, the Philospher Kings of the American Republic,

DEI performance technology is what FDR and the New Deal brought to the dance and the whit supremacists couldn’t keep up, They still can’t They are trying to force Biden to resign and challenging Harris’s credentials, They have no answer for the future,

William F. Buckley famously portrayed himself; in a Neitzsxhean Heroic conceit of standing on the wave of the future, declaring “STOP!”

The Director of the Secret Service who just threw herself on her sword is voth a victem of the Bill Ackman campaign against DEI AND the long-term effects of Project 2025 on the budget of the Secret Service, This kid got a shot at Tampex Ear because of the budget shortfall that is a conseqeunce of Grover Norquist’s “starve the beast” of Project 2025 and Steve Bannon’s objective to dismantel the administrative state, This is a result of the reactionaries of the white supremacist agenda of Project 2025,

In the Nixon White House, there was the adult leadership around Nixon who were committed to the DEI performance technology of Eisenhower associated with Ray Price while Pat Buchanan and the Plumbrs represented Project 2025, going back to the master mind, William F. Buckley. Ayn Rand’s Atals Shrugged is the essence of the resentment white supremacists felt towards FDR and the New Deal, even after having won the war with a huge surge of DEI performance technology that eventually put man on the moon with Apollo 11, Eisenhoer doubled down on the New Deal from the lessons he learned writing Crusade in Europe. Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform is the Marshall Plan for America that the Democratic Socialism of the Pursuit of Happiness makes possible,

And Project 2025 has done everything it could to prevent it from happening, Think Moscow Mitch and Obama’s SCOTUS legacy. Moscow Mitch is what the New Deal did to non-RINO Conservatives.

[onceuponatown]

Wreck of the SS Eastland. Chicago, 1915. 

The SS Eastland was a passenger ship based in Chicago and used for tours. On 24 July 1915, the ship rolled over onto its side while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed in what was the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.

On 24 July 1915, Eastland and four other Great Lakes passenger steamers – Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Racine and Rochester – were chartered to take employees from Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois to a picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. This was a major event in the lives of the workers, many of whom could not take holidays. Many of the passengers on Eastland were Czech immigrants from Cicero; of the Czech passengers, 220 perished.

During 1915, the new federal Seamen's Act had been passed because of the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels.[9] This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making her even more top-heavy. Some argued that other Great Lakes ships would suffer from the same problem. Nonetheless, it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Eastland had the option of maintaining a reduced capacity or adding lifeboats to increase capacity. Its leadership elected to add lifeboats to qualify for a license to increase its capacity to 2,570 passengers. Eastland was already so top-heavy that she had special restrictions concerning the number of passengers that could be carried. Prior to that, during June 1914, Eastland had again changed ownership, this time bought by the St. Joseph and Chicago Steamship Company, with Captain Harry Pedersen appointed the ship's master. In 1914, the St. Joseph and Chicago Steamship Company removed the old hardwood flooring of the forward dining room on the cabin level and replaced it with two inches of concrete. They also added a layer of cement near the aft gangway. Together, this added fifteen to twenty tons of weight.

On the morning of 24 July, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets about 6:30 am, and by 7:10 am, the ship had reached her capacity of 2,572 passengers. The ship was packed, with many passengers standing on the open upper decks, and began to list slightly to the port side (away from the wharf). The crew attempted to stabilize the ship by admitting water into her ballast tanks, but to little avail. Sometime during the next 15 minutes, a number of passengers rushed to the port side, and at 7:28 am, Eastland lurched sharply to port, and then rolled completely onto her port side, coming to rest on the river bottom, which was only 20 feet (6.1 m) below the surface; barely half the vessel was submerged. Many other passengers had already moved below decks on this relatively cool and damp morning to warm themselves before the departure. Consequently, hundreds of people were trapped inside by the water and the sudden rollover; some were crushed by heavy furniture, including pianos, bookcases, and tables. Although the ship was only 20 feet (6.1 meters) from the wharf, and in spite of the quick response by the crew of a nearby vessel, Kenosha, which came alongside the hull to allow those stranded on the capsized vessel to leap to safety, a total of 844 passengers and four crew members died in the disaster.

The bodies of the victims were taken to various temporary morgues established in the area for identification; by afternoon, the remaining unidentified bodies were consolidated in the Armory of the 2nd Regiment.

In the aftermath, the Western Electric Company provided $100,000 to relief and recovery efforts of family members of the victims of the disaster.

One of the people who were scheduled to be on Eastland was 20-year-old George Halas, an American football player, who was delayed leaving for the dock, and arrived after the ship had overturned. His name was listed on the list of deceased in newspapers, but when fraternity brothers visited his home to send their condolences, he was revealed to be unharmed. Halas would go on to become coach and owner of the Chicago Bears and a founding member of the National Football League. His friend and future Bears executive Ralph Brizzolara and his brother were on the Eastland when she capsized, though they escaped through portholes. 

After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy. After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

[deadpresidents]

Which President knew the most presidents, past and future?

I've always thought that the answer was clearly John Quincy Adams and that no other President came close because of the length of JQA's political career and the positions he held. But I wanted to be sure, so I actually did some research on this question and while the answer does seem to be John Quincy Adams, it's much closer than I thought between him and the runner-up, Herbert Hoover.

From the research I did, I'm pretty certain that John Quincy Adams met at least 14 Presidents: 1. George Washington 2. John Adams 3. Thomas Jefferson 4. James Madison 5. James Monroe 6. Andrew Jackson 7. Martin Van Buren 8. William Henry Harrison 9. John Tyler 10. James K. Polk 11. Millard Fillmore 12. Franklin Pierce 13. James Buchanan 14. Andrew Johnson That's basically ever President from the ratification of the Constitution and creation of the Presidency until the Civil War with two exceptions. I found no evidence that Adams ever met Zachary Taylor despite the fact that Taylor was a career soldier. Taylor actually visited Washington in 1826 when Adams was President, but President Adams and Vice President Calhoun were both out of town when Taylor visited. The other exception is actually more of a question mark. It's very possible that Adams met Abraham Lincoln, but there's no definitive evidence to prove it. Adams and Lincoln actually briefly served in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time -- from March 4, 1847 until Adams's death on February 23, 1848. It's entirely possible -- and probably even likely -- that they crossed paths and met during that time. But there's no record of it. So, JQA met 14 Presidents for sure, and Lincoln was possibly number 15.

As for Herbert Hoover, I'm certain that he met 12 Presidents: 1. Benjamin Harrison 2. Theodore Roosevelt 3. William Howard Taft 4. Woodrow Wilson 5. Warren G. Harding 6. Calvin Coolidge 7. Franklin D. Roosevelt 8. Harry S. Truman 9. Dwight D. Eisenhower 10. John F. Kennedy 11. Lyndon B. Johnson 12. Richard Nixon It's possible that Hoover met Gerald Ford since Ford was a rising Republican leader in Congress during the last 15 years of Hoover's life and Hoover remained plugged into GOP politics for most of that time and continued making appearances at the Republican National Conventions until his last Convention speech in 1960. There's also a possibility that Hoover met Ronald Reagan since both were frequent attendees of the Bohemian Grove gatherings. I believe Hoover's last trip to Bohemian Grove was 1961, but I'm not sure if Reagan was there. I couldn't find any definitive evidence that Hoover did meet Ford or Reagan, but it's a possibility. So, Hoover definitely met 12 Presidents and is much closer to John Quincy Adams's number than I realized before doing some research.

Interestingly, there's someone else who is tied with John Quincy Adams and has met 14 American Presidents: Queen Elizabeth II!

The Queen's first meeting with a President was actually while she was still Princess Elizabeth. In 1951, Elizabeth and Prince Philip traveled to Washington, D.C. to represent the ailing King George VI, meeting with President Truman, and staying the night at Blair House where the Trumans were living while the White House was undergoing extensive renovations. While John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover's meetings with Presidents often took place before (and sometimes after) those people became President, Queen Elizabeth's meetings all took place with incumbent Presidents -- except for her meeting with Herbert Hoover which took place in 1957, nearly 25 years after Hoover left the White House. Lyndon Johnson is the only President during Elizabeth's reign that the Queen never met. The 14 Presidents that Queen Elizabeth II met were: 1. Harry S. Truman 2. Herbert Hoover 3. Dwight D. Eisenhower 4. John F. Kennedy 5. Richard Nixon (the Queen met Nixon in 1957 when he was Vice President but met with him against in 1969 when he was the incumbent President) 6. Gerald Ford 7. Jimmy Carter 8. Ronald Reagan 9. George H.W. Bush 10. Bill Clinton 11. George W. Bush 12. Barack Obama 13. Donald Trump 14. Joe Biden

[outoftowninac]

WHY WOMEN WIN

1916

Why Women Win is a four act comedy-drama by Joseph Ferguson. It originally starred the author. Others in the original cast included Mabel Wilson, Anthony De Motto, Charles Rondeau, Juanita Bertram, Harry Wilson, and Harriet Stein. 

The play premiered in Atlantic City at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre on the Boardwalk on January 6, 1916. It was to play the second half of a split week (Thu / Fri / Sat) with The Cinderella Man by Edward Childs Carpenter. 

On New Year’s Day 1916, the Atlantic City Press reported that: 

“While an outline of the plot is not available at present, it is said that ‘Why Women Win’ is a clean, moral, interesting, up-to-date story told with gripping situations and that the comedy element predominates throughout, there being a character called ‘Biddy’ who interrupts many of the tense moments with laughs.” 

On January 4th, the same newspaper reported that the plot of the play dealt indirectly with the Suffragette movement. 

“Incidental to the play, Mr. Ferguson will sing several of his new songs, assisted on piano by Mrs. Stein.”  

On January 6th, in advance of a follow-up booking the following week, the Vineland Evening Journal revealed the plot: 

"’Why Women Win’ a new up-to-date comedy drama by Joseph Ferguson, will be the attraction at the Auditorium, Vineland Monday evening January 10. An unusual plot is embodied in this play which is based on the adoption of two orphans by different well-to do families. One of the orphans a boy turns out an ungrateful ne'er-do well and robs the bank in which his foster father places hm. He is not suspected and his foster brother later catches him robbing the safe at home a struggle ensues in which the adopted brother knocks his foster brother unconscious and arranges evidence that points toward him as the criminal. His foster mother detects the real criminal and orders him from the house forever.. Her son is engaged to be married and bis fiancé turns out to be the sister of the foster son whom she has just turned from the house. The girl induces her brother to return his loot to the bank and to the home and all ends well. 

An Irish servant injects many a laugh in the midst of the tense dramatic moments which character is very well done by Anthony de Motto. Mr. Ferguson himself plays the part of William Stanton the real son of the banker and Charles Rondeau enacts the role of John, the foster brother. Miss Mayo has the role of Avis Laird, the adopted girl, and Miss Bertram does the Mrs. Stanton part. The other characters are in the hands of a good supporting company. The company comes direct here from the Apollo Theater at Atlantic City.”

After a single performance, the management of Nixon’s Apollo cancelled the remaining performances. No explanation was provided for the abrupt cancelation. 

The company was scheduled to appear the following Monday in nearby Vineland NJ on Monday, January 10, 1916. Whether Ferguson and company performed the play in Vineland, or called it quits after being nixed by Nixon’s in Atlantic City, is a mystery. It may be that the play was one of the few to open and close out-of-town after just a single performance.   

Meanwhile, in 1916 Alice Paul and her colleagues rename the Congressional Union (CU) the National Woman's Party (NWP) and began demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, and picketing the White House over the refusal of President Woodrow Wilson and other Democrats to actively support the Suffrage Amendment. It would be four long years before women won the right to vote. 

The League of Women Voters of New Jersey was depicted in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, set in Atlantic City. 

[racefortheironthrone]

Is it that unusual for the man who wins the presidency to not have Washington experience First sitting senator elected to the presidency was Warren G. Harding in 1921 and then John F. Kennedy was the second and Barack Obama was the third... Seems like being a governors wasn't that atypical before our recent era?

Lacking Washington *experience* - which isn’t the same thing as being a U.S Senator - is pretty unusual since the beginning of the 20th century. 

Starting from 1900, we have Theodore Roosevelt (Vice President), William Howard Taft (Cabinet Secretary), Woodrow Wilson (no D.C experience), Warren G. Harding (U.S Senator), Calvin Coolidge (Vice President), Herbert Hoover (Cabinet Secretary), FDR (Assistant Cabinet Secretary), Harry Truman (U.S Senator), Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S Armed Forces), JFK (U.S Senator), LBJ (U.S Senator), Richard Nixon (Vice President), Gerald Ford (Vice President), Jimmy Carter (no D.C experience), Ronald Reagan (no D.C experience), George H.W Bush (Vice President), Bill Clinton (no D.C experience), George W. Bush (no D.C experience), Barack Obama (U.S Senator), Donald Trump (no D.C experience), and Joe Biden (Vice President). 

So out of 20 presidents, that’s 5 with no D.C experience and 15 with D.C experience of some kind. 

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt (32): 4422 days

2. Thomas Jefferson (3): 2922

2. James Madison (4): 2922

2. James Monroe (5): 2922

2. Andrew Jackson (7): 2922

2. Ulysses S. Grant (18): 2922

2. Grover Cleveland (22, 24): 2922 (non-consecutive)

2. Woodrow Wilson (28): 2922

2. Dwight D. Eisenhower (34): 2922

2. Ronald Reagan (40): 2922

2. Bill Clinton (42): 2922

2. George W. Bush (43): 2922

2. Barack Obama (44): 2922

14. George Washington (1): 2865*

15. Harry S. Truman (33): 2840

16. Theodore Roosevelt (26): 2728

17. Calvin Coolidge (30): 2041

18. Richard Nixon (37): 2027

19. Lyndon B. Johnson (36): 1886

20. William McKinley (25): 1654

21. Abraham Lincoln (16): 1503

22. John Quincy Adams (6): 1461

22. Martin Van Buren (8): 1461

22. James K. Polk (11): 1461

22. Franklin Pierce (14): 1461

22. James Buchanan (15): 1461

22. Rutherford B. Hayes (19): 1461

22. Benjamin Harrison (23): 1461

22. William Howard Taft (27): 1461

22. Herbert Hoover (31): 1461

22. Jimmy Carter (39): 1461

22. George H.W. Bush (41): 1461

22. Donald Trump (45): 1461

34. John Adams (2): 1460**

35. John Tyler (10): 1430

36. Andrew Johnson (17): 1419

37. Chester Alan Arthur (21): 1262

38. John F. Kennedy (35): 1036

39. Millard Fillmore (13): 969

40. Gerald Ford (38): 895

41. Warren G. Harding (29): 881

42. Zachary Taylor (12): 492

43. James A. Garfield (20): 199

44. Joe Biden (46): 87+ [as of April 17, 2021]

45. William Henry Harrison (9): 31

More than 2 terms: 1/45

2 full terms: 13/45

Between 1 and 2 terms: 7/45

1 full term: 13/45

Less than 1 term: 10/45

Pending: 1/45

*Washington was elected to 2 full terms, but was sworn in two months late, so he only served 2865 out of 2922 days

**John Adams was elected to 1 full term, but the year 1800 was not a leap year, so his was a day shorter than everyone else's. Same thing would have happened to William McKinley in 1900. giving him 2921 out of 2922, but he was assassinated early int his second term. George W. Bush served the full 2922 because the year 2000 was a leap year.

Joe Biden surpassed William Henry Harrison on February 21, 2021 (32 days)

He will surpass James A. Garfield on August 8, 2021 (200 days)

Zachary Taylor on May 28, 2022 (493 days)

Warren G. Harding: June 21, 2023 (882)

Gerald Ford: July 5, 2023 (896)

Millard Fillmore: September 17, 2023 (970)

John F. Kennedy: November 23, 2023 (1037)

Chester Alan Arthur: July 6, 2024 (1263)

Andrew Johnson: December 10, 2024 (1420)

John Tyler: December 21, 2024 (1431)

John Adams: January 20, 2025 (1461)

[zwischenstadt]

Post-war economic development improved the living conditions of millions of Americans and elevated a new middle-class consumer identity as a dominant social and cultural aspiration. As early as the Woodrow Wilson administration’s “Own Your Own Home” campaign, American politicians, commercial and real estate interests promoted homeownership as an antidote to left labor militancy.36 The turn to housing and real estate development as an economic growth model and political maneuver against labor insurgency would gain ground amid the Depression. Beginning with the New Deal establishment of the Federal Housing Administration and expansion after World War II under the leadership of Harry Truman, the US embarked on a housing revolution, a process of mortgage lending, massive highway and infrastructure development, and new home construction that transformed millions into nominal property-holders and members of the new middle class. Suburban development and all manner of consumer activity propagated a new consumer-class identity, sweeping away old urban ethnic and proletarian affinities, and cementing the loyalty of more secure workers to the Cold War growth trajectory of defense spending, urban renewal and suburbanization. Woven into this same process of suburbanization were policies that resegregated the black urban poor through tower block public housing, freeway construction and practices like redlining, which combined to devalue and deter investment in central city neighborhoods. Out of this post-World War II urban-spatial transformation, race emerged as the dominant symbolic language for understanding American inequality. The combination of home ownership, access to suburban school districts, police protection, tax-relief, and relative economic advantage formed the material basis for the conservative positions of many whites who came to support the New Right, but we know that not all whites embraced such conservatism. Relative urbanity, union-membership, civic organizations, religion, familial and community traditions of activism, and other idiosyncratic factors continued to matter in shaping political ideology and policy commitments even in suburbia. “White” became a synonym for middle class, suburban, law-abiding, virtuous, property-owning, hardworking, and self-governing, and “black” came to function as a euphemism for poor, urban, criminal, dysfunctional, dispossessed, lazy, and dependent. Whiteness discourse accepts and legitimizes these symbolic markers of post-war class structure, without undertaking a more nuanced examination of actual material and political interests, how they are formed, articulated and contested within specific historical-local contexts.

Cedric Johnson, “The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need”

https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

[arcticdementor]

Is America disintegrating into anarchy and civil war among races, religions, and regions? Is the country more divided than ever before? The answer is no. The social and economic divides among white Northerners and white Southerners, Blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants and Jews were much more intense in 1920 than they are today in 2020. What has happened is that the formerly unified, mostly Northern mainline Protestant American establishment has—perhaps temporarily—broken down, allowing the actual diversity of interests and opinions in the United States to be expressed rather than suppressed. If the emerging woke national establishment has its way, however, that diversity of viewpoints and values will soon be suppressed once again, in favor of an intolerant and exclusive doctrine that greatly resembles the old-time Social Gospel from which it is derived.

With the exceptions of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, every American president between 1861 and 1933 was a Republican mainline Protestant from the North or Midwest. The Republican Party, still the Lincoln coalition of Northern industrialists and Yankee Protestants, dominated Congress in the same era. Industry and finance were in the hands of a small number of Northeastern financiers, many of them old-stock Northeastern Protestants like J.P. Morgan. While there were some important Jewish financiers, Jews along with Catholics were kept out of many snobbish Wall Street firms until well after World War II.

…

The Democratic Party that dominated the United States between the 1930s and the 1980s had a few Yankee progressive members, but it was essentially the old Jacksonian alliance of white Southerners and non-British “white ethnics” in the North. If Harry Truman is understood correctly as a cultural Southerner from Missouri, then with one exception every Democratic president between Roosevelt and Obama was a white Southerner—Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. The one exception was John F. Kennedy, from the other wing of the Jacksonian anti-Yankee alliance of Southerners and Irish Americans. Meanwhile, the Solid South combined with the seniority system ensured that Southerners, many of them segregationists, dominated Congress and the Senate throughout the New Deal era.

…

Driven from the White House for half a century after 1932, marginalized in Congress and circumvented by federal state capitalism, the Northern mainline Protestant elite managed to preserve its dominance in three areas: The “Deep State,” the major nonprofit foundations, and elite prep schools and universities. In the movie The Good Shepherd (2007), Joe Pesci’s Mafioso says to Matt Damon’s WASP CIA agent: “You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition, the [Blacks] their music. What do you guys have?” Damon’s character replies: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

In addition to the “Deep State,” other national institutions that the neo-Jacksonians of the New Deal coalition never conquered in their revolution against Yankeedom include the major nonprofit foundations like Ford and Rockefeller and the Ivy League universities. The culture of what might be called the NGO-academic-spook complex remained deeply rooted in the Social Gospel wing of Northern mainline Protestantism of the early 1900s.

The Social Gospel progressivism these institutions have long embraced is a Janus-faced tradition. One face is technocratic, holding that social and global conflicts, rather than reflecting the tragic nature of human existence, are “problems” which can be “solved” by nonpartisan experts guided by something called “social science.” The other face of Social Gospelism is irrational, and rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology convinced that we are on the verge of a world of peace and prosperity, if only wicked people at home and wicked regimes abroad can be crushed once and for all.

This mentality with its bizarre synthesis of science-inspired technocracy and millenniarian zeal, was shared by many turn-of-the-century Progressives, including Woodrow Wilson, a Southern-born Northern transplant. As Dorothy Ross points out in The Origins of American Social Science (1990), Wilson, like many leading American Progressives, was the child of a mainline Protestant minister.

Shedding its specifically Northern mainline Protestant cultural attributes, a version of Social Gospel Protestantism has mutated into the secular religion of wokeness, the orthodoxy of the universities and the increasingly important nonprofit sector. Its converts include many of the affluent white secular children and grandchildren of members of mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists, which are hemorrhaging membership to the category of religious “nones.”

By evolving from an ethnoregional culture into a crusading secular creed disseminated by the universities, the public school system, the corporate media, and corporate HR departments, post-Protestant wokeness is capable of assimilating anyone, of any race or ethnicity, native-born or immigrant, who is willing to conform to its weird rituals and snobbish etiquette. The Long Island lockjaw accent has been replaced by the constantly updated “woke” dialect of the emerging American elite as a status marker. You may have an Asian or Spanish surname, but if you know what “nonbinary” means and say “Latinx” (a term rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American origin) then you are potentially eligible for membership in the new national ruling class.

…

Although the woke managerial culture in the United States has lost most of the vestiges of its Yankee mainline Protestant origins, the emerging American national oligarchy has the same enemies as the old New England-Midwestern WASP oligarchy: white Southerners, Catholic white ethnics and observant Jews. This became clear in the summer of 2020. The woke left not only demanded the removal of statues of Confederate traitors—a perfectly reasonable demand—but also targeted Columbus, the icon of Italian Americans, and Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors. Democratic liberals warned, in the tones of 19th-century Yankee Protestant nativists, that papists were taking over the Supreme Court. At the same time, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Italian American by ancestry but woke by culture, exhibited a striking double standard when it came to public gatherings by left-wing protesters on the one hand and, on the other, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews.

…

What we are witnessing is a power grab carried out chiefly by some white Americans against other white Americans. The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatize, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees.

[darkmaga-retard]

by Jim Bovard | Aug 26, 2024

As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual cons to make people believe this election will be different. At last week’s Democratic National Convention, sham idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism.

But idealism has a worse record in Washington than a New Jersey senator. “Idealism is going to save the world,” President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed shortly after World War I left much of Europe in ruins and paved the way for communist and Nazi takeovers. Wilson’s blather provoked H.L. Mencken to declare that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts…they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.”

The same verdict could characterize today’s political rogues. On the closing night of the convention, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised that “we will choose a better politics, a politics that calls us to our better selves.” And how can Americans know they are fulfilling their “better selves”? By swallowing without caviling any hogwash proclaimed by their rulers in Washington.

Kamala Harris is being touted for bringing idealism back into fashion after the supposedly tawdry Trump era. But we heard the same song-and-dance with Barack Obama.

Obama declared that America’s “ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake” in his first inaugural address. But one of Obama’s most shocking legacies was his claim of a prerogative to kill U.S. citizens labeled as terrorist suspects without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked individuals to legally object. Obama’s lawyers even refused to disclose the standards used for designating Americans for death. Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, and he personally chose who would be killed at weekly “Terror Tuesday” White House meetings which featured PowerPoint parades of potential targets.

[manage-mischief]

Regulus Black and the Darkest Shadows

Chapter 3: The Risky Play

Read on: AO3 or FF.net

Chapter Summary: A familiar face graces the halls of Hogwarts.

Notes: Chapter 3! Yay! So, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be posting Sundays every week. Keep a lookout! Thank you so so much to everyone who has reviewed so far. I really appreciate it. Also, thanks to my incredible beta reader: @leah-ravenanne :)

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

September 6th, 1978

Quidditch tryouts were Saturday and Regulus was quite looking forward to them. He was never happier than when he was playing Quidditch. He had played Seeker on the Slytherin Team for three years now, and had enjoyed every moment of it. The freedom of flying through the air, the wind whipping through his black locks, the sting of the frost on his face—all of it made him feel alive. This year, his good friend Woodrow McDrew, would be captaining the team. Although McDrew was not a member of Regulus’s normal circle of friends, Regulus respected McDrew all the same. He was a highly talented and fiercely kind individual. Avery and Mulciber often mocked McDrew, commenting that he should have been in Hufflepuff due to his friendly, outgoing demeanor and staunchly pro-Muggle views. However, Regulus found McDrew to be a breath of fresh air. He demonstrated the best qualities of Slytherin House, and, despite his disapproval of Regulus’s friends, always treated him with respect. No one deserved to be Quidditch Captain more than McDrew.

“’Ello, Regulus!” McDrew greeted him with a wide smile and a firm handshake. “Have a good summer?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. How about yourself?”

“Oh, you know, nothin’ too interesting to report. Well, until I found out about being Quidditch Captain!” He lowered his voice, suddenly serious. “I’ve been studying up on the other teams, you know? Who they’re likely to keep, who’s gone, and that sort of stuff. We’ll win this year, I know it!”

Regulus laughed, appreciating his confidence. “That’s great. Who do you reckon are going to be toughest to beat?” he asked, although he already feared the answer.

“Ravenclaw, as always.” McDrew rolled his eyes. As if on cue, the Ravenclaw team stormed merrily out onto the pitch, trailed by a hopeful group of newcomers ready to try out. The Ravenclaw Quidditch Team was daunting, there was no denying it. Their offensive strength lay in their elite group of Chasers. Gwenog Jones, who had clearly been named Captain, was a force of nature. Rumor had it that she had already signed a contract with the Holyhead Harpies and would be leaving Hogwarts immediately following the Quidditch season to play for them. George Fleet, a lanky, sandy-haired seventh year, came from a long line of Quidditch royalty. His father had, until very recently, played for the English National Team. Regulus had remembered cheering for Giles Fleet when he was a child. And then, there was Des Lewis. For a girl raised by Muggles, she had immense skill. Regulus remembered the conversation he had overheard her having with Slughorn. Gwenog had taken her to training camp with Holyhead this past summer.

As the blue-clad team passed the Slytherins, McDrew tensed his shoulders. He tersely nodded at Gwenog Jones, who cordially returned the gesture. “Going to the Slug Club next Friday, McDrew? I hear he’s got Ludo Bagman coming in.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” McDrew replied. There was an awkward pause before Gwenog cleared her throat and signaled to her team to move down the field. “See you around, McDrew. Black.” She stomped away.

McDrew exhaled deeply after she had gone. “What a woman!”

---

As Regulus packed up his broom after the conclusion of Slytherin field time (during which he’d flown beautifully, thank you very much), he noted a fleck of maroon in his peripheral vision. Sure enough, the Gryffindors had arrived for their time on the pitch. However, Regulus was shocked to see an old familiar face. Laughing along with the rest of the team, with his untidy black hair and smug grin, was none other than James Potter, the brother-stealer. What was he doing here? Come back to relive his glory days? James caught Regulus’s eye as Regulus stared loathingly across the pitch. Bollocks.

With a new sense of urgency, Regulus haphazardly shoved the rest of his equipment into his bag. He tried to blend in between a group of young Gryffindors cheering on their team as he rushed toward the field’s exit. He wasn’t so lucky.

“Oi, Regulus.”

Regulus walked faster.

“Hey! Hey Reggie, come back!” James Potter sprinted towards him, seizing his robes and yanking him backwards. “Didn’t you hear me shouting?” James asked innocently.

“Oh dear, I guess I’d better get my hearing checked,” Regulus snidely remarked. “What do you want, Potter? Why are you even here? Finally realize that you’re nothing outside of school?”

James looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and fiddled with the cuffs of his robes. “It’s…it’s for work! You know what? That’s none of your business! Listen. I need to talk to you. It’s about Pad—Sirius. It’s about Sirius.”

Regulus’s throat constricted. “What about him?”

“Well, he…um. He wanted me to talk to you. He, uh, well… he wants to say he’s sorry for leaving and sorry that you guys lost touch…”

Regulus was shocked and enraged. “Oh, poor Sirius! How will he go on? Well, you can tell that traitor that if he was truly sorry, he’d have come to me himself, not had his replacement family do it for him! Or better yet, he’d have had the balls to come talk to me a year ago when this whole mess started. So, you tell dear Sirius that I’m sorry his guilt has finally caught up with him, but he can take his guilt and shove up it up his—”

“Stop!” James interrupted. “Don’t you understand how hard it was on him? He’s only just come to terms with being disowned. He thought he’d put you in danger by talking to you himself. He didn’t want your mum and dad to hurt you.”

Regulus remembered the threats his mother and father had made before he returned to school last year, warning him against having any contact with his disgraced brother.

“We will know...”

James seized Regulus’s moment of pause as an opportunity to continue. “He’s fine, now. But he…he’s seen how you’ve changed since he left. We can all see it. He’s afraid that you’re going down a dark path.”

Another wave of rage coursed through Regulus’s veins. “Oh yeah? Well you don’t know anything about my life, and neither does he! He went out and found himself a new family. Well, I did the same!” he shouted, not caring about the younger onlookers surrounding him.

James’s faced contorted. He was angry now too. “You think those Death Eaters are your family? That’s sick, mate. Absolutely sick. Sirius always told me that you were different from old Orion and Wally. He said you didn’t really believe all that pureblood, anti-Muggle shit. But, I guess he was wrong. You’re in just as deep as the rest of them. Spineless. You disgust me, mate.”

Regulus blanched. “Just— just because I’m in with them doesn’t mean I believe all they have to say. I- I can make my own decisions!”

Potter scoffed. “Clearly not. You think that old Voldie’s going to let you think for yourself?! Then you’re way too naive to be caught up in this mess! You’re either in or you’re out. This is a war, mate! I know you know what’s on the horizon. And if you choose the side of hatred and bigotry…well…then you’ll get what’s coming.”

With those scathing words, Potter spun on a heel and stormed back towards his old teammates, leaving Regulus standing there, shocked and confused. Sure, he’d been having some doubts but…He was where he belonged, wasn’t he? His mind raced. His cheeks burned with shame. What did Potter know, anyway?

Turning down a corridor into the castle, he ran into Ginger, whose hair was now putrid green. She was covered with flecks of something dark and wet.

“What happened to you?” Regulus asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I heard Lewis use the Dark Lord’s name in the hall. So, I hexed that Mudblood friend of hers, Bode. Used one of Severus’s old curses. It worked wonderfully—he’s in the hospital wing now. But, Lewis got me with this jinx before I could get away. It’s not too bad, though. Avery reckons he can fix it right up. Those little Muggle lovers don’t have the balls to do anything serious! Pathetic!” She cackled. Regulus found it to be a shrill, ugly sound. He realized the dark spatters peppering Ginger’s face and robes were specks of blood. His head pounded. He felt like he was going to vomit.

“I’ve gotta go.” Regulus spun around and quickly walked away from Ginger and the Slytherin Common Room.

Regulus aimlessly wandered about the castle, reflecting on Potter’s words. He had always told himself he wasn’t as bigoted or as prejudiced as his friends. He had attempted to justify his involvement with the Death Eaters by blaming others; but Sirius hadn’t given into the pressure like Regulus had. Besides, Regulus had wanted a family, he had wanted people who accepted him for who he was. But, did they accept him? Or, did they only want him among their ranks because of his prominent, Pureblood status? He remembered when they had approached him during first year.

“We know enough about you…” What had they known, really?

Back then, Regulus had refused. He had felt that he had higher moral principles. Sure, he had been raised by his parents to hate and fear Muggles. But Regulus had never personally believed Muggles and Muggleborns were less than human. He hadn’t then… did he now? He thought of the boy Ginger had sent to the hospital, just for fun. He felt sickened by himself. How had he let himself end up here?

---

The rest of the week dragged on. Regulus had become detached and distant. He poured all of his time and energy into his classes. He barely slept. He thought about reaching out to someone, but didn’t know who he would go to for help. He could send an owl…but who would he write? Sirius? They hadn’t spoken in years, what would he even say? Plus, Regulus still harbored some animosity towards his brother for abandoning him. James? Not likely after that verbal thrashing. Regulus would be too embarrassed. And they had never quite gotten on, even before Sirius’s flight. He racked his brain. He barely knew anyone outside of his Death Eater circle, now. Dejectedly, he plopped himself on his bed and pressed his fingers over his eyelids, trying to block the oncoming migraine. Quidditch practice tonight was going to be a pain.

Quidditch…McDrew! That was it! He would talk to McDrew. Regulus knew he could trust his fellow seventh year. Cheered up slightly, he grabbed his broom and Quidditch bag and headed to down the pitch, hoping to catch his captain there before the others arrived.

Sure enough, the Slytherin Captain had also arrived early and was currently pouring over a strategy book in the locker room as Regulus walked in. Engrossed, McDrew didn’t notice his entrance. Regulus coughed, and the boy looked up.

“Oh, hey Black! Didn’t realize you’d be here this early. I was just reading up on some new moves I want us to try.”

Regulus forced an awkward smile, suddenly extremely nervous and shy. McDrew noticed something was off.

“You alright, mate?”

Regulus sighed. This was his opening. “Can…can I ask you something?”

McDrew raised an eyebrow, confused. “Sure.”

“Do you think I’m a bad person?”

A prolonged silence filled the room. McDrew considered his answer, deep in thought.  “To tell you the truth, mate, I don’t think anyone is really a bad person. I think people make bad choices, especially when they’re lost or confused. But, deep down, I don’t believe anyone can survive without a little bit of good in them.”

“That was philosophical.”

McDrew laughed. “Yeah, I suppose it was.” He became serious again. “But, I think it’s true. Look, Regulus, I don’t pretend to know everything about you. But, I spent my fair share of time around your brother and his friends, so I’ve heard things. Heard things about what it’s like living with your parents, with all of that pressure, with some of their…disciplinary methods…”

Regulus paled and averted his gaze.

“…And I think growing up like that would be enough to send anyone over the deep end. Considering all you went through, you seem pretty sane to me. But, I think you’re lost. You’re angry. You’re scared. And, I think that’s caused you to make some bad decisions. To fall in with some bad people. I know it’s hard. In Slytherin, there’s this expectation to follow exactly what old Salazar used to say. ‘Purebloods first, Muggles are scum,’ that sort of thing. I, myself, think that’s all bullshit. Sure, I’ve made some enemies, especially among those whom you consider to be your friends. At the end of the day, though, I see it as my duty to speak up. To go against the grain, to prove that all that rhetoric is troll dung. There comes a point where you’ve got to make a choice about who you want to be. And, I think it seems like you’re at that point. So, mate, if you decide that you don’t want to continue down whatever path you’re currently on, you know where to find me. Me and my friends’ll gladly take you in. Don’t let the fear of being alone—of making others angry—ruin your own life.” McDrew smiled. “You’re a good bloke, Reg. I just think you’ve lost your way.”

Regulus fought back the pricking of tears in his eyes. He hadn’t realized how much he needed to hear those words. All he had wanted was to be loved and accepted. Yet, so far, all love in his life—from his family, from his friends—had been conditional. The fear of losing their love had caused Regulus to conform, to become a person he barely recognized. But, here he was, sitting in the musty Quidditch locker room, presented with a way out. A way to rediscover himself and become a better person. Energized by the prospect of this new life, he broke into a wide grin. He heard the rest of the team coming down into the changing rooms.

“Practice is starting, I guess,” Regulus said. “Maybe we can talk more at breakfast tomorrow?”

McDrew smiled crookedly. “Of course, mate! I’ll look forward to it!”

[ramrodd]

Sam Harris: Debating conspiracy theorists, wokeness, Trump, collapse of ...\

COMMENTARY:

The choice this election is between Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness versus Taylor Swift's Generosity of Spirit.  Being is based on the science of Altruism of the  Liberation Gospel of the  Christian centurion of the Italian Cohort of the Praetorian Guard. b Being woke is the defense of altruism in the moral confusion of people like Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky, It's a seminar in sophistry as a contact sport in an Animal House food fight kind of way.

The choice is between a political ;party which considers the Federal Treasury is a  piggy bank for white supremacists like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Glenn Youngkin  and Trump or a party which employs the Federal Government as a capitalist tool in the manner conceived of by the Framers.

I mean, we can do another 4 years jerking off with January 6 bullshit or continue the trajectory of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform into Starship America, We gave been a cunt hair away from completing Stage 2 of the process to transform the social infrastructure of the Manhattan Project to the Eisenhower-von Braun Star Wars economics of 2001; A Space Odyssey and  Starship America.

The thing is, Biden's Build Back Better capital budget will fully implement Reagan's New Federalism and  will complete Stage 2 and the True Paradigm Shift for Stage 3 is al ready beginning to spool up with Pete Buttigieg's stewardship at Transportation, Back in the day before Reagan, the GOP was full of Jack Kemp  Republicans doing exactly the same thing Pete Buttigieg is doing at Transportation. People like Michael Steele, Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan. Pro-Life women are perverse by definition, However, all things considered, Liza Mikulski is a throw back Republican Pioneer woman, Sarah Palin was the GOP's AOC until Steve Bannon fucked with her mind and turned her into a role model of Moubert et al.

Anyway, if you are a woke voter and you want to wathc Trump's head explode, get out an vote for Nikki Haley when your primary comes up. If you want to take back your school boards and libraries from the neo-Nazi Jesus Freaks,, get out an vote with an outcome in mind and make a difference.

I am an Eisenhower Republican but I vote for what I consider to be good for America, I've always been woke and I picked up from my dad. We are from the woke/League of Nations  side of the Woodrow Wilson Family Tree  , I went to Vietnam on the basis  that a Barack Obama or a Michael Stele would be POTUS during my lifetime, On that basis, I voter for Nixon before I went to Vietnam and I voted for him when I got back. I remain committed to the Nixon-Moynihan Affirmative Action process to construct Stage 2 of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform  to evolve the economic structures needed to  sustain a lunar colony for 100 years,

We are a cunt hair aways for Stage 3. Trump and January 6 is that cunt hair.  Biden's Build Back Better processes will  dissolve the cunt hair naturally and .by 2028, if not 2026 Midterms, Beginning with all the Banking and securities reforms Elizabeth Warren can conceive of.

[blackfreethinkers]

A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”