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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

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cksmart-world · 3 years ago

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SMART BOMB

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

September 14, 2021

INLAND PORT TO INCLUDE AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES

Does anyone know what's going on with the Inland Port Authority Board — that small group of secretive and powerful people who will transform Salt Lake Valley from a crowded, polluted metropolis into a wonderful play-land for trucks and trains and all kinds of stuff that will make a few people very wealthy. But wait, there's more — the board reportedly has put together preliminary plans that will make everyone giddy, like Uncle Jack's Fleecing Ride and Mr. Hugh's No-Bid Giant Slide. But first, the board will create a “Public Infrastructure District” (PID) to borrow lots of money against property taxes the port will generate after it is built and people see that it won't cause air pollution or additional truck traffic and foul the Great Salt Lake wetlands. The ingenious slight-of-hand is that the PID is separate from the Port Authority, so if the PID can't repay the borrowed money, the Inland Port can skate — it's a special King's-X-up-yours kind of thing. Isn't it great how the Utah Legislature in all its wisdom knew the best way to become a mega-center was to create a planning and taxing entity not accountable to voters or taxpayers or even lenders. Maybe they aren't as dumb as they look — or maybe they have out-smarted themselves again. Duh.

UTAH OPTIMISTS: TOURISTS WON'T MIND WEARING GASMASKS

The world may be going to hell in a hand-basket, but here in Utah we have a thriving economy and more of everything than we'll ever need. At least that's the view of our leaders and others who truly are optimistic about the future. The staff here at Smart Bomb has added a few attributes to the Beehive State Optimists Club:

A Utah optimist is someone who thinks:

1 – Drought? Great — let's market and sell water.

2 – The Real Housewives of SLC make Burgess Owens look honest and ethical.

3 – The Delta variant? Cool, let's sell the state a truckload of the de-wormer ivermectin.

4 – The Texas anti-abortion law is awesome, it makes our legislature look thoughtful.

5 – Don't worry, the Great Salt Lake will come back and we'll need the Bangerter Pumps again.

6 – Dirty air? Well, they can't blame that on the Inland Port — yet.

7 – Don't worry, ski tourists won't mind wearing gas masks.

8 – Too many cars in Little Cottonwood Canyon? See, we do have The Greatest Snow on Earth.

9 – Skyrocketing real estate prices are fine — they keep out the riff-raff.

10 – And unrefrigerated beer at the State Liquor Store discourages drinking.

SNAKE OIL SALES UP IN RED STATE AMERICA

Right-wingers and conservative media love diet supplements. It's true. There is a link between snake oil and right-wing politics, says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Folks who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and Italian satellites switched votes to Joe Biden are the kind of people who treat health problems with remedies on Fox News, right-wing radio and secret websites. In 2014, Alex Jones’s Info Wars brought in more than $20 million, mainly from supplement sales. It's difficult to tell where the money game ends and the ideological one begins, says Rick Perlstein. “They are two facets of the same coin, where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself.” Donald Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine as a cure-all for Covid 19 as his administration was roiled by the pandemic. As a U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch helped the supplement business immeasurably and got repaid in kind. In 1994, Hatch championed the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act allowing manufacturers to make health claims without going through the FDA to prove safety or efficacy. So step right up, this will cure what ails you, including Democrat hoaxes.

Post script — Well, that's about it for another beautiful week here in paradise, aka Zion, where we have the freedom to be as dumb as we want. Here's a fun fact: In 1777 Gen. George Washington ordered his troops to be inoculated against smallpox. So the anti-vaxers might what to re-think this freedom business. Get this, freedom lovers: In the USA children must be vaccinated against various infectious diseases before they can attend public schools — yes, even in Texas and Florida. They include vaccines against Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Polio, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Hepatitis A and B, Varicella and Meningitis. But now Republicans are going apeshit over Biden's mandate that all federal government workers and contractors get vaccinated against Covid. He's also ordered all employers with 100 or more workers to ensure they all get the shot. Fun fact: In 1901 a smallpox epidemic ravaged the Northeast leading the city of Boston to mandate all residents be vaccinated. It was challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in a 1905 landmark ruling, the high court held that the government has the authority to infringe on personal freedoms during a public health crisis. Convenient memories or just Republican Reality — you decide.

OK Wilson, everyone knows that the warm beer at the State Liquor Store has not discouraged the guys in the band from drinking. Let's just do what the band does for once. Let's just ignore all the pandemics, terrorists, anti-vaxers, wars and all the nut-jobs out there for just a while. Alright, hit it, Wilson:

Into this life we're born Baby sometimes we don't know why And time seems to go by so fast In the twinkling of an eye Let's enjoy it while we can Won't you help me sing my song From the dark end of the street To the bright side of the road From the dark end of the street To the bright side of the road We'll be lovers once again On the bright side of the road We'll be lovers once again on the bright side of the road

(Bright Side Of The Road — Van Morrison)

PPS — During this difficult time for newspapers please make a donation to our very important local alternative news source, Salt Lake City Weekly, at PressBackers.com, a nonprofit dedicated to help fund local journalism. Thank you.

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schraubd · 4 years ago

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I Have To Talk About Omar and Melton-Meaux, Don't I?

I really don't want to. I really, really don't. But sometimes something falls too close to your wheelhouse to ignore it. And with separate antisemitism controversies hitting both Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and her main Democratic primary opponent Antone Melton-Meaux within a few days of one another, I -- writer on antisemitism and former resident of Minnesota's 5th congressional district -- probably can't sit this one out. As much as I want to. Which I do. Both candidates are under some fire for things put in campaign communications. Melton-Meaux released an "FAQ" which included the questions "Why do you have so much support from Jewish people/pro-Israel people" and "Will the money you received from the Jewish community influence your policy decisions?" (to the latter of which he replied "no" and noted his opposition to many policies undertaken by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu). Omar's allies said that by implying that Jews only care about Israel-related issues and supposedly conflating "Jewish people" and "pro-Israel people", he was invoking in veiled fashion a dual-loyalty trope. Omar sent out a campaign mailer accusing Melton-Meaux of being in the pocket of conservative, big money interests, with all of the named donors being Jewish (plus a "Michael from Scarsdale, New York"). This was alleged by Omar's opponents to be an allusion to his opponent being "bought" by Jews (cf. fellow Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer (R) sending out a mailer naming three Jewish billionaires who had "bought" control of Congress). What do I think? Most importantly, while I don't think there is no fire behind this smoke, obviously a lot of the high dudgeon on display here from both sides is really just shots-of-opportunity. That's not exactly surprising, given the nature of politics and all, but still disappointing. I also reiterate my point that while people outside of the 5th District only care about this race for Israel/antisemitism/Islamophobia reasons, the dynamics within the district are generally concentrating on other things (including whether Rep. Omar is more concerned with her national profile than with the particular needs of her district). On the specifics: Melton-Meaux's FAQ is clearly styled as responding to "questions" that amount to hostile whisper-campaigns (i.e., that he's a stalking horse for far-right Jewish and/or pro-Israel interests). On one level, this is why I don't really see the first question as conflating "Jewish" and "pro-Israel" -- aside from the fact that they are listed separately, in context it denotes two variants of a similar question he receives (and the questioners probably aren't too fastidious about the distinction). But the problem with such whisper-campaigns is that it can be really hard to respond directly to the allegation without in some way legitimizing or retrenching it. Imagine being asked if a candidate supports "the gay agenda" -- you can't really answer "yes" or "no", because the entire way the question is framed makes answering it a trap. This is why you don't accept your opponents' framing of questions, as any halfway competent campaign should know. Doing otherwise means you suddenly are putting out statements answering questions like, well, "Will the money you received from the Jewish community influence your policy decisions?" There's no good answer to that question, which is a good sign that Melton-Meaux shouldn't be asking it to himself. To the extent that some Jews cringe while reading it, he has no one to blame but himself. As for Omar. While all of the named persons in her mailer are Jewish, none of them are specifically identified as Jewish (the theme of the mailer is that many of his opponents' donors are backing him solely because they hate her, which is probably true). But on face, this doesn't distinguish her mailer from Emmer's, or Trump's 2016 "closing argument" ad which featured Hillary Clinton and then three Jews associated with money -- George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein (none of whom were explicitly identified as Jewish either). For those in the right circles, Scarsdale is well-known as a very Jewish and very rich town (hence its appearance in the "JAP battle rap", featuring "two hard-as-nails she-brews from SCARSDALE!"). It is fair to say that few people in Minnesota are likely to know this though (had she called out donors from St. Louis Park, by contrast, everyone in her district would know what she meant even as nobody outside the Twin Cities would have a clue). On the whole, my real takeaway is feeling more convinced than ever about the need to think about antisemitism less as a question of motives and more as a question of impact. It strikes me as implausible that Melton-Meaux was intentionally trying to antagonize the Jewish community by loudly disavowing his support; it was an awkward effort by a novice campaign staff to respond to a smear -- but one that nonetheless retrenched the perception that the Jewish community is a force one needs to declare his independence from. Melton-Meaux may be a political newbie, but he has an obligation to be attentive to that dynamic and not blunder into traps quite that obvious. With respect to Omar, I likewise find it highly unlikely that her campaign staff went on a hunt for rich Jewish donors to her opponent in a sly bid to dog-whistle at her opponent being owned by the Jews. Nonetheless, it is probably the case that the Jewish associations of the people cited -- while not likely to be picked up by many if not most of her readers -- likely do help make the attack land more effectively for those who do spot the pattern. I've written elsewhere about how one thing antisemitism does is it greases the wheels of plausibility; when you're trying to tag your opponent as in the bag for big Wall Street money (or Marxism, or "globalism" for that matter) it just feels more right when there's a Jewish hook to go along with it. It's in accord with deep-seated background intuitions, it makes the entire package feel more harmonious. This is one reason why I think someone in the Omar campaign could have reasonably been expected to check and see whether everyone they're talking about is Jewish -- and if not, find some different names (one has to think that there are some non-Jewish rich people who also are pumping money into her opponent's campaign, yes?). But ultimately, I think this is all relatively small fries. The hypocrisy is perhaps more bothersome than anything else. I get the frustration from Omar's allies that they think she's constantly being pelted with small-ball nonsense on the antisemitism front, and so perhaps they think turnabout is fair play when they can accuse Omar's opponent of being the "dual loyalty" trope guy (you can almost feel the catharsis from here!). But either they think stuff at this level is fair game or they don't; they can't have it both ways unless they really do believe that antisemitism can legitimately be treated as instrumental political football. And on the other side, regarding the conservative media ready to stand up and shout about "yet another instance of Ilhan Omar being antisemitic!" -- unless they're willing to concede that the bulk of the Jewish community was absolutely correct in saying that the contemporary GOP, what with its brazen targeting of Soros, Bloomberg, Steyer, etc., is shot through with antisemitism from root to branch, they need to sit the hell down. As always, however strong or weak you think the case for Ilhan Omar being antisemitic is, it's far less strong than the case for the GOP being antisemitic. If I have to listen to one more attempted gotcha from the Republican Jewish Coalition about Jewish Democrats staying out of the 5th District endorsement game, when they're affirmatively trying to put this guy into a Minnesota U.S. Senate seat, I'm going to have an aneurysm. Okay, I've done my duty. As a palate-cleanser, please read this lovely column by a Minnesota Jewish Republican explaining, in touching and heart-felt terms, why he considers Ilhan Omar a dear friend. It really is a nice piece of writing from a man whom I have to assume has decided he never wants to have any role in Republican Party politics again, because any public dictation about Ilhan Omar that's friendlier than "she's a she-devil" is grounds for immediate ex-communication from the party. And, just so nobody thinks I'm endorsing one way or the other (I'm not, and will not), read as well this column from Avi Olitzky explaining why he is such a fan of Melton-Meaux. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2ZUSIUn

#anti-semitism #Antone Melton-Meaux #Ilhan Omar #Minnesota

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sindri42 · 2 months ago

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You know, if all the people you claim to be fighting for tell you that you're facing the wrong direction, some people would consider that an invitation to reconsider your viewpoint and admit to the possibility that you might have been lied to, rather than just attack them too.

Like, you believe that mass shootings are the result of a lack of gun control. Because the people who want to take away your guns told you that. But the parts of the country with the strictest gun control have the most mass shootings, and the places where guns are commonplace don't have any. So maybe, just maybe, the people trying to take guns away from the citizens aren't trying to make you safer? Maybe they just want you to be easier to control and more dependent on their police forces?

You believe that Voting Blue is the way to oppose corrupt police forces. But pretty much every police brutality case happens in a city that is firmly controlled by democrats. Biden was the guy responsible for a lot of the big increase in militarization of police forces, and Harris before becoming vice president was mostly known as the DA who kept destroying evidence that black kids were innocent, and the attorney general who illegally denied parole to non-violent drug offenders while accepting large donations from for-profit prisons.

You blame Trump for the "Kids in Cages" when the cages were built in the Obama administration.

(Also y'all are saying that hispanic voters are going to be deported over this, but you literally have to be a citizen in order to vote.)

And you claim to care about Jewish people, but you're the ones claiming that they're nazis now for trying to defend themselves against active attempts at genocide, and that Jews around the world should be barred from schools and businesses and attacked in the streets because Globalize the Intifada.

You claim to care about the Islamic people, and to prove it you call terrorists heroes, while pointedly ignoring every actual Musilm who tells you that those terrorists are torturing and murdering the citizens they claim to represent.

...That ended up being a lot more vitriolic than it started out as, but I stand by what I said.

Don't take this as an endorsement of the republicans either though; I firmly believe that the world would be a better place if every american politician with rank higher than mayor was executed for treason, starting with the president and working down through the whole congress. I talk more about the blue team, but that's only because they have better media control so they end up with more useful idiots regurgitating their lies.

Love how the left becomes instantly vitriolically racist the moment minorities don't toe the line and vote left. Remember folks, the moment you're not of use to these people, they will drop you and run you over and light you on fire for good measure.

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years ago

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A Mirror But Darkly

I can’t pretend like I haven’t also felt a certain schadenfreude at seeing the Capitol rioters get owned by friends and family members. It’s a pleasant feeling to think that something bad might happen to someone that deserves it, for once. But we need to think past this emotional reaction and examine what we are actually seeing.

State oppression doesn’t become good just because they’re oppressing someone that we don’t like. As funny as the idea might be that these people are going to get their comeuppance, can we really expect the American justice system to really dispense justice? Right wing troublemakers like these rioters are very useful to the government, but they’re only useful when they’re out on the loose causing trouble. They want these people out in the streets with their silly marches, trying to “own the libs” on twitter, or going out of their way to kill Leftists so that the government doesn’t have to. If they’re in prison, they’re just an expense. They can’t inform on their associates from prison. They can’t spread QAnon propaganda from prison. They can’t carry the FBI’s water from a prison cell.

If I had to guess, I’d assume that most of the people ratting on friends, coworkers, and relatives are liberals. Despite the occasional coincidence of interests, liberals are not part of The Left. While the term has been distorted in American discourse, both Democrats and Republicans are Liberals. They are dedicated to maintaining the Liberal order that has prevailed around the world. They make a show of arguing over irrelevant minutia, but neither Democrats nor Republicans offer nor desire any structural changes to the way things are. Democrat policy is just Republican policy with a coat of blue paint.

Sooner or later, the Left is going to have to become violent. Absent fundamental, structural change to American society this is an inevitability. Even if only as a means of self defense, Leftist protestors and activists are going to have to arm themselves and defend themselves and their communities. They will have to keep weapons in their homes and carry them on their persons. They will have to use them against cops, against the national guard, against elected officials, against private employees. The Class Cold War that has been simmering in the US for decades will become hot, likely suddenly and explosively. The bourgeoisie have been preparing for this for decades—for certain they haven’t been handing out M-16s and MRAP vehicles and drones to every police department that asks for fun. We cannot forget that we live in the grips of a society where virtually every decision is formed via the logic of capital, and capital doesn’t invest in anything unless it expects that investment to pay off.

The BLM protests last summer positively dwarf these recent riots in the Capitol by virtually every metric. The amount of people, the duration, the damage done, and most of all the terror it instilled in the ruling class. They’re seeing their nightmares come true. If you don’t think so, just look at how vilified the French and Russian Revolutions are in most American media. In their eyes they are the Bourbons and the Romanovs. Demanding the defunding of the police, or worse yet, ending them outright, is tantamount to demanding the end of the bourgeoisie. The police are an integral part of Capital, more so than ever now. Rent-taking and property rights have to be enforced with the utmost brutality of the law. Modern Capitalism can’t hope to survive without the police. The fact that the Democrats even paid this lip service is testament to how much the unrest frightened the bourgeoisie. We already know that the Democrats hated promising to defund the police, blame it for their election losses, and are already planning to rebuke it. We’ve already seen them go back on their promises to defund or disband city cops. The Democrats are going to do everything they can to portray themselves as the Party of Law and Order. Their survival depends on it.

This all means that what you’re seeing now is the prelude to what you’ll be seeing later, when it’s Leftists that are the “seditious terrorists threatening democracy.” Democrats pride themselves on being “centrists” and “moderates,” enlightened yogis that sit above the petty, childish extremists of Left and Right. Now that Their Guy/Gal is in office they’ll contort themselves into any shape to justify whatever it does, including cracking down on all sections of the Left. For them, decorum is of the utmost. The rioting and property destruction (quelle horreur) that we saw last year won’t be tolerated, not with Team Blue sitting in the White House. As great of fools as the Right are for believing this QAnonsense, liberal Democrats aren’t any better. They’ve bought the “Russia hacked the election” narrative hook, line, and sinker. Even last year the Democrats were trying to discredit the BLM movement as being racist, the work of “white anarchists” or whatever. Anyone that tried to talk about the rape allegations against Biden or the crooked things he’s done or been involved with was tarred as a Russian bot or operative of the Kremlin. Even before all of this in during Occupy Wall Street we saw peaceful protests on a national scale get violently crushed by the Democrats, and those were much more civil and polite than these recent BLM protests. We can only conclude that their moderation in their response and their mealy-mouthed support for BLM last year was a strategic consideration in regards to the election. Now that they got what they wanted they’ve already walked back the promised $2000 checks to $1400. There’s no reason to expect any sort of commitment to ending police brutality or curtailing the police in any form, either.

So bear all this in mind while you’re watching the liberal response to the riots in DC, because that’s the response they’re going to have towards the Left. Today it’s MAGA, but tomorrow it’s ANTIFA. Keep that in mind, because a rat’s a rat, and anyone that’d rat out a friend or family member or ex would just as soon rat you out, too, and CNN will convince them you deserve it just as much.

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bustedbernie · 5 years ago

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Oh hai. Lately there have been a slew of think pieces about Bernie Sanders being the front-runner, discussing how his movement has threatened to withhold their votes from Democrats if Bernie isn’t the nominee. Hidden between the lines is the idea that Democrats, in general, owe their votes to Sanders if he is the nominee, regardless of the fact that his voters do NOT owe Dems their votes if he is not. So, rather than call them out for using the same tactics that lost the 2016 election, there is a faction in the media that is growing more and more permissive to the idea that Bernie and his Revolution are somehow the victims in all this, and that mainstream Dems have done them wrong time and time again when picking a candidate that appeals to the Dems masses.

Let me let you in on a little secret.

I don’t owe Bernie Sanders or his fucked off revolution of stanerific emo-marxist cyber-terrorists a goddamn bit of shit the fuck all. When these utter fucking geniuses in the media reflect on how energized and dedicated his enthusiastic fans are when engaging in their harassment of the average Dem, they seem to think the people who have been abused don’t fucking matter. These Dems are people who have never done anything whatsoever to deserve the constant bullying, cyber-stalking, targeting, threats, or in my case, being falsely reported to the FBI by fans of Bernie who seek to silence dissent. What these media personalities don’t understand is that the abuse by Bernie fans, in his name, actually causes the gap between MAGA and Berners to shrink to the point where it is non-existent. There is no real difference between the abuse from either side, and since Sanders isn’t the warm and fuzzy type that reaches out to the people who have been abused, often there appears to be no real difference between Sanders and Trump.

Slate:

Still, the Bernie-or-Busters, small as they may be, have spun their position into an argument for why others should vote for Bernie Sanders too, regardless of the platform they prefer. As efforts in political persuasion go, this contingent puts forward an openly hostile argument. Sanders is the only electable candidate, they suggest, not just because of his policies, but because of the single-mindedness of his followers. The reason you should vote for Sanders is that we won’t vote for anyone else. You don’t want Trump to win again, do you?

No. But I also don’t want Bernie Sanders to win. In a case of one not liking either candidate, people look to see which movement they feel most comfortable with, Bernie’s or Trump’s. If it turns out that both movements engage in racist behavior, sexism, and homophobia, it really doesn’t matter what they profess to be in favor of as far as policy is concerned, what matters is how they treat their fellow citizens by and large. We all know that unless we take back the Senate with a large majority that can defeat Republican attempts to stop legislation from hitting Sanders’ desk, nothing will pass anyway. So, if you’re not in favor of Bernie’s policies in the first place, and do not like him or his movement, why would you be enthusiastic about showing up for the guy who leads the movement that engages in attacks on you?

Yes, it sounds like ugly hostage taking—not a brilliant persuasive strategy but a crude ego-boosting exercise for a group of leftists who can’t resist the impulse to lord some power over an electorate that doesn’t normally consider them relevant. But that’s exactly what makes it so normal, even understandable, in a depressing “we’re all human” sort of way. [NO.] Because the truth is this: Every threat these Sanders stans are explicitly making is one the venerated Centrist Swing Voter makes implicitly—and isn’t judged for. The centrist never even has to articulate his threat.

Excuse me, it IS ugly hostage taking, it is NOT normal, and no, it doesn’t make me see them as more human.

Another thing is this: not everyone opposed to Bernie Sanders is a Centrist, Moderate, or a Swing voter. Many of us are as far left or to the left of Sanders, I for one am definately to his left, and had supported him in 2015. That was until his racist abusive Bern Mafia targeted me for expressing concern about his lack of outreach to black voters. I noticed his lack of history in hiring black people (D.C. is Chocolate City, we could not find one black staffer in 2015; I am open to correction on this point; if he had black staffers prior to 2015, please send me receipts because I have been looking for them.), lamented and mocked his poor showing at Netroots, fumed over his constant MLK appropriation, jeered at his white ass crowds, and felt humiliated by his inability to discuss black people in ways that were not centered on Poverty or Prisons. It is HIS FAULT that his voters have no clue how to engage Black people without resorting to stereotypes and outright bigotry, because he does the same thing.

Buzzfeed:

Sanders, seated across the table, a yellow legal pad at hand, responded with a question of his own, according to two people present: “Aren’t most of the people who sell the drugs African American?” The candidate, whose aides froze in the moment, was quickly rebuffed: The answer, the activists told him, was no. Even confronted with figures and data to the contrary, Sanders appeared to have still struggled to grasp that he had made an error, the two people present said.

No. He did not apologize for spreading this stereotype, and yes, it shows how he views black people in general.

Slate:

One of many disorienting factors in this election cycle is the fact that the left is more popular and more viable than it has been in a long, long time. They have not one but two exciting candidates, and both are offering policies closer to what leftists actually want than most presidential contenders in U.S. history have.

I wanted the party to move to the Left towards the direction of where I stood too. I can’t really name my ideology because it’s so far left I am almost hitting the wall. Additionally, I am more Libertarian than Sanders, who trends more authoritarian. Yet, I instinctively know that playing a game of “my way or the highway” won’t lead to a place where poverty programs are expanded up and out, ensuring all necessities of life are provided. It will lead to gridlock and we will make zero progress.

Because folks at the center tend to be wooed by multiple candidates, they’re used to having options, and they’re used to the experience of their vote determining who ends up with the nomination. This means that they usually like the candidate they vote for, in the primary and in the general. Not so for leftists, who get to merely tolerate the candidates they end up having to vote for in order to mitigate the damage from a worse result.

Here’s the rub… I’m Black. None of this shit applies to me, because as a Black person, I rarely even LIKE or TRUST any of the candidates I have been voting for over the years. I also usually, especially in State and Locally, don’t have any say so in determining the nominee of any race. I am always stuck voting for whoever White People choose as the candidate, and as such, am merely tolerating whoever is chosen to prevent a worse outcome, which usually means preventing a racist shitmonger from winning a race.

Speaking of race… Progressives refuse to address race as a factor in anything; they like to ignore race in everything they do and allow Prison Policy to stand in for Racial Policy, so it’s impossible to get them to see my reality. They get this shit from Bernie.

From Buzzfeed:

“The real issue is not whether you’re black or white, whether you’re a woman or a man,” he said in a 1988 interview. “The real issue is whose side are you on? Are you on the side of workers and poor people or are you on the side of big money and the corporations?”

Not much has changed with Bernie, as you know, Bernie never changes, because he was born as a 72 year old yelly man, just like Benjamin Button, but louder and not as cute.

“It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry,” the Vermont independent senator and former Democratic presidential candidate said in a not-so-subtle rebuke to Hillary Clinton”

Bernie’s attacks on Identity Politics filtered down to his base, causing them to feel confident in their attacks on Blacks, LGBTQ, and Women who brought up issues of race, sexuality, and gender over the past few years. They love to say shit to black people online that they would never say to an actual Black person IN PERSON, because they are scared as fuck of Black people. Kinda like Bernie. The refrain of “that’s identity politics, not real policy’ rang out constantly on social media the past few years to the point where pointing out racism, homophobia, and sexism was met with swarms of white men attacking Black people, All Women Who Dared To Be THAT Bitch, LGBTQ, and really, anyone worried about social justice issues that focused on identity. The attacks were and ARE bigoted in the extreme.

This is racist as fuck and is one of the ways the Bernie Titty-Babies managed to marginalize Kamala Harris and drive a wedge between her and Black Voters. Somehow they thought keeping it going would make us like dusty ass Bernie more, but they’re stupid, because we don’t even like that geriatric Bernadook now.

This is homophobic.

Bernie’s supporters are engaging in a hate campaign against Mayor Pete and are trying to convince the world that they are not being homophobic, they are just saying Pete is suppressing his dangerous serial killer nature by being so straight laced. This is fucked up because they are attacking a gay man for being “straight appearing” in spite of the fact that his seeming straightness is how he interacts with a world that hates gay people, and has at times (and Still Does) MURDERED men and women who are gay for not assimilating or conforming to hetero-normative stereotypes. Bernie ignores this behavior from his fans like he ignores all of their nasty hate campaigns. I blame him.

This is misogynistic. No explanation needed.

Racist and fat shaming. Black hair is not your fucking business, bitch. Back the fuck up.

This is just blatantly false and caused people to harass Kamala Harris supporters until they stopped using the Yellow Circles she asked supporters to wear, it stems from the misogynoir his fans engaged in towards Kamala. Bernie has never said shit, so I blame him.

Bigotry. Also erasure of Biden’s Black support in a effort to make it seem as if Bernie is the candidate of diversity. Bernie is at fault, he also erases minorities.

Sexist. Also, damn near all of his fans seem to hate Obama on the same level and with as much heat as MAGA. Why the fuck would we want to join in unity with this man when his fans HATE the first black President. Oh, you think Bernie has nothing to do with setting the tone?

“The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last 15 years or so has been a failure,” Sanders started, responding to a question about the young voters who supported his campaign. “People sometimes don’t see that because there was a charismatic individual named Barack Obama, who won the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

“He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, brilliant guy. But behind that reality, over the last 10 years, Democrats have lost about 1,000 seats in state legislatures all across this country.”

Bernie doesn’t fucking like Obama either.

Sexism. Racism. Bernie does the worst with Black Women, and is often dismissive when asked a question by one of us. So, his fans see nothing to lose by targeting us in particular, and we in turn are likely the largest group of people willing to sit this one out if Bernie manages to come out on top. The media is no help whatsoever to marginalized people, because they ultimately weave a narrative where Bernie comes out the victim.

We can already see it happening amongst the Children of the Bern, where they have taken to labeling K-Hive, a movement started by a Black Woman (Me) for a Black Woman (Kamala Harris), “Liberal ISIS” for our resistance to Bernie and willingness to defend the other candidates from the attacks levied by the Berner Swarm.

Oh, cry me a fucking river! We don’t dox, cyberstalk, harass, abuse, try to get people fired, engage in bigotry, we learn from our mistakes, and we never make it our mission to ruin someone’s life.

We simply turn the tables on the bros and ask tough questions, like Kamala Harris. If that breaks you down, you were already broken before you found us. Oh, yeah. That’s another thing. We don’t go looking for Berners to abuse; we wait until they come to abuse US and refuse to play along.

Regardless of what poor Peter Daou says, there is no “Unadulterated Hatred” in asking if someone has checked on him.

So, yes, I can blame Bernie for the nastiness of his movement and choose not to ever join it no matter what. Progressives love to play forever victims, even while they engage in their vile abuse, but I do not have to empower their movement or help them elect Bernie. Maybe if enough people sound the alarm and let him know we will not be helping him in November while suffering constantly at the hands of his Branch Bernidians, then he will have no choice but to be a leader and fucking lead these assholes into being decent people. I don’t expect the abuse to magically end if Bernie becomes President or loses to Trump, and I also don’t expect him to do shit about it, so I guess I’m just Never Bernie. What I am now stuck with is the same as always; White States get to vote first and create the narrative that Dem voters are in favor of whoever these powerful white voters choose, and I am sick of it and sick of Sanders. I didn’t become a Democrat to not only be marginalized by the White Moderate, but to also suffer abuse from the punk ass White leftist bitchmade humdinger of a Revolution. I’m not here to empower shitfucks that search me out no matter where I am just to heap abuse on me, threaten me, or report me to the FBI as a possible MASS SHOOTER, all because I think Bernie is an old bigot who minimizes Black oppression to appease the white voters he thinks he’ll need to win the General.

I’m just Never Bernie, deal with it or die mad about it. I don’t care which.

#neverbernie #bernie #berniesanders #bernie sanders #berniebros #bernie bros #notmeus #feelthebern #long post #longpost #faq

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

Text

Pluralistic: 04 Mar 2020 (Brokered conventions, the Siege of Gondor, ICE risk-assessment whitebox, Chinese covid censorship, America's national immunocompromise)

Today's links

A brokered convention will produce a powerless presidency: Transformative change requires a movement, not a plan.

What the Siege of Gondor teaches us about medieval warfare: 40,000 riveting words from Roman military historian Bret Deveraux.

ICE's risk assessment algorithm only ever recommends detention: NYCLU suing to force them to admit what we've all figured out.

Probing China's Covid-19 censorship: Outstanding work from Citizen Lab.

America is uniquely at risk from coronavirus: 77 million un- and underinsured people.

This day in history:

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

I'm coming to Kelowna, BC tomorrow! I'll be at the library from 6-8PM with my book Radicalized for the CBC's Canada Reads. It's free, but you need to RSVP (and most of the seats are gone, so act quick).

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

A brokered convention will produce a powerless presidency (permalink)

Hoping for a brokered convention is basically saying, "Hey, go fuck yourself" to every doorknocker and phone canvasser in your base. It says, "Let's not use votes to choose the candidate. You little people were for show. We choose our leaders by gathering the people who matter in smoke-filled rooms."

Any candidate hoping to enact a transformative program from the presidency is going to need a powerful, motivated base to whip establishment Dems into order: "I want to do it, now make me do it." Jettisoning the idea that your supporters get you nominated is the most demoralizing thing I can imagine, short of shutting off the server your organizers used to get you elected as soon as they succeed (looking at you, Barack Obama).

It's pure technocratic hubris, the kind of thing that turns promising wonks into figureheads who accomplish nothing. Saving America from plutocracy and white nationalism requires a movement, not a savior with a plan.

What the Siege of Gondor teaches us about medieval warfare (permalink)

Last spring, Roman military historian Bret Devereaux published over 40,000 words of analysis of the Siege of Gondor as depicted in Peter Jackson's Return of the King. It is by far the best use of fiction as a tool for teaching history that I've ever read.

It's in 6 parts, broken down by themes. By far my favorite section was the opener, on the logistics of sieges. I am a quartermaster by temperament, and the logistic of moving 200,000 orcs (plus trolls, elephants, siege engines, etc) is FASCINATING.

https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/

"The road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows. Giving each orc four feet of space on the march, that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day." (!!)

The section on the siege's opener, part II, is likewise fascinating and contains some great craft notes.

https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-ii-these-beacons-are-liiiiiiit/

"LOTR doesn't rely – as so much fiction does – on the 'good guys' making stupid mistake after stupid mistake in order to create tension. Instead, Gondor executes its plans admirably, and yet it is so outmatched in military might that it remains in peril."

Part III is more in the weeds on weapons and tactics. It gets into some really gnarly deep nerd stuff about the immediate preamble to a siege that I loved.

https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-iii-having-fun-storming-the-city/

"The paths the siege towers will take must be cleared and leveled (even a slight grade will tip them over). Earthwork cover for the approach on the gate should be set up, along with obstructions to prevent the army within the city from advancing at an inopportune moment. In assaulting a fortified city with a large army, the spade is often the most important weapon. Even building a ramp right up the enemy walls to enter the city was a common and successful tactic, if the assaulting army had enough labor to do it quickly enough."

My favorite part of the section on calvary charge was the notable absence of NCOs in the orc ranks, maintaining discipline.

https://acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-iv-the-cavalry-arrives/

"The orc general, Gothmog has to push through the ranks and reorder his infantry, while the orcs stare dumbfounded at the new threat. This is a task that should have been taken up by a hundred-hundred NCOs up and down the line, which speaks to problems of command structure."

By far the most intensely geeky section is in Part V, which deals with the math for calculating whether the trolls could possibly heft the hammers that deal the damage that we see.

https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-v-just-flailing-about-flails/

"If a troll really is around 9 times as strong as a strong man, we might figure that a troll sledgehammer might be something like 81kg, and a troll warhammer only 5.76 – 13.59kg. Wildly short of the massive clubs and hammers the trolls wield in these scenes."

ICE's risk assessment algorithm only ever recommends detention (permalink)

The New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders have filed suit against ICE, trying to force it to respond to a FOIA request about risk assessment algorithm that has put people in detention 97% of the time.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/ice-algorithm-bias-detention-aclu-lawsuit/

The algorithm was tweaked after the 2016 election (prior to then, it only recommended detention for 53% of cases), and by classifying virtually everyone it evaluates as a public safety risk, it violates the law's requirement of "individualized determinations" for detentions.

People in immigration detention have yet to see a judge or be found guilty. They can be locked up for weeks or months, and detention can cost them their jobs — or even their children. The Trump administration has exponentially increased the number of immigration arrests; coupled with automatic detention-by-algorithm, this has put thousands of New Yorkers in harm's way.

Investigative journalists and activists have previously shown that the algorithm was changed to eliminate all possible outcomes (bond, release, etc), so that it could only recommend detention. So the problem here isn't the usual one of not knowing how the black-box works. We know exactly how it works. You ask it, "Should this person be detained?" and it says "Yes."

"The no-release policy is particularly tough on people with disabilities or health problems. 'This practice of widespread detention is both cruel and needless.'"

Probing China's Covid-19 censorship (permalink)

Citizen Lab's new report on Chinese coronavirus censorship is outstanding. By decompiling the YY client (which stores blacklist words on the client-side) and probing Wechat (which uses server-side blacklisting), they build up a detailed picture of Chinese epidemiological censorship.

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/03/censored-contagion-how-information-on-the-coronavirus-is-managed-on-chinese-social-media/

Most importantly, they demonstrate how the Cyberspace Administration of China's threat of "thematic inspections" of platforms to ensure coronavirus censorship led to indiscriminate blocking of vital public health information.

It's "authoritarian blindness" in the making, "where people too scared to tell the autocrat the hard truths makes it impossible for the autocrat to set policy that reflects reality"

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/24/pluralist-your-daily-link-dose-24-feb-2020/#thatswhatxisaid

"Censorship of COVID-19 content started at early stages of the outbreak and continued to expand blocking a wide range of speech, from criticism of the government to officially sanctioned facts and information."

By contrast, the sheer volume of "sarcastic homonyms or word play related to COVID-19" that appear on the blacklist are really a testament to the ingenuity and spirit of Chinese netizens.

"A number of these keyword combinations are critical (e.g., "亲自 [+] 皇上," by someone + emperor), criticizing the central leadership's inability or inaction in dealing with COVID-19 ("习近平 [+] 形式主义 [+] 防疫," Xi Jinping + formalism + epidemic prevention). Many of them refer to leadership in a neutral way (e.g., "肺炎 [+] 李克强 [+] 武汉 [+] 总理 [+] 北京," Pneumonia + Li Keqiang + Wuhan + Premier + Beijing)."

America is uniquely at risk from coronavirus (permalink)

Among rich countries, the USA is uniquely vulnerable to coronavirus. Thanks to its title to "by far the worst system among rich countries, it is much worse than that of many poorer countries when it comes to confronting a fast-moving epidemic."

https://theweek.com/articles-amp/899359/why-america-vulnerable-coronavirus

The US has 77m un/underinsured people. "and the vicious, right-wing ideology of the Republican Party has wrecked the government's ability to manage crises of any kind, " with "unqualified cronies" running important agencies.

"Now they are resorting to the only thing they know how to do really well — lying, concocting conspiracy theories and blaming Democrats and the media for any bad news. It does not bode well."

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago EFF is hiring a new IP lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20050307005314/http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/03/04/ip_attorneys_eff_wants_you.php (the ad that led to the hiring of Corynne McSherry!)

#10yrsago Guardian column on LibDem proposal to block web-lockers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/04/web-lockers-digital-economy-liberal-democrats-wrong

#1yrago Fox News was always partisan, but now it is rudderless and "anti-democratic" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

#1yrago Leaked memo suggests that Google has not really canceled its censored, spying Chinese search tool https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-dragonfly/

#1yrago Terra Nullius: Grifters, settler colonialism and "intellectual property" https://locusmag.com/2019/03/cory-doctorow-terra-nullius/

#1yrago Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail: a debut sf novel about counterculture, resistance, and the post-internet apocalypse https://boingboing.net/2019/03/04/gnu-slash-apocalypse.html

#1yrago Financialization is wearing out its welcome https://www.ft.com/content/a9f13afc-3c3d-11e9-b856-5404d3811663

#1yrago How the patent office's lax standards gave Elizabeth Holmes the BS patents she needed to defraud investors and patients https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/theranos-how-a-broken-patent-system-sustained-its-decade-long-deception/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/) and Kottke (Kottke).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

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horizonsstandstill · 10 months ago

Note

When people tell it's either Trump or Biden, it's almost the same as having no choice. The only difference is in the rhetoric. In what they do, blue fascism and red fascism is no different.

In Biden era following things happened and are still happening:

- No promised increase in minimum wage although inflation skyrocketed,

- Black people and POC were killed in Texas because Biden refused to let companies increase the electricity output,

- Cop city is being built despite severe resistance,

- Police brutality is at its highest,

- People lost abortion rights,

- Queer people are facing persecution everywhere,

- Weekly COVID 19 death rates are appalling although they are writing some of the cases off as other causes,

- No improvement in the conditions of working class,

- Rents and homelessness are at all time highest,

- Immigration law passed,

- KOSA is on the way,

- Crackdown on protests are brutal,

- Indigenous land destruction is happening nonstop,

- Big oil is getting subsidised as always,

- No satisfactory unemployment benefits,

- Ten percent of the country is reliant on food stamps,

- The attempts to abolish the slavery of the incarcerated people are thearted by democrats,

- Genocides are funded by your taxes,

- Disable people are still subjected to eugenicist measures,

- Healthcare system is in shambles.

Many things can be counted but I made my point. Can a liberal explain me how that's anything left? And also how that's not knee deep in fascism if not neck deep. Don't cry me "Trump says meaner things and gets my feelings hurt."

Listen to me liberals. If you're going to vote for Biden eventually because you hate Trump, (I will still think you're morally bankrupt entitled and selfish person at best), there's literally no excuse for you not to fill the house and senate with completely unapologetic hardcore green people who will never sway even a little right. Don't just vote for them, agitate for the cause too. Speak up.

Biden is more greenphobic than he ever was against Republican ideals. He was behind the segregationist policies that got a lot of Black people incarcerated, he has always been more of a warmonger than most of the US politicians were and still are. Your choice doesn't have to be between a ra*ist and a ra*ist, you can fill the lacking letters however you like. Try to get a different running candidate first. That's the least you can do.

I mean take lessons from the history. Biden is already widely unpopular. Now the genocide is adding to that. You guys picked Hillary in 2016 who is also widely unpopular especially after the disappointment of what Obama did. Sanders could have won. It's irrational to pick Biden again. Because he's going to be losing by a large margin when the economic impact of the ongoing genocide starts to kick in a few months before the election.

If you cannot even do that, you're a hypocrite and as bad as Biden is. And if you're not protesting him to change his decisions and trying to hold him accountable, you're the secular version of Trump supporters with the same amount of leader fetishism and a greater amount of self claimed moral highground. Don't lash out the people of the other countries who think that you guys are no different. They don't care about the flavour of your fascism and they are right for it.

As a side note, electing hardcore green senate and house members will gain you leverage in the long term, swing everyone towards more left, decrease the demonocratic urge to appease to republican base and is a great strategy for harm reduction whoever gets elected. They are more likely to swing Biden to left and give democrats the right signals. They are also more likely to call out Trump and hamper his policies.

If you don't do that much, you will deserve it when fascist boots come for you next. In this house, we don't pity fascists who are defeated by other fascists. You only have your irrationality to blame. Don't take it out on the victims of Biden's policies. For the people whose livelihood is already being destroyed by Biden, there's no harm reduction. And if you can't care about them, you shouldn't expect them to care about you.

Change doesn't come easy. Stop pushing defeatism on people. "If I get elected nothing will change" guy is not your ally. He's a hardcore republican appeaser. You already saw that in his first term. Remember how Obama swung even more right in his second term? Biden will do the same because he will be rewarded for the atrocities he committed. You will all have blood on your hands.

The things are as they are now, because you placed your bets on Hillary instead of packing the house and senate with green candidates. Make the same mistake again and you'll suffer greater. When things are going bad, establishment supporting political rhetoric almost always loses to establishment hating fascist rhetoric unless someone comes up with an establishment hating hardcore left rhetoric. Biden losing is his own fault, but liberals picking him in the primaries are their fault. Not being able to read the political climate will cost you dearly, both in the domestic policy arena and the foreign policy arena.

As an american myself I can understand why people are so scared that arab-americans are refusing to vote for biden since im terrified of what trump will do to our country. I very much feel forced to choose between two very evil people where i have to choose who will probably do less overall damage. But yelling at arab-americans isnt the right move. Im terrified at what decisions ill have to make with voting, but its not like all arab-americans who refuse to vote for biden are trump supporters and in fact many of them were going to vote for biden before october 7. I dont know what we should do about voting, but yelling at grieving arab-americans who cant bring themselves to vote for biden when biden helped kill their family is just wrong. I get the fear, i really do because i feel it too, but that doesnt make it right.

Like as a disabled person I'm pretty nervous about trump presidency ngl. I need meds that allow me to function on a day to day basis. But I cannot in good conscious vote for the man that killed my family's loved ones. Not to give too much info but a family member's best friend was Heba Abu Nada... when they learned of her death they cried for three days straight and asked me not to say any news about Palestine for a week back in October. Even when I told them that Heba's poem became viral, they just nodded at me and said "a lot of talented people in Gaza died" before going quiet, staring out in the distance. That's something that will stay with me for the rest of my life and I can't bare to think of voting for the man that caused that amount of sorrow to anyone. So imagine every single Palestinian family — they all have their own stories and their own grief. So telling them "that means absolutely nothing" and being told to suck it up isn't going to make anyone want to trust you that you have people's best interests in heart. I don't know. It just is so so obvious how little people care about other people and to me that's the most.... shocking thing.

#if they present you choices as blue monster and red monster it means that electoralism is a lie #vote green #election 2024

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unpopularly-opinionated · 5 years ago

Video

youtube

YouTube recommended me this channel yesterday which piqued my interest because, whether Right or Left, I always find whoever talks about the “Alt-Right” never does so in an objective way (spoiler: this channel doesn’t do it right either), or at least not in such a way that wouldn’t radicalize someone themselves.

For the record, I’m in no way recommending anyone watch this video. It’s 40 minutes long for no good reason, with as much substance as a 4-paragraph BuzzFeed article.

I have to say right off the bat that I do not understand who this is intended for. At the beginning of the video, he says “If you have ever known a Gabe (his example of someone who has fallen to the “Alt-Right”), this video is for you.” So okay, this video is not for the folks who have fallen, but for those who watched them fall. It is to settle and ease the anxieties of Gabe’s friends who watched him step off the proverbial garden path (and onto another). But why this makes little sense is because Gabe’s friends already know why Gabe stepped off the path. If you’re friends with Gabe, then you’re either off the garden path with him, or you’re not friends with Gabe.

He literally begins by describing Gabe as a loner-type, bullied in school, who feels ostracized by his community. Who then is there to save Gabe? This video can’t be for people who are friends with a Gabe because before he stepped off, Gabe had no friends. Who then is this video for?

It can’t be for the Gabe’s of the world, surely, because all it does is affirm the beliefs Gabe’s new friends would’ve taught him. He almost immediately starts lambasting cis white men for being cis white men, claiming they have no problems in life and any struggle they might face is “not unique” and therefor easily dismissible. If this video was meant to “deradicalize the radicals”, then it’s working counter to it’s intended point. All it does is continue to demonize the Gabe’s of the world and push more and more people off the path.

So, if the video is not for Gabe, or Gabe’s friends, then the only group that leaves is the people pretending to be Gabe’s friends. The “Gabe’s Friends” he mentions at the beginning of the video; the ones who I just stated couldn’t be his friends because it runs contrary to the point made that Gabe is a social outcast. This video is for them. It’s a “feel good” video full of all sorts of buzzwords and talking points already familiar to “Gabe’s Friends”.

If 2012-2016 online social commentary were condensed (if you can call 40 minutes condensed) down to a single video, this would be it. It’s got everything you could ever ask for: GamerGate, the Alt-Right, hating cis white men, Milo, Sargon, blaming Capitalism, hating Conservatives/Republicans, etc. etc. You remember arguing about it incessantly on social media a few years back and it’s probably in there. This video is easily more to blame for Gabe stepping off the path than half the things he’s mentioned.

Earlier I mentioned how every video, right or left, that discusses the “Alt-Right”, does so without an ounce of objectivity, and that only helps push people like Gabe off the path. It’s inane to think you can act the way the guy in this video does; say the asinine things that he says, and still question why people like Gabe step off the path. “Gabe is a social outcast, bullied in his youth, who feels the need to hide” and literally seconds later “Gabe is a single cis het white male incel. His problems are not unique. His struggles do not matter.”

I’d also like to quote a section (admittedly large but I think it builds a point) that I feel really highlights not only who this video is for, but what it’s goals are, and how ironically similar it is to the “Alt-Right”:

“The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational. It happens often during periods of transition. As dramatic as the death of a loved one, or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late Capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could’ve gone down the path to becoming a leftist. Now this is not to make an economic anxiety argument. The animating force of the far right is and always has been bigotry. But, the “Alt-Right” targets Gabe by treating his economic anxiety as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the “Alt-Right” before they find us.”

I feel it’s notable to point out the mentioning of three different groups here. There is, of course, the “Alt-Right”, and then a mention of “leftists” which funnily enough he didn’t say with any notable malice or irony as many on the Left do when using that specific term. Then he mentions an “us”. Huh. Who is “us”? If it’s not the “Alt-Right” and it’s not “Leftists” then who could it refer to? Using context, we can safely assume it’s no one right of center, so that’s off the list. “Leftists” is sort of too ambiguous a term to really discern what he means specifically by it. Sometimes it refers to anyone on the Left, sometimes a particular sect of the Left, usually the folks left of Democrats. Who’s to say which he means. Although, he has just knocked on Capitalism for supposedly causing Gabe’s downfall. This alone suggests that whoever “us” is, they’re not avid fans of Capitalism. Maybe Socialists? Maybe Communists?

Alright I’m done tiptoeing around the subject for dramatic effect. It’s evident that this video is by and for anti-Capitalists, meant to lament the loss of a potential candidate for recruitment into their own cult-like mindset. This is why I referred to Gabe’s turn to the “Alt-Right” as “stepping off the garden path and onto another”. This video is calmly worded yet thinly veiled rage at the missing prospect of another recruit. It’s nothing more than a tantrum, blaming any and everything for making Gabe choose the “wrong” evil.

#random rant #alt-right

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presssorg · 6 years ago

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AP FACT CHECK: No sign of Trump-Mexico deal on farm goods

AP FACT CHECK: No sign of Trump-Mexico deal on farm goods WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is bragging about a new deal with Mexico that provides for “large” sales of U.S. farm goods, but it doesn’t appear to exist. In weekend tweets, he announced in all capital letters that he had won the agreement to benefit America’s “great patriot farmers,” and that U.S. sales would begin “immediately.” There isn’t any sign of that happening, however. Mexican officials denied that anything on agriculture was included in the deal on border security reached Friday to avert Trump’s threatened tariffs. Trump also unfairly placed responsibility on Mexico for the entire U.S. drug problem, even though many of the known drug deaths have nothing to do with the country. The statements came in a week where the apportioning of credit and blame often went awry in Trump’s remarks. He hailed pristine air quality that isn’t, wrongly insisted that the U.S. was paying “close to 100%” of NATO and told Puerto Ricans they should love him because he got them hurricane aid that he’s actually been complaining about for months. In the Democratic presidential campaign, meantime, Trump was accused of breaking a gun-control promise that in reality he kept. A look at recent claims and reality: MEXICO DEAL TRUMP: “MEXICO HAS AGREED TO IMMEDIATELY BEGIN BUYING LARGE QUANTITIES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT FROM OUR GREAT PATRIOT FARMERS!” — tweet Saturday, retweeted Sunday. THE FACTS: There’s no evidence that Mexico agreed to “large” purchases of agricultural products from the U.S. as part of the deal to avoid tariffs. Nor did the White House provide any details to show such a deal exists. The joint declaration between the U.S. and Mexico released by the State Department late Friday makes no mention of agriculture. Officials from Mexico deny an agreement was reached on farm goods as part of the talks. “Everything that was negotiated was in the joint statement,” said a Mexican official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. When Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena, was asked repeatedly Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” whether there was a new agricultural deal, she demurred, saying such trade between both countries should increase over time. She referenced instead the potential impact of the separate United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal, which has yet to be approved by Congress. “Is trade on agricultural products going to grow? Yes, it is going to grow, and it is going to grow without tariffs and with USMCA ratification,” Barcena said. According to the office of the United States Trade Representative, Mexico bought $20 billion in U.S. agricultural goods last year, making it the United States’ second-largest ag export market. —— TRUMP: “Look, I’m dealing with Mexico right now. They send in $500 billion worth of drugs, they kill 100,000 people, they ruin a million families every year if you look at that. That’s really an invasion without the guns. … 100,000 people are killed, dead every year, from what comes through our southern border. They shouldn’t be allowing people to come through their country from Central, from Honduras and Guatemala, El Salvador.” — Fox News interview Thursday. THE FACTS: Trump is inflating the death toll from drug overdoses — more than 70,200 in 2017 — and wrongly blaming all the known deaths on Mexico. Tens of thousands of those deaths have nothing to do with Mexico or Central America. They are from legally made prescription opioids, fentanyl laboratories in China or other sources of international drug smuggling and illicit manufacturing in the U.S. More than 17,000 of the deaths in 2017, for example, were from prescription opioids alone. Mexico is indeed a significant conduit in the drug trade — it’s a leading source of heroin, for example — but it is hardly the only one. —— DISASTER AID TRUMP, on signing a relief bill for multiple U.S. disasters: “Puerto Rico should love President Trump. Without me, they would have been shut out!” — tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: That’s not likely. The $19.1 billion disaster aid bill, passed by the House on Monday and signed into law by Trump on Thursday, ordinarily would have been approved by Congress months ago. But Trump injected himself into the debate, demanding that money for hurricane-rebuilding efforts that was sought by Puerto Rico’s elected officials, Republicans and Democrats both, be kept out. Trump frequently inflated the amount of aid that Puerto Rico had obtained in previous bills and feuded with the island’s Democratic officials. Congressional Democrats held firm in demanding that Puerto Rico, a territory whose 3 million people are U.S. citizens, be helped by the measure. The legislation ultimately included more money for Puerto Rico, about $1.4 billion, than Democrats originally sought. The relief measure delivers money to states in the South suffering from last fall’s hurricanes, Midwestern states deluged with springtime floods and fire-ravaged rural California, among others. —— NATO TRUMP: “We were paying so much. I think we were really paying close to 100% of NATO. So we were paying to protect all of these European nations. And it’s just not fair.” — interview Thursday with Fox News. THE FACTS: It’s not true that the U.S. was paying “close to 100%” of the price of protecting Europe. NATO does have a shared budget to which each member makes contributions based on the size of its economy. The United States, with the biggest economy, pays the biggest share, about 22%. Four European members — Germany, France, Britain and Italy — combined pay nearly 44% of the total. The money, about $3 billion, runs NATO’s headquarters and covers certain other civilian and military costs. Defending Europe involves far more than that fund. The primary cost of doing so would come from each member country’s military budget, as the alliance operates under a mutual defence treaty. The U.S. is the largest military spender but others in the alliance obviously have armed forces, too. The notion that almost all costs would fall to the U.S. is false. In fact, NATO’s Article 5, calling for allies to act if one is attacked, has only been invoked once, and it was on behalf of the U.S., after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. —— CLIMATE CHANGE TRUMP, asked if he believes in climate change: “I believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways.” — interview with Piers Morgan that broadcast Tuesday. THE FACTS: Trump is once again conflating weather and climate, suggesting that global warming can’t be happening if it gets cold outside. But weather is like mood, which changes daily. Climate is like personality, which is long term. The data show Trump also is wrong in that there is a clear one-way warming trend. Earth is considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago. So far in this decade, there have been 301,292 daily heat records set in the contiguous United States, compared with only 141,892 daily cold records set, according to retired Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton’s analysis of government temperature records. That’s more than two heat records broken for every cold record, a ratio that is the largest of any decade since these types of records started in the 1920s. According to Walton’s analysis, each decade since the 1970s has had a higher hot record-to-cold record ratio than the decade before it. And that’s just the extreme weather. When it comes to global average temperature, April was the 412th consecutive warmer month than the 20th century average, according to records kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The last five years — 2014 to 2018 — have been the five hottest years on record globally, according to those records. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have been in the past 15 years with records going back to 1880. The White House in November produced the National Climate Assessment by scientists from 13 Trump administration agencies and outside scientists. “Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report said. —— TRUMP: “We have the cleanest air in the world in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m president. We have the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean and I always say I want crystal clean water and air. … We’re setting records environmentally.” — remarks Wednesday with Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. THE FACTS: The U.S. does not have the cleanest air, and it hasn’t gotten better under the Trump administration. U.S. drinking water is among the best by one leading measure. Trump’s own Environmental Protection Agency data show that in 2017, among 35 major U.S. cities, there were 729 cases of “unhealthy days for ozone and fine particle pollution.” That’s up 22% from 2014 and the worst year since 2012. The Obama administration, in fact, set records for the fewest air polluted days, in 2016. In 2017, after Trump took office, the number of bad air days per metropolitan area went up 20%. The State of Global Air 2019 report by the Health Effects Institute rated the U.S. as having the eighth cleanest air for particle pollution — which kills 85,000 Americans each year — behind Canada, Scandinavian countries and others. The U.S. ranks poorly on smog pollution, which kills 24,000 Americans per year. On a scale from the cleanest to the dirtiest, the U.S. is at 123 out of 195 countries measured. On water, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index finds 10 countries tied for the cleanest drinking water, the U.S. among them. On environmental quality overall, the U.S. was 27th, behind a variety of European countries, Canada, Japan, Australia and more. Switzerland was No. 1. —— GILLIBRAND ON GUN CONTROL SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, Democratic presidential candidate, on Trump: “Remember after the shooting in Las Vegas, he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we are going to ban the bump stocks’? Did he ban the bump stocks? No, because the NRA came crashing down and said, ‘Don’t you dare do any restrictions on our guns around this country.”‘– Fox News town hall on June 2. THE FACTS: Not true. Trump kept his promise. A nationwide ban took effect in March on bump stocks, the attachment used by the gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre to make his weapons fire rapidly like machine-guns. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives outlawed the attachments at Trump’s direction after the shootings killed more than 50 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. It is the only major gun restriction imposed by the federal government in the past few years. The Trump administration’s move was an about-face for the bureau. In 2010, under the Obama administration, it found that the devices were legal. But under the Trump administration, officials revisited that determination and found it incorrect. After the Las Vegas shootings, the National Rifle Association initially said “devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.” After the bureau’s ruling banning the devices, however, the gun lobby called it “disappointing” and said it should have provided amnesty for gun owners who already have bump stocks. The government estimates that more than 500,000 bump stocks were sold after they were made legal in 2010. —— VETERANS TRUMP, on the late Sen. John McCain: “I was not a fan. I didn’t like what he did with health care. I didn’t like how he handled the veterans. Because I got them Choice. He was always unable. He was on committees and could have done it.” — interview Tuesday with Morgan. THE FACTS: Not so. McCain did, in fact, get the Veterans Choice program passed in Congress. Trump repeatedly claims falsely that he was the first president in decades to get such a private-sector health program passed. But what Trump actually got done was an expansion of the Choice program achieved by McCain and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the main lawmakers who advanced the legislation signed by President Barack Obama. McCain, an Arizona Republican, co-sponsored the legislation following a 2014 scandal at the VA medical centre in Phoenix, where some veterans died while waiting months for medical appointments. Trump signed the law expanding the program in June 2018. It is named after three veterans who were lawmakers — McCain, Daniel K. Akaka and Samuel R. Johnson. After helping to pass the program, McCain fought to expand it even more in his last months before dying of brain cancer in August. The original Choice program allowed veterans to see doctors outside the Department of Veterans Affairs system if they must wait more than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles (65 kilometres) to a VA facility. Under the expansion, which took effect Thursday, veterans are to have that option for a private doctor if their VA wait is only 20 days (28 for specialty care) or their drive is only 30 minutes. Still, the VA says it does not expect a major increase in veterans seeking care outside the VA under Trump’s expanded program, partly because wait times in the private sector are now typically longer than at VA. —— LONDON PROTESTS TRUMP: “I kept hearing that there would be ‘massive’ rallies against me in the UK, but it was quite the opposite. The big crowds, which the Corrupt Media hates to show, were those that gathered in support of the USA and me.” — tweet Wednesday. TRUMP: “I heard that there were protests. I said: ‘Where are the protests? I don’t see any protests.’ I did see a small protest today when I came, very small, so a lot of it is fake news, I hate to say. …And I didn’t see the protesters until just a little while ago and it was a very, very small group of people.” — news conference Tuesday with British Prime Minister Theresa May. THE FACTS: The protests over Trump’s visit were more than just “very, very small,” and some were hard to miss. Thousands of protesters crowded London’s government district, chanting as he met May nearby. While police erected barricades to stop protesters from marching past the gates of Downing Street, they could be heard as Trump and May emerged from the prime minister’s official residence to pose for photos before their news conference. The protests included a giant Trump baby balloon and a robotic likeness of Trump sitting on a golden toilet, reciting familiar Trump phrases like “No collusion” and “You are fake news.” —— BREXIT TRUMP, referring to how he stood at his Scottish golf resort, Turnberry, on the eve of the Brexit referendum and predicted the British would vote to leave the European Union: “I really predicted what was going to happen. Some of you remember that prediction. It was a strong prediction, made at a certain location, on a development we were opening the day before it happened.” — news conference Tuesday. THE FACTS: He often tells this false story. Trump did not predict Brexit the day before the vote. Three months before the vote, he did predict accurately that Britain would vote to leave the EU. The day after the 2016 vote — not the day before — he predicted from his Scottish resort that the EU would collapse because of Britain’s withdrawal. That remains to be seen. —— TRANSGENDER TROOPS TRUMP, explaining his ban on transgender troops in the military: “In the military, you’re not allowed to take any drugs …People were going in and then asking for the operation, and the operation is $200,000, $250,000, and getting the operation, the recovery period is long, and they have to take large amounts of drugs after that …You can’t do that.” — interview Tuesday with Morgan. THE FACTS: Trump has offered no substantiation for the assertion that transgender military members represent tremendous medical costs and disruption. A Rand Corp. study found otherwise. Nor does the military bar troops from using prescription drugs. Rand estimates that out of about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel, 2,450 are transgender. Only a subset would seek transition-related care, such as hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery. Based on private insurance data, the study estimates a minimal increase in costs from such care for the active-duty armed forces — no more than 0.13%, or $8.4 million annually. As for disruption, members representing less than 0.1% of the total force would seek transition-related care that could affect their deployments, the study says. —— Associated Press writers Peter Orsi and Christopher Sherman in Mexico City, Seth Borenstein, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Perrone and Darlene Superville in Washington, Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho, Nicky Forster in New York, and Jill Lawless and Kevin Freking in London contributed to this report. —— Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow https://twitter.com/APFactCheck EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures Published at Mon, 10 Jun 2019 04:43:05 +0000 Read the full article

#APFactCheck #brexit #climatechange #guncontrol #immigration #nato #tariffs #tradewar #transgendertroops #veterans

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unterwaesche · 3 years ago

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Both sides are shit for different reasons, Republicans aren’t actively trying to bring harm down on their constituents because that’s stupid, and Democrats don’t actually care about their constituents even though they pretend they do. They’re pretty much the same, no matter what Democrats and/or Republicans will insist.

At their core, both parties just want to be the ones steering. That’s literally it, neither one of them care about any of the issues of the hoi polloi, they’re just trying to elbow their way into the new American aristocracy that we were supposed to avoid creating, oops.

So here’s what’s really happening though, because it ain’t any of those scenarios up there. See, Democrats will always build themselves up as the plucky underdogs, the counterculture, the Great Protectors of the common person, even when the federal government has a Democrat supermajority, or in Democrat stronghold cities, or what have you. That means they have to pretend to care about their pet issues and the goings-on of the regular folk, even though it’s obvious that they’re offering pretty promises during their campaign and just sit on their thumbs while they’re in office. But they’ll blame Republicans for standing in their way, even in situations where there either aren’t any Republicans actually there to do so, or there aren’t enough to really cause any disruption. The filibuster, for example, is much more commonly used by Democrats.

Now, Republicans...they just got no spine. They’re the party that kisses the asses of law enforcement officers the country over, which means that whole bills supported by every single Republican might fail if the chief of police bitches. They’ll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory just to show people how gracefully they’re willing to lose. They ALSO could care less about the people they’re supposed to represent. I’m trying to think of more shit I can say about them, but honestly, they’re under such a microscope because 90% of American media leans Democrat that they don’t tend to get away with much that isn’t well known. But also they tend to get lied about a lot. It’s complicated. Don’t get me wrong though, they’re by no means the good guys being laid low.

Both parties are in the pocket of corporations. No legislation will ever get passed that will harm anyone who owns a politician, on either side. Even bills with bipartisan support might get killed if it hurts someone it’s not supposed to hurt. They call each other out on it all the time. And they’re right. But nothing ever happens because of it.

Democrats like to add tiny little details into must-pass legislation that, if it’s bad enough, Republicans will end up killing a bill over. Then they’ll say that Republicans hate us all and want us all dead. The bill that was intended to help with the baby formula shortage also expanded federal authority over businesses that make baby formula, so the Republicans went against it, and then everyone was all, “See, Republicans want babies to starve.” They killed a Medicare expansion bill, too, because it would have delayed a different bill that was cracking down on kickbacks to politicians.

But Republicans also said they just haaAAAaaaaAaad to vote yea to the spending bills that have sent us into this huge inflation period because Americans needed help even though 95% of the spending didn’t go towards actually helping people, it went to corporations and shit. One guy literally said he voted for things that “broke his heart” but he just KNEW the bill had to pass.

So like...Democrats will push and push hard for their progressive policies but they’re willing to destroy the people they say they’re trying to help to get their way. They don’t care who it hurts as long as feel-good policies get passed. Republicans will, in turn, act as doormats and let whatever the fuck Democrats want go through as long as it’s a year ending in an odd number, but they magically want to turn power back over to the states (where, I’ll add, it belongs) during election years.

Sorry, I said way too much. But yeah, like, Republicans aren’t actively trying to hurt people, but that doesn’t mean they’re the good guys...but Democrats definitely aren’t, either.

republicans will be like “good news, everyone! we have passed legislation that will make it legal for us to shoot you in the chest” and dems will respond with “we have listened to the SCIENTISTS and the SCIENCE says that being shot in the chest is bad! and that is why we are proposing a BOLD counter-legislation that would provide FREE bulletproof vests to individuals making less than $30,000 per year!” and leftists are like “um yeah I guess if those are our only options I’ll pick the dems but why is it legal for you to shoot us in the chest? maybe they shouldn’t be able to do that in the first place? where’s that option?” and dems will be like “shut up and vote blue no matter who you stupid fucking hippie” and then you find out that the private company that makes the bullets and the vests funds both parties

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loudlytransparenttrash · 6 years ago

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One of my followers is a lefty, but unlike most left-wingers today, she's an actual liberal. Not the kind that hates conservatives because our ideology is different. But she seems to think that us right-wingers hate black people and the only difference is we're more honest about it than the left. I wanna give her a convincing argument against this notion but I'm not Ben Shapiro or the right-wing equivalent of Jordan Peterson, so what do I say to her, exactly?

Lol you don’t need to be either of them to know that’s simply not true. I think it’s senseless to suggest either side hates black people. I’d love to talk to your follower and find out what reasons she has to believe majority of the country hates blacks considering she believes both sides hates blacks just one is more honest about it than the other. I think she’s confusing the black civil rights leaders who would say the only difference between a liberal and conservative is liberals pose as black’s benefactor while conservatives are more honest about not being blacks’ benefactor. That’s very different to hating black people.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment either, as conservatives openly have no interest in being the benefactors for anyone. Conservatives don’t want us dependent on the government, they’re against creating a socialist welfare state and they’re against creating policies which enforce special treatment to entire groups. They believe in individualism, self-sufficiency and productivity. And this is why they’re considered racists today. They refuse to treat blacks differently and they don’t encourage blacks to be dependent on them, so that clearly must mean they hate black people.

Blacks had always overwhelmingly voted Republican as they once valued family, freedom, independence and personal responsibility. It also helped that Democrats were the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation and anti-civil rights. Only after the black vote started to count, Democrats rebranded themselves as the sympathizers, defenders and saviors of black Americans, telling blacks they will give them the free ride they are owed, they’ll give them reparations and entitlements and welfare in return for their vote. Unfortunately, they fell for it, and Democrat policies and Democrats elected in black-majority cities have turned out to be disastrous for blacks.

Racism and “the legacy of slavery” is the go-to explanation for the struggles faced by black Americans, and if only the government righted the historical wrongs of whites and promise to coddle blacks and provide for them, and if only we have Democrat/black leaders (despite having a black Democratic president and largely black administration for eight years), well only then can black people succeed. This is the winning formula for the Democrats hooking the black vote, but what would happen if blacks regained their conservative values and stopped asking what the government can do for them and instead go back to asking what they can do for themselves.

Before blacks latched onto welfare and reparation programs and believed success was owed rather than earned, black high schools were doing better than many other majority-white schools, blacks had higher rates of workers than whites, blacks had a lower rate of teenage unemployment, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at greater rates, the large majority of black couples were married, most black babies were born to married parents, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing, both poverty and dependency were declining and black income was rising at equal rates to white income. There was also far less black crime and less black homicide.

Fast forward to the implementation of Democratic welfare and “we owe you” programs and rewarding single mothers, black workers and black teenage employment decreased in half, less than half of black students graduated from high school in 2005, 75 percent of blacks aren’t married, almost every black baby is born to a single mom and raised by a single parent, teenage pregnancy has accelerated, blacks today commit the overwhelming largest rates of murder and violent crime, in many cities blacks constitute majority of shooters even when they’re a minority and black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age combined. But let me guess, racism is worse today than it was pre-1960? Or the legacy of slavery is more prevalent today than two generations ago?

You may not think black married families is important, but when you consider almost no black married family live in poverty while the large majority of unmarried, single black mother households do live in poverty, it’s probably something we should be treating more seriously. Imagine what could be possible if we took the values blacks once believed in such as marriage, education, nuclear family, high expectations, holding everyone to the same standards, being self-empowered, respect for law, and combined them with the ceaseless rights, opportunities and freedom we enjoy today. It’s never been done and it probably never be will for as long as conservative values are racist and our rights, opportunity and freedom only exist for white guys…

This is the problem with feeding blacks the idea their lives are hopeless, threatened and oppressed. It makes them feel powerless which is great for Democrats as they become black’s only hope to provide for them like wounded pets but it’s proven to be a massive setback for blacks because once you give up your self-determination and independence, productivity and progress can never exist. Black Americans continue to sit at the bottom and in many ways have fallen backwards more today than 50-100 years ago. No group has ever successfully improved their circumstances by clinging to a counterproductive culture that is supposedly “authentic” in the name of group pride or identity. The only way up is to work for it, the excuses and blame have to stop. We have to reach out, forgive and move on. Walking on eggshells out of fear or guilt or throwing money at the problem solves nothing.

Apart from the myths about oppression and victimization which push more blacks into welfare, crime, broken homes, poverty, drugs and self-destruction, I despise the well-intentioned, sympathetic liberal view on black people. Have you seen the video where young liberals all agree blacks shouldn’t have to hold an ID to vote because most blacks are either too broke or don’t know how to use the internet to find their local DMV? Or that it’s not black people’s fault for being unhealthy because all they can afford is fried chicken or they don’t know how to find healthier places to shop… I sure as hell believe this liberal shit is more offensive than expecting blacks to be held to the same standards, rules and accountability as everyone else.

It’s also why they vote for affirmative action and racial quotas, rather than wanting blacks to be better educated or be employed based on skill and merit, they rather just lower the bar altogether and admit based on skin color where they will ultimately fail and drop out or come out of college less educated than before holding an expensive degree in Fuck Trump studies. Just look at the black student who was accepted into a top university just for writing lines of ‘black lives matter.’ Professors are told to not correct the spelling of black students as their broken english is their “own language” and now they want to do away with tests altogether as the results discriminate against blacks.

We can add the bigotry of low expectations to the list of Democrats screwing over black Americans. Ask your follower if she can come up with a list of examples of Republicans or conservatives “hating blacks” that can out-do the left. She might want to leave out the inevitable incarceration rates though as they perfectly match the black homicide and violent crime rates, plus older blacks support the no-sense approach as they’re just as fed up with young blacks terrorizing their neighborhoods and shooting each other daily. She might also want to read up on Black Lives Matter, their violence, agenda and the facts surrounding their founding martyrs before claiming the right unfairly criticizes the movement. And she sure as heck can’t point to pro-lifers as the majority of aborted babies are black, probably not something racists would protest.

None of this not to say the right doesn’t have its racists or major faults, but if they’re as so honestly and openly racist as your follower believes, surely she could prove it? Thanks :) xx

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newstfionline · 6 years ago

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Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About ‘Trump Country’

By Sarah Smarsh, NY Times, July 19, 2018

WICHITA, Kan.--Is the white working class an angry, backward monolith--some 90 million white Americans without college degrees, all standing around in factories and fields thumping their dirty hands with baseball bats? You might think so after two years of media fixation on this version of the aggrieved laborer: male, Caucasian, conservative, racist, sexist.

This account does white supremacy a great service in several ways: It ignores workers of color, along with humane, even progressive white workers. It allows college-educated white liberals to signal superior virtue while denying the sins of their own place and class. And it conceals well-informed, formally educated white conservatives--from middle-class suburbia to the highest ranks of influence--who voted for Donald Trump in legions.

The trouble begins with language: Elite pundits regularly misuse “working class” as shorthand for right-wing white guys wearing tool belts. My father, a white man and lifelong construction worker who labors alongside immigrants and people of color on job sites across the Midwest and South working for a Kansas-based general contractor owned by a woman, would never make such an error.

Most struggling whites I know live lives of quiet desperation mad at their white bosses, not resentment of their co-workers or neighbors of color. My dad’s previous three bosses were all white men he loathed for abuses of privilege and people.

It is unfair power that my father despises. The last rant I heard him on was not about race or immigration but about the recent royal wedding, the spectacle of which made him sick.

“What’s so special about the royals?” he told me over the phone from a cheap motel after work. “But they’ll get the best health care, the best education, the best food. Meanwhile I’m in Marion, Arkansas. All I want is some chickens and a garden and place to go fishing once in a while.”

What my father seeks is not a return to times that were worse for women and people of color but progress toward a society in which everyone can get by, including his white, college-educated son who graduated into the Great Recession and for 10 years sold his own plasma for gas money. After being laid off during that recession in 2008, my dad had to cash in his retirement to make ends meet while looking for another job. He has labored nearly every day of his life and has no savings beyond Social Security.

Yes, my father is angry at someone. But it is not his co-worker Gem, a Filipino immigrant with whom he has split a room to pocket some of the per diem from their employer, or Francisco, a Hispanic crew member with whom he recently built a Wendy’s north of Memphis. His anger, rather, is directed at bosses who exploit labor and governments that punish the working poor--two sides of a capitalist democracy that bleeds people like him dry.

“Corporations,” Dad said. “That’s it. That’s the point of the sword that’s killing us.”

Among white workers, this negative energy has been manipulated to great political effect by a conservative trifecta in media, private interest and celebrity that we might call Fox, Koch and Trump.

As my dad told me, “There’s jackasses on every level of the food chain--but those jackasses are the ones that play all these other jackasses.”

Still, millions of white working-class people have refused to be played. They have resisted the traps of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and nationalism and voted the other way--or, in too many cases, not voted at all. I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling white Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.

Like many Midwestern workers I know, my dad has more in common ideologically with New York’s Democratic Socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with the white Republicans who run our state. Having spent most of his life doing dangerous, underpaid work without health insurance, he supports the ideas of single-payer health care and a universal basic income.

Much has been made of the white working class’s political shift to the right. But Mr. Trump won among white college graduates, too. According to those same exit polls trotted out to blame the “uneducated,” 49 percent of whites with degrees picked Mr. Trump, while 45 percent picked Hillary Clinton (among them, support for Mr. Trump was stronger among men). Such Americans hardly “vote against their own best interest.” Media coverage suggests that economically distressed whiteness elected Mr. Trump, when in fact it was just plain whiteness.

Stories dispelling the persistent notion that bigotry is the sole province of “uneducated” people in derided “flyover” states are right before our eyes: A white man caught on camera assaulting a black man at a white-supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Va., was recently identified as a California engineer. This year, a white male lawyer berated restaurant workers for speaking Spanish in New York City. A white, female, Stanford-educated chemical engineer called the Oakland, Calif., police on a family for, it would appear, barbecuing while black.

Among the 30 states tidily declared “red” after the 2016 election, in two-thirds of them Mrs. Clinton received 35 to 48 percent of the vote. My white working-class family was part of that large minority, rendered invisible by the Electoral College and graphics that paint each state red or blue.

In the meantime, critical stories here in “red states” go underdiscussed and underreported, including:

Barriers to voting. Forces more influential than the political leanings of a white factory worker decide election outcomes: gerrymandering, super PACs, corrupt officials. In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach blocked 30,000 would-be voters from casting ballots (and was recently held in contempt of federal court for doing so).

Different information sources. Some of my political views shifted when my location, peer group and news sources changed during my college years. Many Americans today have a glut of information but poor media literacy--hard to rectify if you work on your feet all day, don’t own a computer and didn’t get a chance to learn the vocabulary of national discourse.

Populism on the left. Today, “populism” is often used interchangeably with “far right.” But the American left is experiencing a populist boom. According to its national director, Democratic Socialists of America nearly quadrupled in size from 2016 to 2017--and saw its biggest one-day boost the day after Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent primary upset. Progressive congressional candidates with working-class backgrounds and platforms have major support heading into the midterms here in Kansas, including the white civil rights attorney James Thompson, who grew up in poverty, and Sharice Davids, a Native American lawyer who would be the first openly lesbian representative from Kansas.

To find a more accurate vision of these United States, we must resist pat narratives about any group--including the working class on whom our current political situation is most often pinned. The greatest con of 2016 was not persuading a white laborer to vote for a nasty billionaire with soft hands. Rather, it was persuading a watchdog press to cast every working-class American in the same mold.

#Trump country #working class #US politics

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Republicans Voted For Impeachment In The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-voted-for-impeachment-in-the-house/

What Republicans Voted For Impeachment In The House

Dana Bash: Its Reprehensible That Republicans Who Propagated Election Fraud Lies Did Not Apologize

From CNN’s Dana Bash / Written by CNN’s Maureen Chowdhury

CNN’s Dana Bash called out House Republicans who did not come out and admit that they were wrong for propagating false election fraud claims during the House impeachment debate.

“Those who did say that the election was stolen, those who propagated that, those who fed the lies of the President, ‘I’m sorry, I made a mistake,’ we heard that from nobody. And that’s frankly reprehensible,” CNN’s Dana Bash said.

“Especially given the fact that they all know better,” Bash added.

“I think they know the reality. I think that they know the truth. I think that, in their heart of hearts, understand that when the secretaries of states in swing states like Georgia or Pennsylvania or Arizona say ‘This election wasn’t stolen,’ and it was free and fair and honest that, that actually is the truth,” Bash continued.

Bash also highlighted how, aside from the backtracking from election fraud claims, Republicans didn’t acknowledge the live footage from last week’s attack which show rioters stating “the President told us to come here.”

Watch Bash’s full remarks:

Liz Cheney John Katko And Dan Newhouse Among 10 House Republicans Who Voted In Favour Of Motion

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump a second time on Wednesday. The House voted 232-197 in favour of an unprecedented second impeachment just one week after the violence at the U.S. Capitol.

Those 232 votes were cast in favour of the bill by 222 Democrats — along with 10 Republicans, members of Trump’s own party.

The Republicans include:

House Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Face Backlash At Home In Test Of Trump’s Staying Power

CNN

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump are facing a wave of anger at home, with Republican officials, donors and voters condemning their votes and primary challengers launching their campaigns early.

The backlash has turned their 2022 primaries into tests of how long Trump can hold the stage in Republican politics and whether GOP voters are willing to turn the midterms into tests of loyalty to him.

The group of 10 Republicans includes moderates in swing districts, as well as some reliable conservatives, including the No. 3-ranking House Republican, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, and South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice.

“It started out big and it’s still growing. People are angry,” said Bryan Miller, the Republican chairman in Wyoming’s Sheridan County who said he plans to run against Cheney in the party’s 2022 primary. “She’s not living up to what we in Wyoming wanted, across the board. And it’s a huge betrayal.”

Anthony Bouchard, a Wyoming state senator who is also running against Cheney, said he’s been “flooded” with messages encouraging a primary run.

“I believe that her impeachment vote revealed who she has allegiance to, and I don’t think the voters will forget it any time soon,” Bouchard said.

He said any establishment donor money that goes to support those 10 GOP lawmakers will be “dwarfed” by money aimed at ousting them.

Video: GOP Rep. Kinzinger: This is not the party I joined

“I do not think this is going to dissipate,” Miller said.

House Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Face Backlash At Home In Test Of Trumps Staying Power

CNN

Anthony Bouchard, a Wyoming state senator who is also running against Cheney, said he’s been “flooded” with messages encouraging a primary run.

“I believe that her impeachment vote revealed who she has allegiance to, and I don’t think the voters will forget it any time soon,” Bouchard said.

He said any establishment donor money that goes to support those 10 GOP lawmakers will be “dwarfed” by money aimed at ousting them.

Video: GOP Rep. Kinzinger: This is not the party I joined

“I do not think this is going to dissipate,” Miller said.

Republicans Voted To Impeach Trump 7 Already Facing Challenges For Their Seats In Congress

U.S.Donald TrumpRepublicansGOPCongress

Some of the Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in January are already having their seats challenged and their ability to hold onto their place in Congress may be dependent on the moves the former president makes in the next 18 months.

Ten Republicans joined Democrats in impeaching Trump a historic second time, a move that was quickly met with condemnation back in their home states. They’ve been publicly scolded, pushed to resign and warned that local organizations will mount a strong push to oust them from office in the primary.

“After my last election, I had decided not to run again. But the vote by Congressman Valadao to impeach President Trump with no witnesses, evidence, or without allowing any defense was too much for me to stay on the sidelines,” Chris Mathys, a former Fresno, California, city council member, told Newsweek.

Valadao, who represents California’s 21st district, wasn’t in office during Trump’s first impeachment, as he had been ousted from office in 2018 by Democrat TJ Coxx. In November, Valadao won back his seat from the Democrat who beat him in 2018 by less than a point. The Republican placed blame on Trump for the Capitol riot, saying that his rhetoric was “un-American, abhorrent and absolutely an impeachable offense.”

PoliticsDonald TrumpHouse RepublicansGOPImpeachment

“The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not,” Cheney added.

House Republicans Face Some Backlash Over Vote To Impeach Sounding A Warning To Senators

January 28, 2021 / 7:01 AM / CBS News

Republicans divided in post-Trump era06:18

In his first phone town hall since voting to impeach former President Trump, a voter told South Carolina Congressman Tom Rice his decision was “inexcusable.”

“Next time around, I don’t think you’re going to get elected,” said his Myrtle Beach constituent, from the district Rice has represented since 2013. “I’m not happy with you. And I certainly won’t vote for you again. So if you can figure out some way to redeem yourself, I’m all ears.”

But the next caller, an 80-year-old woman, commended Rice for the “tremendous courage” he showed by voting for impeachment.

“If you want a Congressman that is going to bow down to bullies… that’ll go along with the crowd, ‘Oh, everybody else on this side voted this way, so I better vote that way so people back home don’t question me — if that’s the guy you want, then I’m not your guy,” Rice said.

“But if you want somebody who’s gonna stand up for what’s right, and protect our Constitution like I took an oath to do, then I am your guy.”

For Rice and the nine other House Republicans who voted for impeachment, Mr. Trump’s rally speech before the attack at the Capitol and his long silence as rioters breached the building was reason enough to join Democrats in impeaching the president a second time.

But their decision was met with an immediate backlash from many constituents, local parties and their Republican colleagues.

Rebecca Kaplan contributed reporting.

Of The 10 House Republicans Who Voted For Impeachment Already Have Primary Challengers

Dr Steve Turley

Rumble — SAVE $50 OFF your 4-Week Emergency Food Supply Kit here: http://www.preparewithsteve.com?Don’t wait for an emergency before you prepare for one! Click on the link now! ^^^————————————————————————??? YOUR PATRIOT PATH TO FREEDOM! ???9 Of The 10 House Republicans Who Voted For Impeachment Already Have Primary Challengers! In this video, we’re going to look at how pundits are already admitting that the 10 Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment are set to lose their seats, how several of them had the gall to vote in favor of giving illegals amnesty, and why it is that the Republicans had better rid themselves of all RINOs or face eventual political annihilation; you are NOT going to want to miss this!————————————————————————

Report: 9 Of The 10 Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Trump Facing Primary Challengers

Nine out of the 10 Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump are facing primary challenges for their congressional seats.

Fox News reports that a majority of those who joined Democrats and the media circus during the second impeachment trial are facing a “barrage of pro-Trump primary challengers.”

“Some of them,” like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger , according to Fox, “may have a very hard time holding on to their seats.”

The former President has vowed to back challengers to any Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment as they gear up for a fight in 2022.

Republicans who voted for impeachment face barrage of pro-Trump primary challengershttps://t.co/YsVrRwhYGj

Gop Leader Mccarthy: Trump ‘bears Responsibility’ For Violence Won’t Vote To Impeach

Some ambitious Republican senators have never been as on board the Trump train as the more feverish GOP members in the House, and the former might be open to convicting Trump. But their ambition cuts two ways — on the one hand, voting to ban Trump opens a lane to carry the Republican mantle in 2024 and be the party’s new standard-bearer, but, on the other, it has the potential to alienate many of the 74 million who voted for Trump, and whose votes they need.

It’s a long shot that Trump would ultimately be convicted, because 17 Republicans would need to join Democrats to get the two-thirds majority needed for a conviction. But it’s growing clearer that a majority of the Senate will vote to convict him, reflecting the number of Americans who are in favor of impeachment, disapproved of the job Trump has done and voted for his opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

Correction Jan. 14, 2021

A previous version of this story incorrectly said Rep. Peter Meijer is a West Point graduate. Meijer attended West Point, but he is a graduate of Columbia University.

Stun Guns Stinger Whips And A Crossbow: What Police Found On The Capitol Protesters

Not long after security forces cleared the last of the pro-Trump mob from the Capitol, a police officer stationed nearby spotted a “suspicious male in a white passenger van with red spray paint on the side.” The Ford Econoline 150 had Georgia plates and a red MAGA hat on the dashboard.

“I’m one of these,” the man said to the officer as he pointed to the hat, according to a police report.

The man, Grant Moore of Buford, Ga., went on to say that he was supporting the Chinese who were “currently protesting around the city,” the report says. Whatever that meant, Moore, 65, was soon placed under arrest on weapons charges.

Inside his vehicle was a book bag containing a semi-automatic handgun with a fully-loaded 6-round magazine, the police report says. The officer also found three other magazines inside the bag and 12 loose rounds in one of the van’s front compartments.

The guns and ammunition were among an unusual collection of weapons the police seized from protesters who flooded into D.C. to support President Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump Acquitted In Impeachment Trial; 7 Gop Senators Vote With Democrats To Convict

Dareh Gregorian

The Senate on Saturday voted to acquit former President Donald Trump on a charge of incitement of insurrection despite significant Republican support for conviction, bringing an end to the fourth impeachment trial in U.S. history and the second for Trump.

Seven Republicans voted to convict Trump for allegedly inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, when a mob of pro-Trump supporters tried to disrupt the electoral vote count formalizing Joe Biden’s election win before a joint session of Congress. That is by far the most bipartisan support for conviction in impeachment history. The final vote was 57 to 43, 10 short of the 67 votes needed to secure a conviction.

Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania all voted guilty.

The vote means the Senate cannot bar Trump from holding future federal offices.

Moments after the vote concluded, the former president issued a statement praising his legal team and thanking the senators and other members of Congress “who stood proudly for the Constitution we all revere and for the sacred legal principles at the heart of our country.”

“This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country. No president has ever gone through anything like it,” Trump said.

House Votes To Impeach Trump But Senate Trial Unlikely Before Biden’s Inauguration

9. Rep. John Katko, New York’s 24th: Katko is a moderate from an evenly divided moderate district. A former federal prosecutor, he said of Trump: “It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection.” He also noted that as the riot was happening, Trump “refused to call it off, putting countless lives in danger.”

10. Rep. David Valadao, California’s 21st: The Southern California congressman represents a majority-Latino district Biden won 54% to 44%. Valadao won election to this seat in 2012 before losing it in 2018 and winning it back in the fall. He’s the rare case of a member of Congress who touts his willingness to work with the other party. Of his vote for impeachment, he said: “President Trump was, without question, a driving force in the catastrophic events that took place on January 6.” He added, “His inciting rhetoric was un-American, abhorrent, and absolutely an impeachable offense.”

Raskin Compares Trumps Actions On January 6 To Lighting A Fire In Closing Argument

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen, meanwhile, insisted his client did nothing wrong and maintained he was the victim of vengeful Democrats and a biased news media. He called the impeachment proceedings a “charade from beginning to end.”

While he often seemed angry during his presentation, van der Veen was delighted by the acquittal. Reporters saw him fist bump a fellow member of Trump’s legal team afterward and exclaim, “We’re going to Disney World!”

“While a close call, I am persuaded that impeachments are a tool primarily of removal and we therefore lack jurisdiction,” the influential Kentucky Republican wrote in the email, which was obtained by NBC News.

McConnell, who’d rebuffed Democratic efforts to start the trial while Trump was still in office, had condemned Trump’s conduct after the riot and said he’d keep an open mind about voting to convict — something he’d ruled out entirely during Trump’s first impeachment trial last year.

After voting to acquit, McConnell blasted Trump for his “disgraceful dereliction of duty” and squarely laid the blame for the riot at Trump’s door in what amounted to an endorsement of many of the arguments laid out by House impeachment managers.

“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Cassidy gave a simple explanation for his vote in a 10-second video statement he posted on Twitter.

Gop Leader Mccarthy: Trump Bears Responsibility For Violence Wont Vote To Impeach

Correction Jan. 14, 2021

A previous version of this story incorrectly said Rep. Peter Meijer is a West Point graduate. Meijer attended West Point, but he is a graduate of Columbia University.

House Votes To Impeach Trump But Senate Trial Unlikely Before Bidens Inauguration

‘a Win Is A Win’: Trump’s Defense Team Makes Remarks After Senate Votes To Acquit

Despite the acquittal, President Joe Biden said in a statement that “substance of the charge” against Trump is “not in dispute.”

“Even those opposed to the conviction, like Senate Minority Leader McConnell, believe Donald Trump was guilty of a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and ‘practically and morally responsible for provoking’ the violence unleashed on the Capitol,” Biden’s statement read in part.

The president added that “this sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile. That it must always be defended. That we must be ever vigilant. That violence and extremism has no place in America. And that each of us has a duty and responsibility as Americans, and especially as leaders, to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Saturday’s vote “the largest and most bipartisan vote in any impeachment trial in history,” but noted it wasn’t enough to secure a conviction.

The trial “was about choosing country over Donald Trump, and 43 Republican members chose Trump. They chose Trump. It should be a weight on their conscience today, and it shall be a weight on their conscience in the future,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor.

With control of the Senate split 50-50, the House managers always had an uphill battle when it came to convincing enough Republicans to cross party lines and convict a former president who is still very popular with a large part of the GOP base.

Trump Calls For ‘no Violence’ As Congress Moves To Impeach Him For Role In Riot

This time, there will be more. Some Republican senators have called on Trump to resign, and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he is undecided at this point.

Trump’s impeachment won’t lead to his removal — even if he is convicted — because of the timeline. The Senate is adjourned until Tuesday. The next day, Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president. But there’s another penalty the Constitution allows for as a result of a Senate conviction that could be appealing to some Republican senators — banning Trump from holding “office” again.

While there is some debate as to the definition of “office” in the Constitution and whether that would apply to running for president or even Congress, that kind of public rebuke would send a strong message — that Republicans are ready to move on from Trumpism.

Ny Lawmakers Rejoice End To Tragic Chapter In Our States History As Cuomo Quits

Ten House Republicans crossed party lines on Wednesday and voted to impeach President Trump — which is 10 more than the amount to go against him the first time around.

The GOP lawmakers aligned with Democrats to formally charge the outgoing commander-in-chief with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” in last week’s storming of the Capitol by supporters he had addressed during a rally near the White House.

No Republicans voted in 2019 to impeach Trump the first time.

Here are the 10 GOP members who voted to impeach on Wednesday:

Rep Tim Ryan: Probe Underway On Whether Members Gave Capitol Tours To Rioters

7. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, Washington’s 3rd: Herrera Beutler was swept in with the Tea Party wave in 2010, but her district is a moderate one. Trump won it 51% to 47%. Herrera Beutler gained prominence several years ago for giving birth to a child three months early, born without kidneys and a rare syndrome. Her daughter, Abigail, became the first to survive the often-fatal condition. The now-mother of three and congresswoman from southwest Washington state declared on the House floor her vote in favor of impeachment: “I’m not choosing sides, I’m choosing truth.”

8. Rep. Peter Meijer, Michigan’s 3rd: Meijer is a freshman, who won his seat with 53% of the vote. He represents a district that was previously held by Justin Amash, the former Republican-turned-independent who voted in favor of Trump’s impeachment in 2019. Meijer, a Columbia University grad who served in Afghanistan, is a social conservative in favor of restrictions on abortion rights and against restrictions on gun rights and religious freedoms. But he said Trump showed no “courage” and “betrayed millions with claims of a ‘stolen election.’ ” He added, “The one man who could have restored order, prevented the deaths of five Americans including a Capitol police officer, and avoided the desecration of our Capitol, shrank from leadership when our country needed it most.”

Trump Calls For No Violence As Congress Moves To Impeach Him For Role In Riot

This time, there will be more. Some Republican senators have called on Trump to resign, and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he is undecided at this point.

Here Are The 10 Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Trump After The Capitol Riot

Tala Michel Issa, Al Arabiya English

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Ten Republicans of the US House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump after rioters stormed the Capitol building last week, making him the first president in US history to be impeached twice.

Trump’s support within the Republican party appears to be wavering. While only 10 Republicans voted for impeachment, during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 the party closed ranks, with zero votes for impeachment at the time.

All House Democrats voted in favor of the impeachment; 197 Republicans voted against it. The 10 Republican votes for this impeachment trial made history as the tally exceeded the previous record of five Democrat votes during Bill Clinton’s 1988 impeachment trial.

The US House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, first decide if a President should be impeached. If the house finds in favor the Senate, the upper house of Congress, will then hold a trial overseen by the US chief justice.

The Senate’s response to the president’s second impeachment is yet to be determined. In order to render a guilty verdict, 17 Republicans would have to join Democrats.

As of yet, only a small number of Republican senators have shown interest in potentially convicting Trump in a Senate trial. The trial would begin after Trump has left office and after President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office on January 20.

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