#except the reality is that one of these candidates is going to be elected whether you vote or not | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thereallifecath · 2 months ago

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I doubt I can reason with you, but truly, we are voting for an administration we can protest. An administration we can criticize. One that may actually change if pressured enough. You said yourself you don’t know how the ballot works. Here’s how it works: there’s two candidates that could possibly win. That’s it. Harris, or Trump. Third party is statistically impossible. This isn’t how it should be, but it is. A lot of vulnerable people (see: those listed in your pinned post) would be devastated under a second Trump admin. With Harris, we have a fighting chance at maintaining or improving our rights, and can continue to fight for Palestine without unfathomable repercussions. This would be all but impossible under Trump. Please don’t weigh in on USAmerican elections online when you admittedly don’t understand them. Thank you for listening, and understand I mean no disrespect by any of this, just hope I can give some insight on the unfortunate reality of our choice. Not voting for Harris is a vote from Trump and essentially my own death warrant as a marginalized USAmerican.

Starting any response off with ‘I doubt I can reason with you’, is immediately disrespectful and a cop out. You don’t know me, we’ve, as far as I’m aware, never conversed before and so I am confused as to why you feel ready to make that assumption - that I’m an unreasonable person.

I am Australian, so I am aware of how frustrating it is to be constantly told to vote for the lesser of two evils because statistically the other parties won’t win… but I also understand that that statement is very much a ploy to keep us voting for the same two parties. Here in Aus, there is a ranking system on the ballot, so you can vote for your first choice, second, third, etc. So that is very different, to my understanding of how the US American’s ballot works. You claim that I admitted to not understanding how American elections work, when I didn’t - I stated that I don’t know how specifically the ballot works - as in what it looks like. I was having a hard time getting a straight answer on whether there is other parties on the ballot other than Republican and Democratic, and I understand now that there is but like here, it’s unlikely that anyone else will win. It is of course, easier for me to say that I would vote someone else, as again here it’s different but I also don’t know how real change is supposed to happen if we (globally) just shrug our shoulders and accept the system instead of fighting it or trying to change it. How is anyone other party ever going to have a chance if everyone collectively just agrees to that shitty vote for the lesser of two evils bullshit. I’m not telling you - and I didn’t once say that I hate Americans for voting for Kamala, I was mainly criticising celebrities and people in power for supporting this rhetoric instead of trying to invoke real change.

You say a lot of vulnerable people would be devastated under Trump rule as if no one is being devastated now. I am very much aware of the struggles the American people face, as the Australian government/parliament follows and kisses USA’s ass more often than not. What happens in America doesn’t just happen in America, it’s a ripple effect that affects life and laws here too. The police here take inspiration from the USA’s police, and Prime Ministers always buddy up to the Presidents. In saying that it’s not as overtly bad here as it is in America, but USA news is constantly broadcasted here. There is of course one candidate that is worse than the other, and in no way am I saying that you shouldn’t vote or that voting for Trump would end up better than Kamala, but talking about it like Kamala is going to be better than him, feels wrong. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are basically the same at this point, they both want the same things, except one is just a lot more open and honest about it than the other. Kamala first and foremost will always be a cop, and she is not going to go easy on protesters and that’s evident in the last four years - hell - the last eleven months with Palestine Protests and police’s abhorrent behaviour towards students and other protestors. She may not have been President, but she was Vice, and I wonder how much in the past two years has been Biden, and how much has fallen to her because of his age and physical state at the time. By vulnerable people, I wonder if Muslim, Palestinian, and Middle Eastern citizens of the US as a whole, are considered under your definition, because if you ask them their lives don’t get better with either option. Same goes for the black community, it’s been horrible for decades, Kamala isn’t going to actively make it any better. And considering a high portion of violence against African Americans and people of colour is done by the police, why do you think Kamala is going to listen? I don’t want anyone to die or get hurt, and I understand that under Trump more people will be in danger, but Palestinians don’t have a threat of danger - they’re past that - the danger is a constant, almost a certainty that they will die sooner or later… if no one stops it now. I’m not telling you that whole stupid thing of ‘you can’t complain cause it’s worse in x’ I’m saying that I don’t see how just voting for the lesser of two evils is going to help anything, when you could band together and vote for a third party instead. Statistically it may be impossible but physically it’s not? You could invoke real change.

And the ‘you’ part isn’t even the main issue I had. I am more than allowed to criticise celebs for their engagement in an active genocide and how their behaviour and influence affects real issues. I have lost all hope in celebrities this past year and to see two celebs I loved, especially Misha Collins, endorse a woman who supports the genocide is disheartening for sure, and considering the fucking emotional wreck you naturally become when you see burnt body parts of kids on the fucking daily, yeah I’m gonna be angry, and yeah I’m gonna be angry at the people who are putting their hand in to help the wrong side. Both Trump and Kamala want Israel to succeed, and I don’t see how standing on the side of either can be seen as the right choice. I don’t want Trump to win, but shit has been fucked under the Biden/Harris administration and I of course get angry when I see people praising her. And really, a whole GEEKS FOR HARRIS/WALZ event when you have not done a single fundraiser for Palestine? Fuck that, that’s just openly being ignorant of the people suffering because of Israel yes, but also because of the USA’s involvement as well as Canada’s, Australia’s and Britain’s too. The western imperialist countries have done NOTHING to help Palestine, instead we have disgusting officials encouraging the killing of babies - celebrating it even, and we just have to sit back and stay partial to the bullshit. I’m tired of the system and you should be too, be radical, try to change the system because it’s not working for anyone and Kamala isn’t going to change that. The least we can do is demand that Kamala understand that the president should serve the people, and that to get the people’s vote she must divest from and sanction Israel.

And look I’m not going to fault you for voting for her, in complete honesty, I get it, it’s a fucking difficult situation. But I am going to fault everyone involved in creating this stupid event, because they could’ve put on a fundraiser or sanction Israel event sometime in the past eleven months, but they didn’t and they still could’ve put on an event to convince the people that they do have a choice and they can actually change things by voting third party. Yeah people aren’t going to vote third party if they are told they can’t or their vote doesn’t matter if they do. And I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings in any way, I genuinely am, but I am fucking tired of seeing people in so much pain and not being able to do much about it. The least these celebs can do is openly campaign against Israhell but they don’t, and I’m more than entitled to tell them to fuck off when instead they support Kamala Harris.

The protests for Palestine have been going on for 75 years, there is very little tiny chance that Kamala is going to somehow listen to protestors when she’s elected and change things. We have to change things, the people, and I get it, you can’t change things is you’ve got a dictator preventing you from doing so, but talking about Kamala like she is going to help… isn’t it.

#free palestine #kamala harris #trump #jill stein #fuck albanese #fuck israel

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aeoki · 4 months ago

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Atlantis - Amusement Park: Chapter 5

Location: Yumenosaki Auditorium Characters: Touri & Wataru Season: Winter

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ< A few hours later. Yumenosaki Auditorium – the stage for the final debate. >

Amano Hashidate (Wataru): (Now, things have become interesting.)

(What a commotion. Shinobu Sengoku-kun was theoretically supposed to be in second place in the election, but he declared that he would drop out and support Himegimi instead.)

(He even confidently gave a campaign speech for Himegimi.)

(His words were laced with touching enthusiasm… His word choices were a bit poor and he spoke in haste, but I think that’s exactly why his words had such a great impact on those watching him.)

(Everyone naturally felt that someone as naive as he would only say the truth.)

(They’ve thrown away their resentment and prejudice and have begun looking directly at Himegimi.)

(At this rate, he might be able to get people who never supported Shinobu Sengoku-kun to vote for him.)

(My my, how wonderful. He’s someone with exceptional talent – someone I’d love to bring into the world of theatre.)

(He mentioned being an “ally of justice”, didn’t he…? He is skilled in wearing a mask ♪)

(But you can’t win with just that. Right now, things are looking up for Himegimi but…)

(The iceberg in front of him – in other words, me – will not melt away and disappear. It’s not as simple as charging at it at top speed.)

(What will you do, Himegimi? If you charge at me just like that, you’ll just end up sinking into the ocean, you know?)

Touri: “–My plans have gone crumbling down since Shinobu suddenly gave that campaign speech.”

“There isn’t a lot of time, so let’s start the debate.”

Amano Hashidate (Wataru): (Good, good. You made the right decision by making a positive comment and taking the initiative.)

“Yes. Let’s begin the debate that will decide who will be worthy of becoming the student council president.”

Touri: (Dammit~... That cross-dressing pervert is so calm and collected. If he looked even a bit fazed, then I could’ve made it look like she’s not reliable.)

(But that just means you’re not going easy on me, right? Okay, fine. Geez.)

(If anything, I would’ve gotten angry if you held back and treated me like a child.)

Amano Hashidate (Wataru): (Hehehe. You’re too focused on me, Himegimi. In reality, it does look like it’s a one-on-one fight between you and me.)

(But all the candidates for the student council president election are gathered here in the auditorium, and it’ll be a clash of unrestrained opinions.)

(It’ll be held in front of the students – for as long as time allows.)

(The debate will also be streamed live online to the other students not in the auditorium, so it will greatly impact the real voting.)

(It was up to the students whether they wanted to watch our speeches, as it was also up to us to give them. But this debate is almost like a mandatory event.)

Touri: (But that’s exactly why, on the other hand, I think there’s a chance I can turn the tables if I can completely defeat Hibiki-senpa– I mean, Z. K. Amano Hashidate.)

(The things that have happened so far don't matter – I can win by ending this with a checkmate.)

(No. I need to prove it to everyone right here and now.)

(I need to prove to them that I’m better than Z. K. Amano Hashidate– no, that I’m more worthy to be the student council president.)

(Alright, let’s put an end to this, Senpai.)

Amano Hashidate (Wataru): (Right. Show me what you’ve got.)

(No. I should be seen as a newcomer, so I should act like I’m emulating and learning from someone skilled, my “upperclassmen”...)

“Hehe. I was surprised when I saw Sengoku-san give that campaign speech.”

“I see you two are close friends. As a new transfer student, I don’t have anyone like that.”

“Although I do find it strange to compare the number of friends we have, I, too, have many people who support me.”

“So many that if I were to name each and every single one of them, we wouldn’t have any time for our debate.”

Touri: (Hmm… She’s trying to say that I’m not the only one supported and loved by people.)

(Thanks to Shinobu’s speech earlier, it seems everyone thought about supporting me.)

(They empathised with Shinobu and were influenced by him.)

(But, Senpai… Amano Hashidate is trying to change that.)

Amano Hashidate (Wataru): (Yes, for I am a flag.)

(But “making people imagine what it’s like to support you” is vague and unclear as opposed to envisioning a flag flapping in the breeze.)

“We, from the other courses, must be unable to imagine the kind of friendships that are formed between idols.”

“Yes, that small world that has nothing to do with us is certainly expanding.”

“The school has cherished and protected the exclusive idol course, and us outsiders have no way of knowing what happens there.”

“But we’re forced to watch performances we don’t want to watch at this auditorium for our grades and…”

“We were constantly gazing at you all from beneath the stage.”

“Hehe. It’s such a weird rule that our grades will be affected if we don’t watch an idol performance, isn’t it? I understand that can’t be helped, since this is an idol training school.”

“This is a school for you idols. Students from the other courses must be something extra.”

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ← Previous Chapter ᠂ ⚘ ˚⊹˚ ⚘ ᠂ Next Chapter →

#atlantis

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nicklloydnow · 5 months ago

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“Donald trump should have seen it coming. He arrived on May 25th at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington, DC, hoping to expand his support, but the crowd mostly responded with boos. Attendees lacked enthusiasm for a protectionist who added $8.4trn to America’s national debt. They also spent the weekend squabbling among themselves. After losing presidential races for more than half a century, the Libertarian Party is facing an identity crisis.

(…)

The most intense divisions are about strategy. The hardline Mises Caucus (named after Ludwig von Mises, a pro-market Austrian economist) has dominated the party’s leadership since 2022 and adopted populist rhetoric. The group was responsible for inviting Mr Trump, as well as Robert F. Kennedy junior, an independent candidate, to speak at the convention. The debate about whether to invite the outside candidates at times seemed more heated than the Libertarians’ own presidential-nomination fight. On May 24th, the convention’s first day, one attendee yelled into the microphone, “I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” The crowd cheered.

“I would rather us focus on the Libertarian candidates,” said Jim Fulner, from the Radical Caucus. “I’m fearful that come later this summer, when I’m working the county fair, someone will say, ‘Oh, Libertarians, you guys are the Donald Trump people.’” Nick Apostolopoulos, from California, welcomed the attention Mr Trump’s speech brought—and said his presence proved “this party matters, and that they have to try and appeal to this voting bloc.”

Few believed that Mr Trump won much support. He promised to appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet and commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who is serving life in prison after founding the dark-web equivalent of Amazon for illegal drugs. The crowd responded positively to Mr Trump’s nod to a Libertarian cause célèbre, but booed after he asked them to choose him as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee. Mr Trump hit back, “If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”

Mr Kennedy was more disciplined, tailoring his speech to the crowd by highlighting his opposition to covid lockdowns. Even so he received a cool reception. Libertarians want a candidate who will promise to abolish, not reform, government agencies.

The reality is that Libertarians are more interested in positions than personalities. The exception may be the broad admiration for Ron Paul, a retired Republican congressman whom many cite as their lodestar. But at 88 Mr Paul has achieved the difficult feat of being considered too old to plausibly run for president.

(…)

But the party is far from unified. Given the choice between Mr Oliver and “none of the above”, more than a third of the delegates preferred no one. It remains uncertain whether the party’s candidate will appear on the ballot in all 50 states, as several previous nominees have. If the Libertarian candidate has any influence on the presidential election this year, it will be as a spoiler in a close-run swing state.

Mr Oliver’s victory marked a rare defeat for the Mises Caucus. But the re-election of Angela McArdle, a Mises Caucus member, as the national party chairperson is perhaps more important to the future of the movement. Ms McArdle faced criticism for her decision to invite outside candidates to speak. Controversy over the Mises Caucus had led several state delegations to split, and much of the convention’s floor time was eaten up over fights about whom to recognise. The rise of the Mises wing of the party has led more pragmatically minded members to largely give up on the project of advancing libertarian ideas by building a political party.

The party struggles on big stages, such as in presidential, gubernatorial or Senate contests. Yet it occasionally wins municipal elections, leaving some to wonder whether national activism is pointless or even counter-productive. Why would Libertarians invest time in a hopeless race for president when they could direct their energy to fighting a local sales tax or antiquated laws restricting alcohol sales?

(…)

The party faithful believe that national and local activism are not mutually exclusive. Elijah Gizzarelli won fewer than 3,000 votes when he ran for governor of Rhode Island as a Libertarian two years ago, but he argues that the party has a long record of success—so long as the definition of success expands beyond winning elections. He says the party succeeds by shifting the “Overton window”, or the spectrum of political ideas that are generally considered acceptable.”

#libertarian #libertarianism #liberty #mises #caucus #party #president #election #trump #robert kennedy jr #austrian economics #ayn rand #objectivism #become ungovernable #ron paul #overton window

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thebreakfastgenie · 1 year ago

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The idea that Joe Biden, personally, supports the death of thousands of children is an example of that misinformation @cardassiangoodreads was talking about. You can argue that the entire American foreign policy apparatus is immoral, but you still have to grapple with the reality of what our choices are. It's especially absurd in this case to argue about whether it's "okay" to vote for Biden or not, because Trump (who is the Republican frontrunner and will be the sole alternative to Biden unless he dies in the next 11 months) has also been the president already. Any foreign policy crimes you can hang on Biden also apply to Trump. This hand-wringing about whether it's "okay" to vote for a candidate also conveniently only happens on the left.

What other candidate do you want the Democratic party to offer? There's nothing stopping a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel candidate from challenging Biden in a primary, except for the certain loss. The reality is most Americans support Israel and however you feel about that, we can't just "offer up" a candidate who doesn't and win any election, including a Democratic primary.

I have not remotely "let it all go," but just because we have a Democratic president right now doesn't mean the landscape of American politics has fundamentally changed. The threat of the Republican party is real and constant and I am not being dramatic. I'm still fighting the same fight I was fighting when "my side" was out of power. I'm not pretending nothing is happening, to the contrary, I'm very aware that a lot of things are happening, not just one. There are Americans across the political spectrum who are pretending nothing is happening because they're insulated by privilege and generally incurious about world events. There are also Americans across the political spectrum who are very aware of what is happening and have a variety of strong opinions about it.

My post was specifically about American citizens who vote in American elections. It does not apply to people in other countries. I'm also not telling anyone how to feel. I'm just acknowledging that actions have consequences. Not voting is not saying "I choose neither candidate" it's saying "I will let other people choose for me." Advocating not voting as the only moral position is just telling people the only moral thing to do is give up.

The thing is I understand the idea behind "we're allowed to be angry at/criticize/pressure our leaders" but that doesn't change the reality of how elections work in the United States right now. We only have one party that's tethered to reality, so indulging people who say they don't want to vote for that party just feels fake. Especially when the alternative is worse on everything, including the issue they're angry about. Withholding your vote isn't a protest, it's just giving up your voice. I think maybe some people think of it like a boycott, like they're a consumer refusing to give a political party their business. But that's not exactly how it works, nor should it work that way. Party politics are not a brand identity and we don't want them to be.

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kstewdeux · 3 years ago

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What made decide to tackle mental health in both Rewind and Wherever You Will Go (Breaking the Habit) and why use Inuyasha in both stories?

Excellent question. This requires a little more so…

Inuyasha is the epitome of surviving any physical injury, overcoming obstacles and projecting an “I don’t give a shit” attitude towards everything.

Except when it comes to Kikyo. With her, he turns into a floundering depressed hot mess of a person which I always believed alluded to him being much more traumatized than he would like everyone to believe which, in turn, gives him more depth.

That being said, I believe taking an arguably “strong” character and having him be the one who struggles with mental illness was the best candidate. It should go without saying but mental illness can affect anyone. Whether it be depression or anxiety or bipolar or schizophrenia or PTSD. Inuyasha was selected as an example of that fact and I believe, as evidenced by how he acted whenever someone he cared about was in danger coupled with the fact that his life had been filled with tragedy, that Inuyasha was also the character most likely to be pushed over the edge by arguably traumatic events. It’s made very clear in canon that his number one and two fears are (i) being alone and (ii) failing to protect someone he cares about.

In Rewind, having his two fears coming to fruition pushes him over the edge. In Breaking the Habit/Wherever You Will Go, his abandonment issues catch up with him. In All That Matters, losing the one thing that has helped him survive and what allowed him to prevent his worst fears from coming to fruition sends him spiraling. These stories demonstrate how even Inuyasha can have mental health issues. They also show the dangers of allowing yourself to wallow instead of admitting you need help. There is nothing shameful about struggling mentally but people tend to treat mental health conditions much differently than they would over something like diabetes. Why? I personally believe it’s because more “normal” issues don’t inconvenience them. Fuck other people and what’s convenient for them. It’s sure as hell never been convenient to the sufferer and hiding what’s going on doesn’t do anyone any favors. I want to show the realities of unchecked mental health issues and perhaps make them more understandable to someone who has never experienced them.

Now as to why I elected to pursue these avenues. I have a mental illness and after two very long, difficult decades trying to find what worked, I seem very normal. No one would ever know unless I told them. People simply didn’t believe me for the longest because I have the ability to mask very, very well. Not perfectly but well. I also have the gift of gab and being extremely creative. I always loved writing even when I was small. So I used that gift most of my childhood and adult life to describe what I was experiencing in a very illustrative, descriptive, sometimes metaphorical way so people could understand what was going on in my mind. Because of this gift I was luck in that I was able to get the help I need and because of that, I now hold two doctorates, have a husband, a baby and a job I’ve held for the past six years which I’m very good at.

I hope, perhaps arrogantly, that by using my gift in some of my darker stories I can give people the words they need to describe what they’re feeling. Given some of the comments I’ve received, however, I’m rethinking this theme for future stories. I do not want to make someone worse. That’s partially why Breaking the Habit is on hiatus and why the latest chapter is shit. My initial plan for the ending was to try to describe the thought processes behind suicide - namely that it is more about escaping the pain you are feeling, the devastating belief that your issues truly make you a burden on everyone you love, that you’ve ruined their lives and the belief that even though you know they will be sad, those you love will be relieved in the long run. It can be both a selfish process and a selfless process. You are not only trying to escape but to save. You are so lost in this process and those beliefs that you mentally overcome that fear of death. Alternatively, sometimes you just need the pain to stop and you truly believe there is no other way. That things will never get better and it’s all your fault. That being said, I felt discussing suicide was perhaps insensitive, an issue that was specific to myself in the past and would ultimately send the wrong message. Namely that there is no point in seeking help because there’s no point. You’ll never get better. So I’m trying to come up with a more positive ending for Breaking the Habit.

💛💜💛💜💛

Thanks for the ask @theinuyashareader

💜💛💜💛💜

#ask me anything #kstewdeux

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losille2000 · 4 years ago

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Mister America, Prologue: Massachusetts

CHAPTER NUMBER: 1/? CHARACTERS: President!Chris Evans/OFC (see notes) GENRE: Romance/Drama FIC SUMMARY: After a massive social media write-in campaign organized by others, Chris finds himself thrust into a spotlight that he is unprepared to handle. His campaign managers suggest that a political marriage might help him weather the storm and help his image during the campaign... just so long as it isn’t the one woman Chris really wants. RATING: M WARNINGS: Nothing. AUTHORS NOTES: This story is AU in the fact that this is the 2020 presidential race, and Chris is a candidate. But everything in the past is still the same with him being an actor. Also, COVID-19 is not a part of this story. I needed to play in a land where COVID didn’t exist and “Captain America,” in his alter ego, punched out a Nazi in a metaphorical(?) way. For more on the story, go here.

This first part is prologue-y.

I have also curated a soundtrack for all 50 states, and then some. You can listen on Spotify right now, may eventually put it on Youtube. There will be 50 chapters (I’m hoping), but many of them will be shorter.

Also on AO3!

Boston, MA Evans for President Campaign Headquarters November 3rd, 2020 30 Minutes Before First Polls Close

Stage fright is no joke.

When it hits, it hits like a semi truck going seventy on an icy Massachusetts road. In the blink of an eye, you’re completely obliterated. Except this is on stage and you’re not dead, even though you wish you were. In fact, you’re very much alive. Alive enough to feel the force of the impact, followed by the squeezing in your chest and choking on your breathless words. Paralysis takes over. Cold clammy sweat slicks your palms and also trickles down your back to that one spot between your shoulder blades you can’t reach, but causes your costume to uncomfortably stick to your skin.

There’s no escape. You know what’s coming. You worry you’ll forget your lines, or trip on your cue, or make a complete and utter fool of yourself. You feel like an imposter, questioning why you’re here, in this role, when that dude, JD, from your acting class years ago was a million times more talented than you, and you’re the one that got that teen movie deal. You’re the one who became one of America's most beloved superheroes for a decade.

You’re also the one who has a very real chance of winning the 2020 presidential election, despite no college education, limited understanding of what elected officials in DC actually do on a day to day basis, and the closest thing you have to experience as a “boss” or “commander in chief” of anything was a movie set or two where you were director and executive producer.

Nope.

What I, Chris Evans, have is a dedicated online fan base who took the time to write my name into ballots when they discovered I had filed for ballot access in every state of the union. I didn’t do the filing on a whim; we sat around late one night talking about the interviews I had been conducting in DC for a website about party positions on important issues. My business partners and I came up with the idea that a long form documentary about campaigning would be interesting, and we determined the best way to understand the process was to become a “candidate” myself. Meaning, we only planned to use the credentials to be on the front line of the campaigning process. I was never going to create signs and make speeches or debate with others.

I never intended to run a legitimate campaign.

But, as I mentioned, something strange happened during the Democratic primaries. People started to vote for me, a trickle of rain in a hurricane.

I won a few primary delegates.

Without even trying.

Not enough to win the Democratic ticket, but enough to make pollsters sit up and take notice.

My loyal fans stepped in again, undaunted, and ignited a storm. They dubbed it “Operation America’s Ass” and created a grassroots campaign across the country with GoFundMe donations and a lot of pluck. I thought it was a joke. A part of me still does think it’s a joke. I mean, what other explanation is there for this mess? For the red, white and blue bunting hanging on the walls with the “Chris Evans for President” sign plastered underneath it? For the staffers who stop briefly to see if I need anything...‘Would you like a drink, sir?’... or, upon seeing how pale I look, give me a vote of confidence… ‘Are you ready for your acceptance speech?’ There’s absolutely no good explanation as to why there are twenty or thirty people buzzing around the hotel suite waiting for results. They’re so energized with hope for a better future.

Hope that I can be everything they ever wanted in a president.

An Independent president, free from party oversight.

A president with class.

A president for the people.

A president who can bring the United States back from the brink of destruction at the hands of previous leaders.

I wish I had their confidence.

When they asked me on career day in school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said artist. When I was older, in high school, I knew I was going to be an actor. Never president. The job never entered my mind as being a possibility, not even when I used to work for my uncle’s congressional campaigns. Or when I started filming those interviews.

Why does anyone think I, a straight white momma’s boy from Boston should be president in 2020? Just because I made a few popular Tweets about the current president’s lack of leadership?

It has to be a joke. A cosmic one. I’m a punchline. I am convinced they’ll jump out from behind a doorway and yell “You’ve been PUNK’D! We really got you this time, now here, Bernie, you’re the better candidate.”

And yet…

What if they see in me something I do not?

I place a lot of stock in being in the moment. I’ve also put a lot of work into accepting the twists and turns of life instead of allowing all the “what ifs” and “what should I dos” to eat away at me. I told everybody after I was done with Marvel and financially secure enough to only work on projects I really wanted to, I’d take life as it came at me.

Well, it came after me.

To be fair, I originally chose to get into politics, even in a tiny way, because I wanted to be informed about my choices. I created a website so others could learn, as well. As time went on, I became more involved on Capitol Hill. I even did some lobbying for a few causes dear to my heart. And, yes, I did file the ballot access paperwork.

Had I unintentionally set my path in this direction? Was it inevitable for me to become a contender for the presidency?

Fortunately, I learned early on in the process that a lot of being a presidential candidate is being a convincing showman. An actor. The world's a stage, after all, and I am but a player. You have to have some solid ideas and convictions to back up the image, but a lot of the governing comes from other members of the executive branch. Should I win, I’d only be signing off on everything.

Of course, that “everything” affects the lives of more than 300 million souls. I wouldn’t trust me with a kitchen knife, much less nuclear launch codes and people's livelihoods and education and health and…

My hands shake with nerves just thinking about it.

Let it be said, once I do make it out onto the stage--be it as an actor or presidential candidate--I rise to the challenge. The energy from the audience buoys me. Makes me feel alive. But I am not, by nature, someone who likes to sign away so much personal freedom in exchange for the weight of carrying an albatross around my neck. I thought signing for Captain America would be tough; the human toll of running for president even moreso.

Actually being President? I can’t even wrap my mind around that.

It would be easy to call it quits, even now when the votes are already cast. I could have done it a long time ago, when the reality of the situation hit me the first time. I didn’t. Something told me to hold back, play it out. I persevered. Why? Somewhere, along the line, I began to believe I could do this. I could make a positive difference in the lives of Americans.

I certainly want to do right by all my supporters--and my detractors. I want to be a leader for all Americans.

But can I, really, while knowing my incredible deficiencies?

Maybe I can’t, but I can be the team leader. A brand ambassador, if you will. A good leader delegates. And I intend, should I win, to surround myself with the best and brightest. I will accept no less. I will do ‘Whatever It Takes,’ as our slogan boasts. I am American, first and foremost, and I care deeply about this country.

A real Captain America, if you will. Maybe not as strong or powerful as others, but I sure as hell can give a great speech and will defend my country from bullies until my last breath, whether they be purple… or orange.

Except, I suppose if I’m elected, I won’t be Captain America anymore. They’ll call me Mr. President.

Or, horror of horrors, what if the new name my nearest and dearest coined makes it out into the public. They tease me with it just to see my visceral revulsion and get a laugh. But if I have learned anything about the internet--and pop culture--is that if something is catchy, it sticks around for a long time.

Maybe I ought to get used to the idea of being a punchline.

So, I suppose I have a question for you.

Won’t you consider a vote for Mr. America?

#chris evans #captain america #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans fan fiction #chris evans fanfic #chris evans fan fic #mister america #president!chris evans #president

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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On the third night of the Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. In what’s being described as a “stark, sober address” intended to frighten Americans about the dangers of a second Trump term, the former president took a moment to acknowledge the hopelessness and cynicism that has become so prevalent in today’s political discourse:

“Look, I understand why many Americans are down on government. The way the rules have been set up and abused in Congress make it easy for special interests to stop progress. Believe me, I know. I understand why a white factory worker who’s seen his wages cut or his job shipped overseas might feel like the government no longer looks out for him, and why a Black mother might feel like it never looked out for her at all. I understand why a new immigrant might look around this country and wonder whether there’s still a place for him here; why a young person might look at politics right now, the circus of it all, the meanness and the lies and crazy conspiracy theories and think, what’s the point?”

Now, I’m not a factory worker, a Black mother, or a new immigrant, so I can’t speak for them, but Obama’s assessment of why each of those people may be “down on government” seems more or less accurate. Factory workers do feel betrayed, Black people in general have good reason to think the government never cared about them, and it stands to reason that new immigrants would feel unwelcome given the current administration’s overt hostility towards them.

Obama’s explanation for why young people have grown jaded, however, is far less convincing. In fact, it’s completely made up. As a fairly young person myself who discusses current affairs on a literal daily basis, I can assert with great confidence that young people today aren’t bitter about politics because of “the circus of it all, the meanness and the lies, and crazy conspiracy theories.” They’re bitter because of the failed presidency, and tone-deaf post-presidency, of Barack Obama.

Millennials such as myself remember what it was like to feel optimistic about politics. We first felt this sense of hope in 2008 when Obama first ran for president. We created a grassroots movement behind his campaign, carried him to the Democratic nomination in what initially seemed like a Quixotic battle against the Clintonian Democratic establishment, and voted for him in droves in November, propelling him to a landslide victory. And what did all of this hope, and effort, and enthusiasm get us, even when we won? Romneycare.

So in 2016, after a hugely disappointing Obama era, most of the young people who supported him twice, as well as a new generation of even younger voters, became equally involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign, which the Democratic Party conspired against in favor of Hillary Clinton, the very person the youth rejected in favor of Obama eight years prior. When she lost to Donald Trump, and Sanders ran again this time, yet another crop of young people supported him in overwhelming numbers. This time, it seemed there were enough of them to finally win, until, once again, Barack Obama, the man the older millennials invested their hopes in twelve years ago, intervened in the eleventh hour to align the party against the Sanders campaign, once again crushing the candidate that the youth had rallied behind.

In short, that’s why so many young people are “down on government.” It’s not because politics is too mean, or too circus-like, or that there are too many conspiracy theories to keep track of. It’s because young people invested their hopes in Barack Obama, and he failed them.

Obama continued:

“Well, here’s the point: This president and those in power — those who benefit from keeping things the way they are — they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote does not matter. That’s how they win. That’s how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life, and the lives of the people you love. That’s how the economy will keep getting skewed to the wealthy and well-connected, how our health systems will let more people fall through the cracks. That’s how a democracy withers until it’s no democracy at all.”

While his assessment of youth apathy and cynicism was undoubtedly deceptive, this paragraph is pure Orwellian propaganda.

First, the premise is false. Anyone with any political understanding knows that there is a bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C. that serves to protect and maintain the status quo. To classify “this president and those in power” as the sole beneficiaries of “keeping things the way they are” is simply dishonest. Obama’s subsequent claim that Republicans seek to depress and suppress the vote by depressing and disempowering the electorate is fair enough, but of course, Democrats have their own underhanded means of protecting their power, just as Republicans do.

In fact, I could very easily rewrite this segment of the speech to describe how the DNC protects its own interests at the expense of the common good. It would go something like this:

Well here’s the point – the Democratic establishment – those who benefit from keeping things the way they are – they are counting on your support. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to blackmail you into voting for them, and to convince you that your vote matters when it really doesn’t. That’s how they win. That’s how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life, and the lives of the people you love. That’s how the economy will keep getting skewed to the wealthy and well-connected, how our health systems will let more people fall through the cracks. That’s how a democracy withers until it’s no democracy at all.

Notice I didn’t have to change much at all. Because as far as political strategy is concerned, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans sell despair and the Democrats sell false hope. Republicans overtly encourage people to shun civic responsibility altogether and think only of themselves, whereas Democrats manipulate their base into participating in masturbatory dead-end exercises of meaningless civic engagement, i.e., voting for Democrats.

When we got involved, got inspired, and mobilized to elect the last Democratic president, did that stop the economy from being “skewed to the wealthy and well connected?” Did it stop people from “falling through the cracks” of our for-profit market based healthcare system? Did it protect our democracy from undue influence by oligarchs and demagogues? Of course not. If it had, the Wall St. criminals who tanked the economy would be in jail, we’d have at least a public option, and we wouldn’t have President Donald J. Trump.

And so when Obama addresses these issues, he speaks as though he were never the president; as though he were never in a position to prove to young people that government could in fact work for them; as if he was never entrusted with the task of renewing people’s faith in politics as a means for enacting positive change; as if he never rallied his base behind a campaign slogan of “Yes, We Can,” and as if he never let them down.

At this point, the only people still fawning over Barack Obama’s empty rhetoric and revisionist historicizing are those who don’t care how empty and revisionist it actually is. The liberal class’ privilege allows them to be hypnotized by Obama’s eloquence, charisma, and “classiness,” and to conveniently ignore both his failures as president and his inability to acknowledge them in his post-presidency. They pontificate about how much they “miss having a president who can speak in complete sentences,” as if complete sentences alone are of material benefit to poor and working class people struggling to make ends meet.

In 2008, Obama’s base of support was an idealistic coalition of multiracial young people brimming with excitement over his aspirational vision. Twelve years later, his speeches resonate only with those who can afford to revel in their superficiality. This much is obvious to anyone who’s not already in the tank for the Democrats, but it hasn’t seemed to dawn on Obama himself one bit. The lack of self awareness in this speech is a perfect example of why Democrats are so loathed by so many, and why they’re always the last ones to learn just how unpopular they are.

The rise of Donald Trump is an unfortunate but undeniable consequence of Obama’s failure to deliver on the promise of “hope and change.” If Barack Obama is too prideful, or too insulated from reality, to admit this to himself, it’s about time Democrats start admitting this to each other, because this whole convention gave off major 2016 vibes. We saw an elitist party basking in its own perceived moral and intellectual superiority while making no substantive policy pitches to anyone who they fear may be on the verge of giving up and staying home in November. Speaker after speaker stressed the importance of voting by insisting our democracy might fall if we don’t. Never did anyone stop and ask themselves why they should expect people to feel so invested in a “democracy” whose political outcomes have rendered 63% of Americans unable to afford a $500 emergency. Sure, democracy is nice for people like Julia Louis Dreyfus, whose roasting of Donald Trump on the convention’s final night went over predictably well with comfy #resistance liberals, but what good is it to everyone else if they don’t get anything out of it except the opportunity to vote for sleazy politicians who don’t look out for them?

This country is battered, broken, beaten down, and ready to throw in the towel. This was true four years ago, and it may be even more true now. The unfulfilled promise of the Obama years is a big part of why that is, a big part of why Trump was elected in 2016, and a big part of why America might just double down on despair in 2020.

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mfranklin21ahsgov · 4 years ago

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Election 202 Presidential Candidates Assessment

Green Party (Howie Hawkins / Angela Nicole Walker)

Monitor and Prosecute White Racist Terrorists

Federal Investigations of Local Police Misconduct

Community Control of the Police

End Mass Incarceration��Treat Drug Abuse as a Health Problem, Not a Criminal Problem

Legalize Marijuana

Decriminalize Personal Possession of Hard Drugs

Drug Treatment on Demand

Decriminalize Sex Work

Fight Corporate Crime

End Warrantless Mass Surveillance

Pardon Whistle Blowers and Political Prisoners

I agree strongly with pretty much everything on this list but there are a couple that I think could be worded a little bit better or I am just misinterpreting what it says. The one that bugs me the most is, “End Warrantless Mass Surveillance” because I can’t tell if it is saying there should be camera like in the streets because people don’t consent to them? If that is the case, then I do not agree with that at all because I think cameras are necessary to catching crime and maybe even preventing crime because they know they will be on camera. I really like the what they are saying about the policemen and how they have to be held accountable for their actions and just because they are are policemen, it doesn’t mean they just have the right to do anything with no consequences. I think legalizing weed would be smart because it is proven to be not as bad for you as alcohol and people don’t become aggressive so maybe people will make the switch to weed as they already are.

The beliefs of these candidates to coincide with the beliefs of the rest of the political platform which would be expected in my opinion because if they didn’t then why wouldn’t the candidates just run under a different party unless they knew they couldn’t compete with Biden and Trump.

Republican Party (Donald Trump / Mike Pence)

-As we all know by now, Donald Trump loves his “Men in Blue”, which I respect, but there is one problem. Donald Trump will rarely admit something they have done is wrong when in reality, they do a lot of things wrong and they need a quick reform and that would just be a start to getting this country to come closer together but he is a very stubborn person and will likely never do that. Donald Trump has given money to cities to help them restore their equipment when in reality, what they need is longer, stricter, harder, and better training. Students should not be criminalized for what they believe in.

I agree with Donald Trump in the fact that policemen are very important. I personally do not think policemen are doing more harm than good on the individual basis, but the many people are perceiving this whole situation is that all policemen are bad because a few cops are and with social media, the bad videos are obviously going to go viral much quicker than the good videos. With this being said, the few bad cops are making all the good cops look bad and so people could say that “policemen are doing more harm than good” but I think policemen get too bad of a reputation because of a few sick and cruel cops. I am not agreeing or disagreeing because didn’t put this on his website, but policemen definitely need more training and it needs to be harder to become a policeman. I do not understand why he can’t see that even with the few bad cops, people are just asking for a change and they aren’t getting it so they will continue to be angry.

This website agrees with the republican website and I wouldn’t even be surprised if the people who made the Republican Party website helped out with the Donald Trump Website and vice versa.

Peace and Freedom (Gloria la Riva / Sunil Freeman)

End mass incarceration and police brutally and end racism.End mass incarceration of oppressed and all working class people. Fully prosecute all acts of police brutality and violence. Free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners!

After reading through the rest of their ideals, it is really difficult for me to say that I would identify with this group or agree with them. I don’t think very much time was put into this website because one of their points was just, “end racism.” Ok... and how are you going to do that? That is what I want to know. I can’t say everyone, because there are always exceptions, but 99.9% of the United States wants to end racism. Saying that doesn’t help whatsoever. They gave no suggestion on how to end racism but if for some reason they were elected all of the sudden racism would just end? This website sort of gets on my nerves the more I read about it. This is sort of off topic, but one of the points made on this website is “Shut down all U.S. military bases around the world—bring all the troops, planes & ships home.” In my opinion, this is just super dumb. Yes, nobody likes war, but if you shut down all the military bases everywhere then all of the United States citizens will be at risk and people will come tot he United States to attack. It seems as if whoever wrote this website doesn’t think that there are still bad people in this world except for cops. I don’t see how a platform can have so much hate towards policemen but yet have faith in the rest of the world to not harm our citizens. I could have interpreted this whole thing wrong but it was really weird reading this and thinking that people actually believe in it. I do agree for the most part about the criminal justice though.

For the most part, this website agrees with the party platform but the party platform website was much broader than this website. This website went into like a few specific case scenarios but didn’t really cover the overarching theme.

American Independent (Rogue de la Fuente “Rocky” Guerra / Kanye Omari West)

-Dear Mr. Rocky de la Fuente, The issue I am concerned about isc riminal justice. I am concerned about this issue because because it is a very big issue in 2020 and different candidates want to handle it in different ways. I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government class. Please clarify your stance on this issue. Thank you so much for your time and good luck.

Sincerely, Mitchell Franklin

[email protected]

(Yes this was sent, I just put it here so I could fill the space with something. If he responds, then I will edit this blog post)

Libertarian (Jo Jorgensen / Jeremy “Spike” Cohen)

-We claim to be the “Land of the Free” but yet we lead the world in incarcerations. This is not to say that we should should just start letting people out of jail, but she thinks that if the crimes are not violent and if they are are drug related, then those people need help more than anything which I completely agree with. Putting them in prison will just make them even worse and maybe even turn violent. There should be no law that prohibits a person from owning an object. Whether that object is a gun, or if it is a drug. If there is no victim, there will be no crime which means she will decriminalize everyone who falls underneath that umbrella.

I agree with what Jo says because people are getting put in prison way too easily as if it is going to make them a better person. It is a known fact that putting people in prison will not make them a better person. In fact, more times than not, it makes them a worse person. What these people need is education. I disagree with the fact that all frugs should be legal. I think I interpreted that right from what she said because she said “owning an object should not criminalize anyone” but the fact of the matter is, with the worse drugs, people get addicted, then they resort to stealing which has a victim so why not just stop that from the beginning. I think they should but other than that, I really like her ideas of keeping the non violent people out of jail because it will only make them worse.

This is pretty much exactly what the party platform website said. Both this website, and the party platform liked to focus on having less people in prison and not convicting people of crimes that are not violent.

Democratic Party (Joe Biden / Kamala Harris)

-Today, too many people are incarcerated in the United States – and too many of them are black and brown. To build safe and healthy communities, we need to rethink who we’re sending to jail, how we treat those in jail, and how we help them get the health care, education, jobs, and housing they need to successfully rejoin society after they serve their time.

1. Our criminal justice system cannot be just unless we root out the racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system.

2.Our criminal justice system must be focused on redemption and rehabilitation.

3. No one should be profiteering off of our criminal justice system.

I completely agree with all three of these main points. There was one more main point, but it was sort of summarized in the top section. The bottom one is really important. If people are making a profit off of incarcerating people (not the government because it is insanely expensive to house inmates) then they will want to keep having people incarcerated so that needs to stop, and if Biden is elected, his plan is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Another one is making sure the policemen are not being racist and if they are, they need to be punished because there is a very large number of black and brown people and part of that is because due to the people who arrest them in the first place.

This website is very similar to the Democratic website because these are the Democrats who are running for office. Both websites focused on focusing in on reforming the police foundation and incarcerating less people which is very important to a healthy community, state and nation

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theliberaltony · 4 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

America is a little matryoshka doll of panic right now; pop open each layer to reveal a new, worrying scenario. For months the country was focused on reopening the economy, which had its own complicated set of problems. But only recently has a broader swath of America tuned into the mess nestled inside it, one that parents have been sitting with for months: what to do with the kids.

There has been no federal plan to help American parents with child care, and they continue to wonder whether schools will really open their doors come the new school year. That lack of action is in direct contrast to other crises that have struck America recently. After the financial crash of 2008, there was a bailout and a stimulus plan. After the protests against police over the last few months, officials in cities and states responded with promises of better actions in the future but also, immediate policy implementation: New York state repealed a law that had shielded police personnel files, while the Minneapolis City Council voted to begin a process that could eventually lead to the dissolution of the city police as it’s now known.

But on child care and school, a specific, urgent response has been missing, or at least one that acknowledges our new reality. President Trump threatened to withhold federal funding for education if schools didn’t open back up, counter to schools’ insistence they need more money to provide a safe education amid the pandemic. While the CARES Act, an omnibus COVID-19 relief bill signed into law in late March, gave extra stimulus funding to families with children, schools and child care businesses so they could remain afloat, a Democratic-backed bill to give a $50 billion bailout of the child care industry has gotten little attention. Teachers around the country have voiced doubt that necessary safety measures for in-school teaching will be sufficient, and Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the country’s largest school systems, has decided not to reopen classrooms when schools go back in session in August. Some worry that while distance learning is safer, socially different children and those without stable internet connections or computers — who are already at the margins in normal times — will fall irrevocably behind.

There is no cohesive solution to America’s child care problem. But the relative inattention to this crisis, one that’s so foundational to a functioning society, the economy and family units across the country, is revealing. It shows that for all the changes that have happened in American life — more female elected officials, a MeToo movement and a workforce that is around 47 percent female — our power dynamics remain fundamentally skewed. We are failing to collectively understand what our most critical and pressing problems actually are.

“Care in general has always been seen as a sideline issue,” Vicki Shabo of the left-leaning think tank New America said. “A nice-to-have and not something that’s necessary, and not something that’s central for adults to be productive in the economy.” Of course, now we’re seeing how much of a misunderstanding that is. In a country where most men and women work even when they have children, having child care is inextricably linked to economic productivity — and not having it often hurts women most. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2015 found that in households with children under 6, women spent an hour a day doing child care, compared to the 25 minutes of care provided by men. It’s easy to extrapolate this trend for pandemic times: American women will bear the brunt of the school and child care crisis.

Yet, child care in particular hasn’t often found itself at the forefront of political debate. Experts and activists I talked to for this story all used the same framing to talk about why: an American narrative that child care problems are individuals’ problems, not society’s.

“If you think about child care traditionally before the pandemic, you probably didn’t think about it too much before you had kids,” Melissa Boteach, vice president of income security and child care at the National Women’s Law Center, said. “Then you have kids, you’re in the most stressful and resource-strapped part of your life: You’re operating on three hours of sleep a night, you’re financially squeezed, because at the very time you’re taking off of work, you have diapers and wipes and formula and whatever else. You’re in this total daze of early motherhood. That’s probably not the time when you say, ‘You know what, I’m going to call my member of Congress.’ You’re feeling it like a personal issue.”

Child care isn’t necessarily seen as a macroeconomic issue or a driver of labor force participation or GDP, Shabo said. And because of that, she said, it often takes a backseat to economic issues like wages when lobbying efforts happen. This is not to say that child care issues don’t get attention — in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, which featured several female candidates, child care plans took a more front and center role in the campaign than they had in the past. One leading candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, co-authored a 2004 book, “The Two-Income Trap,” which was about the ways the rising incomes of households with two full-time employed adults belied the heavy costs of essentials like child care. Warren thought child care costs were among the reasons the American middle class was in an economic crisis.

“Our workplaces were built for white men,” said Danielle Atkinson, the founder and director of Mothering Justice, a Detroit-area advocacy group for working families. The fact that parents are left to fend for themselves from birth to kindergarten and then during the after-school, pre-dinner hours, is an American tradition that seems to assume a readily available, at-home caregiver. (Atkinson pointed out the inextricable role black women have played in American child care; enslaved women often took care of white children.) The nuclear family with a stay-at-home parent (usually a mother) is an ideal that persists, or at the very least lingers in American life: only 18 percent of Americans in a 2018 Pew Research Survey thought it was ideal for both parents to work full time.

“This conversation about school is really a conversation about work,” Atkinson said. “The conversation about returning to school is not based on health. It’s about returning those workers to working and not looking after their children, so those children have to be somewhere.” Essential workers in particular are being forced to make difficult choices about their children’s care — many essential-worker jobs are lower wage — and many child care providers are in strapped situations. The work of child care providers, Atkinson said, is often undervalued — their median annual wage in 2017 was a little more than $22,000 annually, which is just above the federal government’s poverty line for a family of three — and as Boteach pointed out, those workers could continue to risk greater infection rates as schools and work open back up. She highlighted the plan put forth by Senate Democrats, the Child Care Is Essential Act — which would provide a bailout to the suffering industry and additional money for those providers to buy personal protective equipment — and cited an estimate that the U.S. child care industry would need a $9.6 billion injection monthly to survive the pandemic.

It’s more likely the next governmental nod to parents and their school-age children will come in the next iteration of the omnibus coronavirus relief package. Congressional Democrats have proposed $350 billion in funds for schools and universities to purchase PPE and clean their facilities. Republicans agree about more funds, though it’s not clear what their proposed number is — some have argued that since many schools will be operating on a partly virtual basis, less federal funding is needed.

The moral tussling that many parents have been doing — go back to work and risk potential COVID-19 infection at day care or school — will likely continue to be subjected to partisan politics. Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have been the loudest voices in recent days about sending children back to school at all costs, much to the chagrin of teachers, many of whom feel ill-prepared for the safety precautions necessary for in-person pandemic teaching. Ultimately, though, it is parents who are forced to make a choice. Atkinson, a mother of six, told me she would be keeping her children home in the fall.

For those who focus on child care, the pandemic has perversely presented an opportunity to advance the cause of greater access to guaranteed services. “This pandemic has created greater alignment of experience, potentially, between white middle class folks who saw this as an individual issue that they were struggling with and outraged by but hadn’t really taken action on and the longtime, long-standing lived experience of lower wage folks and people of color who have struggled for decades with the unaffordability of child care and the lack of care options to meet their work schedules,” Shabo said.

Atkinson said she also hoped the individualism narrative would be shattered by the current crisis. “We want to lift the veil away and help women, especially white women, know that you’ve been lied to. You were sold a bunch of lies: ‘if you just work harder, if you just slay sexism, you’ll be OK.’ But really, it’s a tool to divide,” she said.

The pandemic has shattered norms and paradigms ever since it arrived in the U.S. — our expectations of child care is no exception. What some politicians and activists had long sought to do to no avail — place working parents and their child care crisis on the center stage of American politics — the virus has done in a matter of months.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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blackfreethinkers · 4 years ago

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A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coded racial terms

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

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

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploiting societal divisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreating from civil rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deport, deny and discourage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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yobaba30 · 5 years ago

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This.Is.Fucking>Brilliant.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

#the apprentice (tv program)

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