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tiramisiyu · 4 years ago

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【恋与制作人】 MLQC: Chapter 34 “Night Curtain” Summary

Translation Masterlist

Summarized Chapters: [to be updated]

Spoiler alert: Please note that all content in this post is content that has not yet been released in the global server.

34-2

Despite it being afternoon, it’s dark and thundering outside

In Shaw’s call, he also had MC bring her father’s notebook when she goes to the orphanage

Before heading out, MC hears a sound, goes onto her balcony, and sees Lucien on his balcony

They talk about the dark, gloomy weather; MC says it feels like an apocalyptic movie and asks if Lucien knows what’s behind it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t, though he says that maybe her power can light up this night

MC suddenly receives messages from Shaw, noticing key phrases “Leto”, “orphanage”, “copying Evol”, “Ares”, the last of which makes MC look at Lucien

Suddenly, the clouds split and the moonlight shines through, lighting half of Lucien’s face

MC asks about Lucien’s Evol

Lucien: After the ball ended, someone broke into Ultima Bioresearch Centre and took something away.

MC: Your Evol?!

Lucien: That was something I discarded, to begin with. As a half-finished product, it’s currently finishing its last mission.

MC: But Leto used your Evol to kidnap the children in the orphanage!

MC then apologizes for getting too agitated

Lucien: Nothing bad will happen. Aren’t you going to the orphanage now? So, nothing bad will happen. I believe in you, and you should also believe in your own power.

MC begins to head off

Lucien: It’s about to rain. I hope that when we meet again, you won’t be too drenched.

34-4

As MC tries to catch a cab on the empty, rainy streets, Gavin calls – and MC notices he’s standing at the end of the road, so she runs to him

They talk about the orphanage matter

MC: I heard that Leto kidnapped the orphanage and installed a bomb, and he threatened the STF, requiring to see the Queen.

Gavin: Will you really go see him?

MC: Yes, I can’t leave the kids to be frightened the whole time. Plus… You called me because you knew I was planning to do so, right? No matter what Leto wants to see me for, I won’t be scared. Plus, with you here, nothing will happen.

Gavin: Don’t worry. I will protect you well.

They then drive off in Gavin’s car

MC expresses her surprise at Gavin’s new role as STF commander

Gavin: It’s not sudden. Some things are things I need to personally change.

MC notes that public view of STF has been changing a lot under Gavin’s new leadership

Gavin says that Leto must not have much time, as his copy Evol’s appearing is strange and he’s rushing to see MC – possibly because he can’t control or maintain the evol

An STF member calls in on walkie-talkie, saying that there’s a car accident in front; Gavin says to call an ambulance, leave two STF people on the bridge, and for the rest to head to the orphanage on another path

MC notes the change in him, from a sharp blade of the STF to the mature commander

Gavin asks a motorcyclist if he can exchange the car for the motorcycle, and the guy very readily agrees

(I must ask, MC why did you go out in only that dress when it’s raining…)

As they head off on the motorcycle, Gavin uses his Evol to block off the rain, and MC is reminded of when on another rainy day when he tugged her into the rain, dispelling her worries (don’t remember what this refers to)

“Right now, I was no longer weak, no longer crying, no longer needing his comfort to go forward. I could become… someone who could give him power and walk with him.”

34-5

STF people meet up with Gavin at the orphanage, confirming that their assault preparations are set and positions of controlled STF people are confirmed

MC is shocked, remembering that Leto’s request was for the Queen to come in alone; Gavin says that it’s Leto’s request, but he doesn’t agree with it

MC convinces Gavin to let her go in alone since they don’t know Leto’s intentions and he has the children

Gavin relays the change in plans to the team, saying for one portion of the team to cover MC, and another portion to prioritize saving the kids

MC enters the building – with Leto not showing himself, she can only holler that she’s here

Lighting flashes as the rain batters nonstop

After some violin music, someone called “Zero” tells Victor that it’s almost time; Victor says he knows

34-7

MC is surprised when Shaw appears. He complains about her slowness and tells her to give him the notebook after everything is over

When MC asks about why he’s here:

Shaw: Right now, there isn’t a single person who can stay out of this. If I don’t intervene, this world is done for.

(To which MC says he’s exaggerating)

MC explains the STF’s role when Shaw asks if they’re using her to draw fire

Shaw confirms that he knows where the children are, and regarding the bomb, there are others who are more concerned about keeping this building together

Shaw hands MC a flashlight when they hear something, and MC sees STF people standing at the end of the light beam, their eyes mindless

Shaw tells MC how to get to the children and to not mind the other stuff – for Leto, wait until he (Shaw) gets her first

MC sees two identical rooms at the place Shaw indicated, and heads for the one where whimpering sounds are coming from

Ares walks into a room where Helios is, triggering discussion all around

Hephaistos looks at Helios, then says, “Ares, welcome back.”

Ares: How is it?

Helios: It’s almost done.

Helios then heads off to “deal with a small issue”

34-9

MC finds a boy curled in fear in the corner and convinces him to go with her

The boy says that if they head out, they’ll run into the “uniformed people”. MC thinks it should be fine since Shaw’s there

The boy points out a second door in the room and says to go out from there, as the other kids are enclosed over there

MC notes that there has been no communication from Gavin on the microcommunicator he gave her, and is a little worried

The boy says that he thinks that all Evolvers are bad people because their powers can make them arrogant and selfish, to MC’s surprise

MC explains that aside from their powers, Evolvers are no different from normal people. The boy lets go of MC’s hand, then mutters about why Evolvers killed his family if this is the case

The boy’s body starts changing as he sinks into a crawling position, turning into Leto

Leto: Don’t bother with your fake mercy. Hand your Evol to me… I will tell you exactly how horrifying this power is.

34-10

Leto says he called MC here to kill her and get her Evol; MC says it’s impossible to get an Evol from that way

Leto says that with the black box, he can get anyone’s power – MC wonders if he’s talking about the “pyramid black box” that she saw with Helios at STF, then at the evolution acceleration cabin

MC suddenly finds that she can’t move, and everything is quiet – Leto has stopped time

Leto then aims a sharp wind with ice at MC’s eyes when a white ripple spreads and stops Leto’s attack – MC’s power

Leto’s right eye becomes black, and attempts to command MC, and MC shuts her eyes in response as he continues his wind attack

A crack appears on MC’s barrier

Leto commands MC to hand her Evol to him as her barrier breaks, and MC feels like her power is draining away (and is shook by the powers that once protected her, being turned against her)

Leto prepares one more ice attack, when MC is able to get out one more attack that appears as a white wave, reducing the ice to powder

Leto is knocked out and MC gradually falls unconscious, the notebook falling to the floor

34-12

MC has a dream about when her father was alive, where he hopes for her to meet someone she loves

Shaw: … A space Evol? He really is willing to steal anything.

Shaw finds the children and has them go with him

Gavin walks into the building and gives the command to look for the hostages’ positions, then says he will go find MC

Helios taps away on the keyboard, dismantling the last of four bombs

He looks on the wall where a green light flashes faster, then becomes red, then is extinguished

Goldman takes a stack of documents from Victor

When Goldman asks about MC, Victor says he (Goldman) doesn’t need to worry about that

Lucien regards a line that has already calmed down on a sensor

Lucien: This night truly does seem to be very long… Wake up soon.

34-13

MC dreams of a long night with a rainstorm, freezing wind, and earthquakes, then wakes up

Leto picks up the notebook and reads it. Seeing MC wake, he expresses surprise that she’s not dead, then tosses the notebook and walks to her

Leto suddenly collapses, looking agonized and convulsing, and MC remembers Gavin’s words from before – that Leto got MC here because he couldn’t use the Evol that didn’t belong to him

MC says that what he’s done to Evolvers has no difference from Evolvers of back then (presumably those that killed his family), and even if he kills all Evolvers, he won’t get back what he lost

A black barrier forms over Leto’s body, blocking MC’s attacks, and he attacks with black wind

Leto: The Queen’s power will only wasted by you, so you’re better off handing it to me. I will use it to stand at the top of this world.

MC: Use? My power is born from love and becomes strong due to love. Love is a better method of resistance than hate, and it can attain a level of resistance that hate cannot. It’s useless even if you get the Queen’s power. Because your narrow-mindedness cannot bear this strength, just like how you can’t bear this copy Evol! Evols aren’t tools for you to gain power. You, who only aims for power, will forever only be ignorant and lamentable.

Leto continues with the ice attack

MC remembers when her father said that humans are weak, but love will make one strong and that this might be the greatest power of humans, and thinks of Kiro, Victor, Gavin, Lucien

MC dthat she won’t let the power born from love be used by him, and a white light wraps her up and attacks Leto

The black box tumbles to the floor, and the sky lightens

34-14

MC gets up; the black box has shattered; Leto is on the ground, his looks becoming old and wrinkled

Leto grasp at the box, going from surprise, to confusion, to relief, then laughing madly, seeing like he understood something

Black Queen MC and Anole appear; Anole gives the notebook to Black Queen

Black Queen mocks Leto for trying to get the Queen’s power; MC prepares to attack her, but Black Queen says that she’ll only hurt herself

Black Queen then attacks Leto with a black light ball, shocking MC, and Leto is gone, leaving just the black box

Black Queen: Why so agitated? I didn’t kill him. He will just exist forever in this world in an unliving form. In some ways, that could also be considered immortality, right?

Black Queen forms the black ball again, saying that it is the endpoint of degeneration, asking if she wants to try it

MC says Black Queen won’t kill her, since they’re one person

Black Queen: Do your best in struggling, for our futures. Soon, you will understand that I am the person who will save this world.

MC: The one who needs to struggle is you. This world doesn’t need people like you to save it!

Black Queen walks off indifferently, and MC collapses in exhaustion, seeing a rainbow outside. As she falls unconscious, she hears footsteps approach

34-15

Two days since the events above

As MC cleans up her balcony, she glances towards Lucien’s balcony while children cheer about seeing seagulls

MC wonders why there are seagulls in the middle of the city

Victor calls, saying that he’ll go find MC; MC asks to meet at the café downstairs instead. Victor agrees succinctly, making MC feel like he’s a bit off today

MC arrives at the café in advance, taking out the copy of her dad’s notebook she’d made before and wondering about its secrets. She notes that Shaw had told her before to give him the notebook after the events of that day, but in the end, he himself vanished. Plus, Black Queen wanted it too

MC wonders about how the STF didn’t seal up that old building after Gavin took the kids to other orphanages

MC flips through the notebook, finds nothing of note, and decides to take a nap

Victor looks at MC through the window of the café, not wanting to disturb her rest

Violin suddenly sounds, and Zero says “it’s time to set out”

Victor asks the staff to hand the paper bag he has to MC

Zero: You won’t say farewell to her?

Victor: No need for farewells. I will return very soon.

MC wakes up and opens the paper bag, finding pudding and realizing it’s from Victor. She looks around but (obviously) doesn’t see him

#mlqc #mr love queen's choice #mlqc gavin #mlqc lucien #mlqc shaw #mlqc victor #mlqc kiro #mlqc translation

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kathleenmcgregor · 5 years ago

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September 6, 2020 (Sunday)

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo warned that American democracy is ending. He pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like support for Donald Trump. They are wedded to a narrative based in lies, as the president dismantles our non-partisan civil service and replaces it with a gang of cronies loyal only to him.

He is right to be worried.

Just the past few days have demonstrated that key aspects of democracy are under attack.

Democracy depends on the rule of law. Today, we learned that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who rose to become a Cabinet official thanks to his prolific fundraising for the Republican Party, apparently managed to raise as much money as he did because he pressured employees at his business, New Breed Logistics, to make campaign contributions that he later reimbursed through bonuses. Such a scheme is illegal. A spokesman said that Dejoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations,” but records show that many of DeJoy’s employees only contributed money to political campaigns when they worked for him.

Democracy depends on equality before the law. But Black and brown people seem to receive summary justice at the hands of certain law enforcement officers, rather than being accorded the right to a trial before a jury of their peers. In a democracy, voters elect representatives who make laws that express the will of the community. “Law enforcement officers” stop people who are breaking those laws, and deliver them to our court system, where they can tell their side of the story and either be convicted of breaking the law, or acquitted. When police can kill people without that process, justice becomes arbitrary, depending on who holds power.

Democracy depends on reality-based policy. Increasingly it is clear that the Trump administration is more concerned about creating a narrative to hold power than it is in facts. Today, Trump tweeted that “Our Economy and Jobs are doing really well,” when we are in a recession (defined as two quarters of negative growth) and unemployment remains at 8.4%.

This weekend, the drive to create a narrative led to a new low as the government launched an attempt to control how we understand our history. On Friday, the administration instructed federal agencies to end training on “critical race theory,” which is a scary-sounding term for the idea that, over time, our laws have discriminated against Black and brown people, and that we should work to get rid of that discriminatory pattern.

Today, Trump tweeted that the U.S. Department of Education will investigate whether California schools are using curriculum based on the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which argues that American history should center on the date of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Chesapeake shores. Anyone using such curriculum, he said, would lose funding. Government interference in teaching our history echoes the techniques of dictatorships. It is unprecedented in America.

Democracy depends on free and fair suffrage. The White House is trying to undermine our trust in the electoral system by claiming that mail-in ballots can be manipulated and will usher in fraud. While Trump has been arguing this for a while, last week Attorney General William Barr, a Trump loyalist, also chimed in, offering a false story that the Justice Department had indicted a Texas man for filling out 1700 absentee ballots. In fact, in 2017, one man was convicted of forging one woman’s signature on a mail-in ballot in a Dallas City Council race. Because mail-in ballots have security barcodes and require signatures to be matched to a registration form, the rate of ballot fraud is vanishingly small: there have been 491 prosecutions in all U.S. nationwide elections from 2000 to 2012, when billions of ballots were cast.

Interestingly, an intelligence briefing from the Department of Homeland Security released Friday says that Russia is spreading false statements identical to those Trump and Barr are spreading. The bulletin says that Russian actors “are likely to promote allegations of corruption, system failure, and foreign malign interference to sow distrust in Democratic institutions and election outcomes.” They are spreading these claims through state-controlled media, fake websites, and social media trolls.

At the same time, we know that the Republicans are launching attempts to suppress Democratic votes. Last Wednesday, we learned that Georgia has likely removed 200,000 voters from the rolls for no reason. In December 2019, the Georgia Secretary of State said officials had removed 313,243 names from the rolls in an act of routine maintenance because they were inactive and the voters had moved, but nonpartisan experts found that 63.3% of those voters had not, in fact, moved. They were purged from the rolls in error.

And, in what was perhaps an accident, in South Carolina, voters’ sample ballots did not include Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, although they did include the candidates for the Green, Alliance, and Libertarian parties. When The Post and Courier newspaper called their attention to the oversight, the State Election Commission, which is a Republican-majority body appointed by a staunch Trump supporter, updated the ballots.

Democracy depends on the legitimacy of (at least) two political parties. Opposition parties enable voters unhappy with whichever group of leaders is in power to articulate their positions without undermining the government itself. They also watch leaders carefully, forcing them to combat corruption within their ranks.

This administration has sought to delegitimize Democrats as “socialists” and “radicals” who are not legitimate political players. Just today, Trump tweeted: “The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before.”

For its part, the Republican Party has essentially become the Trump Party, not only in ideology and loyalty but in finances. Yesterday we learned that Trump and the Republican National Committee have spent close to $60 million from campaign contributors on Trump’s legal bills. Matthew Sanderson, a campaign finance lawyer for Republican presidential candidates, told the New York Times, “Vindicating President Trump’s personal interests is now so intertwined with the interests of the Republican Party they are one and the same — and that includes the legal fights the party is paying for now.”

The administration has refused to answer to Democrats in Congress, ignoring subpoenas with the argument that Congress has no power to investigate the executive branch, despite precedent for such oversight going all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Just last week, a federal appeals court said that Congress has no power to enforce a subpoena because there is no law that gives it the authority to do so. This essentially voids a subpoena the House issued last year to former White House counsel Don McGahn, demanding he testify about his dealings with Trump over the investigation into the ties of the Trump campaign to Russia. (The decision will likely be challenged.)

On September 4, U.S. Postal Service police officers refused Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) entry to one USPS facility in Opa-Locka, Florida and another in Miami. Although she followed the procedures she had followed in the past, this time the local officials told her that the national USPS leadership had told them to bar her entry. “Ensuring only authorized parties enter nonpublic areas of USPS facilities is part of a Postal Police officer’s normal duties, said Postal Inspector Eric Manuel. Wasserman Schultz is a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

And finally, democracy depends on the peaceful transition of power. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not leave office because the Democrats are going to cheat.

So we should definitely worry.

Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.

But should we despair? Absolutely not.

And I would certainly not be writing this letter.

Americans are coming together from all different political positions to fight this attack on our democracy, and we have been in similar positions before. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke under similar circumstances, and noted that Americans who disagreed on almost everything else could still agree to defend their country, just as we are now. Ordinary Americans “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach---a scythe---a pitchfork-- a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver,” he said. And “when the storm shall be past,” the world “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

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afriendlyirin · 5 years ago

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Steven Universe Rewrite

So I’ve now finished my rewrite of the final arc (go read it and tell me all your thoughts), and while I’m satisfied with it in many respects, I still feel like it doesn’t properly resolve or engage with everything I’d like to, nor is it fully in keeping with the parts of Steven Universe I liked, despite that being my goal. There’s simply too much to get into and too little space to for it. To fully “fix” the narrative in my mind, I’d probably have to diverge much farther back.

I’m not interested in actually writing such a story, but I think it would be a good exercise to sketch an outline of what such a thing might look like.

I think the biggest problem is that Steven Universe has too many antagonists. The three initial Homeworld gems work well on their own – we spend a lot of time between each one, giving us time to process what’s happened before they return or a new antagonist gains focus. But with the diamonds, we don’t really get that breathing room. We barely know anything of Yellow before Blue shows up, we’re only just starting to really process them before White appears, and then the show ends. And throughout all of this, we have even more unresolved antagonists dangling – Jasper, the rubies, Topaz and Aquamarine, Homeworld’s system itself. To do justice to all of these characters at the previous pace of the show would probably have taken twice as many seasons.

My second problem, which is more personal preference, is that I don’t like how the plot ended up going epic, with Steven having to take on uberpowerful opponents with an entire empire of resources. I’d say this is also thematically confused – the show starts off making it seem like everyone is safe on Earth and the war is in the distant past, but it’s then revealed the war is very much still on and the plot becomes about Steven continuing the rebellion Rose left half-finished. My favorite parts of the show were seasons 1-3, which were much the antithesis of that – the conflicts were much more subdued, against lone actors or just interpersonal problems.

So, let us combine these things to give us a different starting state.

There was only one diamond, and she was destroyed during Rose’s rebellion. Either she blew herself up with a corruption bomb, or the shattering of a diamond is what makes a corruption blast. Down-scale the empire’s resources such that they were putting most of their manpower into fighting the rebellion, meaning that their population is utterly crippled by the fallout of the blast in addition to their loss of leadership. The gem empire still exists but as a shadow of its former self; it no longer has the manpower to invade new planets. (We can also tone down the oppression; no killing people just for being born. Whether or not that is still the case for Era 1, it’s just not possible to keep doing that with your population so crippled. Homeworld can still be oppressively conformist, but not to the point of EUGENICS EVERYWHERE.)

Right off the bat, this dodges a lot of awkward questions that are present in canon. Why did Rose stop fighting just because she saved one of many colonies, and why did she make Steven when Homeworld was still a threat that could endanger him – why, in sum, does she act like the war is over? Well, because it is, and she won.

This shifts the tone and focus of the story away from an epic rebellion plot and into one of postwar reconstruction. After the dust has settled, what happens? How do you pick up the pieces and move forward? Steven will only ever encounter pale shadows of Homeworld’s former power. Things like the Cluster become akin to forgotten landmines, echoes of a violent past that can still hurt people long after the conflict is over. He can still fight Homeworld gems, but they are lone agents acting on personal grudges; Jasper is not acting under orders, she just really wants to take a swing at Rose Quartz. (This setup even works a lot better with the threat level we actually see from canon, which is that Homeworld keeps sending weak scouts and small groups instead of bringing their full military might to bear against the Crystal Gems.)

This frees up a lot of space to just get into the characters talking about their feelings, which was always the real core of Steven Universe. In canon, Amethyst is the only Crystal Gem who really gets a full arc with a proper resolution (the battle with Jasper at the conclusion of season 3); Garnet’s gets flattened to just be about her relationship so it can be rushed through in Heart of the Crystal Gems, and Pearl’s arc gets completely substituted for something else that officially has no problem for her to resolve at all. The time spent on the diamonds and battle logistics could instead be spent on developing those arcs. With the antagonist compression, we could develop the Homeworld gems further as well, perhaps making them proper foils to Crystal Gems – something I get the impression canon was trying to go for but never seemed to really commit to.

Speaking of which, this would make the Homeworld gems much more tragic and sympathetic. Lapis’ despair over how different the new Homeworld is would no longer be about the simple passage of time, but because it is genuinely a shambling corpse of what it once was. And because Era 2 is so different than Era 1, Peridot, an Era 2 gem, would lack much of the shared culture and knowledge other gems have, justifying her naivete and social awkwardness. Finally, the rebellion destroying the entire army makes Jasper even more isolated – she is one of the very few survivors of the war, further justifying her fury at Rose and her inability to open up to her peers – she has none.

This would also make everything about Bismuth so, so much more reasonable. Instead of reacting to the fact that Rose lost the war that is very much still on, she’s advocating for igniting a brand new one before the ashes have even cooled on the first. (For extra horror, she might not even be dissuaded by the news Rose killed the diamond after all – they may have understood Homeworld’s soldiers were only following orders and assumed they would defect if they removed the command structure… but now you’re telling her they assassinated the head honcho and they’re still loyal to Homeworld? Clearly the only solution is to KILL ‘EM ALL.) It is far more understandable for Steven to keep her bubbled in that situation, and for the Crystal Gems to agree to it.

Ultimately, I think this plotline could remain very similar for seasons 1-3; perhaps move up the “Rose shattered Diamond” reveal to around season 2, and follow it with the Cluster plot to show why that really was necessary while emphasizing that yeah, war is horrible we really shouldn’t be starting another one, Bismuth!

The major difference would be swapping out Yellow Diamond for a lower administrative gem. I thought Yellow Diamond alone worked as a fine antagonist, really, so not much needs to change – just transplant her personality into another gem. This character could function as a foil to Garnet, someone thrust into overwhelming responsibility because there’s no one else qualified left alive. We could even double down on this and make her a permafusion; that maps really well onto modern conservatism, where people who would actually be hurt by the old hegemonies still romanticize them anyway. Season 4’s arc could revolve around her; having dealt with Lapis, Peridot, and Jasper, Steven must go to Homeworld and address the problem at its source. (The events of “Raising the Barn” could happen here, giving Lapis an extra season to work through her issues.) This could actually be resolved very similarly to the White Diamond resolution in canon, but it would fit with the earlier themes much better – this gem really would have reasons to feel insecure about her failure to live up to a perfect ideal. And for bonus points, that makes her a foil to Steven, too.

It would also make it a lot more believable that these gems would need Steven to teach them what is, if we’re being honest, pretty basic philosophy. If they are technically free of the old system but still stubbornly cling to its trappings, it makes sense that they’d need an outsider to tell them to think for themselves and that this would genuinely be a radical new perspective for them. Hauntings, again – just as in real life, the system still influences peoples’ thinking long after it was officially dismantled.

We could replace the Zoo arc with something that hits the same beats. The rubies return (or someone new gets sent) and capture Greg for some reason. Instead of seeing the Zoo we get to see Homeworld society directly during the trip. The events of That Will Be All still occur, as Not Yellow Diamond, cracking under the strain, unfuses and argues with herself behind closed doors.

Instead of the gems only being caught as a joke (and having that also be resolved as a joke), it’s a choice Steven makes. We invoke the hero’s last temptation: He has everything he’s ever wanted, his family in one piece and Homeworld beaten so thoroughly they’ll never threaten them again… but to take that offer means looking away, and abandoning everyone who is still suffering on Homeworld. He looks upon the gates of Heaven, but willingly chooses to walk back into Hell.

(Connie should probably be present to witness this so we can set up the falling-out arc, which is important for deconstructing Steven’s martyr complex.)

This leads to an analogous arc to Wanted and Diamond Days where Steven navigates Homeworld until he finally reaches Not Yellow Diamond. For added tension, the gems are separated somehow and Steven spends a significant time on his own befriending Homeworld gems. Garnet converges with him for the finale so we can make it about her (maybe extend her themes to the previous arc, focus on her stress and failures as leader during the heist).

Not Yellow Diamond is a noncombatant, but hides behind elite guards and defenses that Garnet and Steven can’t handle on their own, necessitating a fusion. The theme here could be that Garnet is paralyzed by her responsibilities, unable to both mount an offense while also keep Steven protected; Steven cuts through this by taking on his own responsibility, showing Garnet that she doesn’t have to do everything herself.

Not Yellow Diamond’s redemption happens similarly to White Diamond’s, but because she’s a noncombatant it is actually reasonable for Steven to spend so long on a nonviolent solution. Possibly Garnet even tries to shatter her (this could be what makes them unfuse), but Steven stops her. Not Yellow Diamond more explicitly agrees to change things and protect Earth.

So by this point, Steven will have dealt with all extant threats… but there are still issues left unresolved. The corrupted gems still aren’t healed, Bismuth’s still bubbled, Lapis is still missing, and Pearl hasn’t had a personal arc to resolve her issues. This would then turn season 5 into something of a denouement season, tying up all the remaining loose ends. This season’s theme could be one of self-actualization, revolving around Lapis and Pearl working through their difficult mental health problems and Steven, though seeing his own issues reflected in them, overcoming his own imposter syndrome in the process.

Season 5 starts after a timeskip. Steven is trying to heal the corrupted gems but is making no progress. Make this into a metaplot, with snippets in other episodes throughout the season showing he’s continuing to try and making more progress as his personal arc progresses.

Bismuth is already unbubbled to leapfrog over that awkward conversation, but still suffers from PTSD. She gets an episode (or two) about her issues, primarily grief. She bemoans the loss of her friends, and Steven tries to assure her that he’ll heal the corrupted gems any day now. She shows him the shards and says bitterly, “Can you heal these?” Spirals into a breakdown naming and remembering all the shattered gems. Steven tries to lay down some generic platitudes like he always does, but this time it doesn’t work; Bismuth calls him out on his ignorance and innocence, that he’s never lost anyone so he has no idea how she feels. This forces him to rethink things and actually listen to Bismuth, foreshadowing that that will be the theme of this season. (For bonus points, could also have her echo Pearl’s “She’s gone, but I’m still here,” re: the shattered gems.)

This could probably happen simultaneously with the falling-out arc (though that interacts awkwardly with the timeskip since Connie would probably be upset immediately after), could draw a connection by having Steven realize or Connie point out his god complex, he wants to help people for his sake not for theirs.

After that heavy opening we can have funtimes with human friends; Sadie Killer arc happens here plus any outstanding human subplots resolve. Should probably also have an episode about Pearl that touches on her issues since that’ll be the topic of the final stretch.

Then Lapis comes back. Have a conversation about PTSD and how she needed to do it on her own time etc., Steven can show his growth by accepting this and not pushing.

If the Lion chest is important, Lapis found the key while soul-searching (it was hidden somewhere on Earth the CGs didn’t look).

Next plot episode is Steven getting frustrated over his inability to heal the corrupted gems (can have a comedy bit where he tries increasingly absurd and convoluted methods), wonders what he’s doing wrong. Something happens that leads to him talking to Pearl about Rose. Possibly he thinks whatever’s in the chest is the cure, but that seems pretty stupid even for him. Events lead to Pearl revealing that she shattered Diamond and Steven has a fresh meltdown, accuses all the other gems of secretly being shatterers and not telling him (Garnet could react really awkwardly, implying she actually has killed people), decides that’s the problem and runs off.

(If there is a similar memory scene with Pearl, it’s via hologram; Diamond literally does not get a voice.)

Either Pearl tracks him down, or someone else brings him back only for him to discover that Pearl has run off because she agrees that she is horrible and shouldn’t be around Steven. Either way leads to a deep conversation about their issues. The climax here would result in Steven fusing with Pearl as he has with the others, but perhaps this time the context is peaceful rather than it being a tactic used in desperation, affirming the idea that fusions are a way of life and not just a tool.

As a result of his growth from this, Steven finally figures out the method to heal the corrupted gems, whatever that may be. We have a great happy ending montage where it looks like everything’s resolved – Steven has forged peace with Homeworld, and all the corrupted gems are healed, including Jasper…

…who immediately attacks him. We get one final episode, or perhaps even a full arc, revolving around a final fight with Jasper. Because Steven never actually resolved her issues before she got bubbled! She is still mad, still violent, and still hurting. This is the most narratively satisfying climax, because Jasper is all the story’s themes embodied: the sins of the past come back to haunt us, the scars left by war, and the pain of grief and acceptance. She always made the most sense as a “final villain” to me. Steven’s usual approach of steamrollering people with generic feel-good platitudes would not work here; he must actually use what he’s learned and engage with Jasper on her own terms.

(If this were an actual show THIS is where I would pull the surprise season extension, lead everyone to think the Pearl reconciliation is the grand finale and then surprise them with Jasper.)

The Jasper episode, or the finale if it’s a whole arc, would be titled “Under the Stars So Bright” as a reference to Trigun and also the imagery of being under the star of Diamond.

I feel the only way to make this work would be to intercut the Jasper ep with flashbacks to her time under Diamond, much like Trigun’s final episode. Only issue is that the sudden change in POV would be really weird; Trigun worked because the hero was there for those events and we only see his perspective, but Steven has no window into Jasper’s past.

Jasper poofs all the CGs and digs a hole to the core with the intent of popping the Cluster. Steven proceeds to get the crap beaten out of him protecting and bubbling the CGs like Vash vs. Midvalley in Trigun. Make this incredibly gruesome, even with the bubble shields she cracks his gem and draws blood.

Steven tries to reason with her like he did before, and like before it just makes her push back harder. Eventually she tries to pull a suicide by cop and bait Steven into shattering her. He gruesomely rams his fingers through her face to grab her gem and draws his fist back to kill her, and then we get a flashback montage of all his family memories – but in an inversion of Vash vs. Legato, this results in him not killing her. (For bonus creepy, he could also be stopped by Jasper flashing a grin or letting slip that she wants to die.)

Maybe as a compromise, he does poof her – this would be the only time in the series he intentionally does so.

(In the fantasy world where I have an animation studio at my beck and call, this would be filled with visual references to Trigun, both the Legato and Knives confrontations.)

Ending is Jasper going to prison to face trial for trying to blow up Earth. Lapis gets to say her piece, then Steven gives a more mature redemption speech than usual, about how he can’t make her change and she has to want to become a better person but he still believes in her anyway. This can perhaps be the nuanced message that the movie… appeared to be trying to go for with Spinel, that people can have understandable reasons for lashing out and doing bad things, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to exhaust yourself for them; you don’t have to be a martyr.

In the final montage, Jasper reunites with other jaspers who were corrupted in the war (maybe mirrored with a montage of Bismuth hugging formerly-corrupted Crystal Gems). Final message is what the canon ending claims to be: Steven has gained a more mature and complex outlook on “good” and “evil” but he still chooses to be optimistic and believe in the goodness of people. GOOD END.

That’s my take. Ultimately, it seems Steven Universe bit off more than it could chew, or perhaps had too many cooks. The most important takeaway from this, in my view, is to keep things to a manageable level in your story. Don’t introduce elements you know you won’t have time to adequately address; a few points done well will often land better than a lot of stuff done slapdashedly.

#steven universe #su #fanfiction #su meta #steven universe meta #my posts

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years ago

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Against Innocence Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”3 In the words of Fanon, the cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men — the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”6

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”7 The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”9 When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State — though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21

Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Théorie Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office.”26 However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.

Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, “The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.”27 Historian Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.

SAFE SPACE

The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.”29 This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe space language. The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were verbally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, “they were violating, I thought, the cops’ space.”

The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war.30 When people use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending the cops, I noticed that many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop, classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there — suffering from a nasty disease of addiction — what do I care if they are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment — that is for sure — but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.” Let it be known that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to protect the State’s monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving gendered violence does not mean you are incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently been leveled against the “safe space” model. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No safer spaces this year,” festival organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the festival, offering in its place an appeal to “individual reflection and responsibility.” (In other words, ‘The safe space is impossible, therefore, fend for yourself.’) I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing, and unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit, as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self”-style “politics” of choice).31 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics to perpetuate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. It becomes impossible to do anything that involves risk when people habitually block such actions on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions while POC cannot because they are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out of jail, etc) make a correct assessment of power differentials between white and non-white political actors, but ultimately erase POC from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent — liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.32

Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an emphasis on personal comfort that supports police behavior in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly become so bogged down by consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a 10 minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy (as Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”)33 Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position.

The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people within the US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider that we live on stolen lands in a country built on slavery and genocide. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my “freedom” is only understood through the captivity of people like my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17. When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies that they project hostile feelings onto, which allows them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence. The precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native American people, which was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, “This ‘absence’ is effected through the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.”34 The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are constituted by this repetition of violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for it). In southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human Involved.35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those considered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined36 as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires. This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity — but that their demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white femininity.

Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape of a white woman by a person of color.37 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual violence — not only by because they cannot leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that women crossing the border often take contraceptives because the rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women are also systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice system. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.”38 One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes is because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are often sexually assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have their children taken away. Given that the infrastructure that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize survivor resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures.

Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white ciswomen’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is sanctified.39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way devalued.”40 Once she ‘gives away’ her chastity she no longer ‘owns’ it and so no one can ‘steal’ it. However, the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this “valued” chastity.41

AGAINST INNOCENCE

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after the over 400 arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:

AMY GOODMAN:Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent?

MARIA LEWIS:Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that that’s a really inspiring thing.

While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent” elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”42

The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent.

It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.

Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.

1 This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are unfamiliar with the cases:

The Jena 6 were 6 Black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting racial tensions including the hanging of a noose on tree. 5 of the teens were initially charged with attempted murder.

Troy Davis was a Black man who was executed on September 21, 2011 for allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, though there was little evidence to support the conviction.

Oscar Grant was a Black man who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year-old Black youth who was murdered by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. 2 This was a real situation that I heard described by Michelle Alexander when I saw her speak at Morgan State University. While she was working as a civil rights lawyer at the ACLU, a young Black man brought a stack of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling. The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including names, dates, badges #s, descriptions), but the ACLU refused to represent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police, particularly an officer he identified, planting drugs on POC. 3 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-240. 4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Uniform Title: Damnés De La Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (2003): 183-201. 6 H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, Die, Nigger, Die! : A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002). 7 Loïc Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2007. Conference presentation. 8 Ibid. 9 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95-134. 10 Ibid. 11 Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998). 12 Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners, “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1: ( 2011) 270-290. 13 Georgina Hicke, “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1 (2011): 77-94. 14 Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1975). 15 Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense.” 16 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 17 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis.” 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 19 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.” 20 Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified consumers.” Žižek wrote that, “they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.” 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). 22 Riots erupted in LA on April 29, 1992 after 3 white and 1 Hispanic LAPD officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a Black man, following a high-speed chase. 23 Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The Guardian, 2011. 24 “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC News, 2011 (Video). 25 Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the two forms of power co-exist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth. 26 Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (New York: Autonomedia, 2012). 27 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 30.2 (2003): 18-28. 28 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 29 This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as femmes who are too loud, or queers who engage in illegal actions. 30 In “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect: ��Affect is the body’s response to the world—amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way ‘the criminal’ and ‘the terrorist’ become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject racism. Jackson and Meiners, “Fear and Loathing.” 31 Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and atomized under late-capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3. AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one another.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist) or rhizomatic (non)-strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individualism? In The One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power discusses how individual choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the workplace. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on women, who are the primary bearers of childcare responsibilities. She also discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off.” Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.” Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 33 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random House, 1971). 34 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005). 35 See Amy Scholder, Editor, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco, “NHI—No Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition - Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993. 36 New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime, committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize male violence by defining rape as inherently male? 37 Ibid. 38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-99. 39 Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women of color. 40 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 41 Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexuality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our claims is counter-productive because certain bodies are more valued than others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private property (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have to turn our bodies into property—into a commodity—which is a conceptualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist, liberationist one. (Foregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores the forced sterilization of women color and the unequal access to medical resources between middle class women and poor women.) While white men make their claims for recognition as subjects, women and people of color are required to make their claims as objects, as property (or if they are to make their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine white discourse). In the US, juridical recognition was initially only extended to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that operate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners. 42 Carmichael, Stokely Speaks. 43 Spivak and Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic.

#jackie wang #anarchism #race #identity #crime #communism

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 6 years ago

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Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Digital Elixir Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Yves here. We pointed out some time ago that the idea that the UK would get a favorable trade deal with the UK post-Brexit, and particularly post a crash-out, was bonkers, so it’s good to have official confirmation, even if it comes from the likes of Larry Summers. The US typically dictates terms in bi-lateral trade deals, allowing at most only a bit of face-saving terms-tweaking at the margin. The power imbalance will be even more pronounced in trade negotiation in the wake of Brexit because the UK will be desperate to cinch a deal quickly, and the urgency will give the US even more leverage.

More quotes from the Summers interview on BBC Radio 4, courtesy Al Jazeera:

“I’m not sure what Britain wants from the United States that it can plausibly imagine the United States will give.”

“If Britain thinks that the American financial regulators – who have great difficulty coming together on anything – are going to come together to give greater permissions and less regulation of UK firms, I would call that belief close to delusional.”

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal found a whimsical Brexit angle today, although it could just as easily have been spun as gallows humor: Tired of Waiting for Brexit, Britons Munch Through Nutella Stockpiles (any Northern Ireland readers may take umbrage at “Britons”):

Britain’s Brexit preppers have been stockpiling for months. Now their revolution is eating itself.

Fed up with waiting for the U.K. to leave the European Union and mindful of product expiration dates, stockpilers are using up foodstuffs they had squirreled away in case of a blunt exit leaves them cut off from imported treats, or spikes the price of necessities, like toilet paper and tea.

The chance of a no-deal divorce hasn’t diminished and may only have been postponed until Oct. 31, but some preppers can’t resist breaking into their stashes.

Elizabeth Priest, 29, found it easy to eat into her stockpile because she had socked away delectable items such as Nutella and mozzarella from Italy, lactose-free milk from Denmark and an awful lot of tea—not, say, Spam.

“Because we bought nice things, we weren’t facing down this nasty stockpile of tinned ham,” says the writer from Hastings on Britain’s southern coast. She brewed the last of her 200 stockpiled tea bags on June 29, three months to the day after Britain was meant to leave the EU.

Returning to the theme of this post, it’s not clear what could be strip mined from the UK. Unlike Russia post the collapse of the USSR, there aren’t natural resources that to be bought on the cheap and sold in world markets. North Sea oil is largely played out. UK manufacturing capacity will become much less valuable due to post-Brexit non-tariff trade barriers. Sadly, the big wealth opportunities may lie in moves like acquiring real estate and squeeing already not-well-housed working people with higher rents, and dismantling the NHS.

By Adam Ramsay, the co-editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full-time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay. Originally published at openDemocracy

“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers on Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning, as new foreign secretary Dominic Raab jets off on a tour of North America to investigate potential trade deals.

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions,” said Summers, a senior figure in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

Summers is of course right. But he makes a key mistake. He assumes that Raab, Johnson and the new cabinet care about defending the interests and autonomy of most people in the UK. He seems to be under the impression that Brexit was about taking back control.

In reality, the brand of Brexit promoted by Tory hardliners has long been about pulling Britain under the shadow of American capital. Not as a 51st state, with votes and constitutional rights, but as an outhouse for US business, a sort of colder, paler version of Puerto Rico.

We will be forced to accept US-style deregulation, with its poor standards for workers and consumers. We will have our assets stripped clean off the bone. Even before Brexit, we are fast becoming a pawn in the Pentagon’s global games.

We won’t become Americans, though. We’ll have no say in the standards that will govern our new Atlantic common market. Nor will we be permitted to help decide who stands in the planet’s biggest pulpit. Nor will we have much significant say in our own foreign policy. The UK has chosen to shift from participating in one power block to sitting on the outer edges of another.

Victory of the Lobbyists

If that wasn’t clear before (though it was), the events surrounding the arrival of Boris Johnson in Downing Street have confirmed it.

During the leadership election there was, of course, the failure to defend Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US. Then there is the ongoing confrontation with Iran, in which Britain’s post-empire is being enlisted in the schemes of US neoconservatives. There is the revelation that a new US pro-Brexit campaign group has launched, and Steve Bannon’s insistence on ‘Today’ that Boris Johnson should deliver a “no deal, hard out”.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen Britain’s lobbying industry and think-tanks auction their access to our politicians off to US corporations and oligarchs – from the firm which ran Johnson’s leadership campaign bragging in Washington about its ability to shape Brexit for US business, to the Institute for Economic Affairs offering to broker meetings between senior ministers and US companies wishing to get their piece of the Brexit pie.

We’ve seen one former Washington lobbyist – Shanker Singham – move to London and secure unprecedented access to our politicians, even writing the so-called Malthouse compromise, while lobbyists also drove the team that ensured their preferred candidate was elected prime minister.

And now that they’ve got their Johnson in place lobbyists have taken over the cabinet.

We’ve seen Trump confirm that “everything” – including the NHS – “will be on the table” in a US trade deal, before his spin-doctors reminded him that he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

“Britain Trump”

We see it in the ascent of Johnson himself – a rise which has coincided with the arrival in the UK of the sorts of institutions and culture we’re more used to watching from a safe distance across the Atlantic. On openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how Definers Public Affairs, the smear machine which destroyed Hillary Clinton, has set up shop in the UK, how a US-style super PAC is being rolled out across Europe and how Brexit is the biggest outsourcing of public policy in British history.

Johnson, who has surfed this wave, has been anointed “Britain Trump” by his US admirer. It’s a fair nickname, not because they have the same character, but because they both epitomise the elitist myths embedded in their respective national characters. Trump is the millionaire’s son who pretends to be rich because of merit, the brash bully-boy billionaire in a culture whose dream equates wealth and cruelty with merit and success.

Johnson, on the other hand, comes from the school on whose playing fields the battle of Waterloo was mythologically won. He epitomises an Anglo-British exceptionalism built on a mystical link between nation, royalty and aristocracy: a link forged in the failed revolution of the civil war and bought with imperial plunder, and which reminds the British bourgeois of an era when you didn’t need to do your homework to attain power – you got it by dint of your nation, gender, class and skin colour.

Likewise, their identikit ideologies are the same: oligarch enrichment woven round national mythologies.

Johnson pretends to be a free trader in the way that earlier British politicians claimed to support free trade whilst using their military might to force China to buy opium, commit genocide in Tasmania and smash up cotton looms in India. Trump claims to be a protectionist just as earlier US presidents used a pretence of isolationism to pretend they weren’t building an empire, at the same time preaching that the US was manifestly and justifiably destined to conquer the whole North American continent, committing genocide against Native American peoples as they did so.

Both Trump and Johnson have been contorted by the distorting lenses of their respective nationalisms, confusing many into thinking that they ooze truth or charm or talent. Strip off those red white and blue tinted goggles and you quickly see them for what they are: rich racists willing to trample anyone to secure the world for their kind.

Ultimately, they both represent the same interwoven set of interests: oligarchs, mafiosi, disaster capitalists, Gulf oil millionaires, hedge fund speculators and any other corner of the elite which has spotted that the neoliberal era is coming to an end, they have few places left to invest and their best option is to hide away as much money as they can behind the biggest walls they can build.

This is what Johnson meant when he said “fuck business” – that he and his friends no longer have anything invested in traditional industries, so are happy to see them disappear. It is why Trump is perfectly happy to fuck America’s car industry as he slashes tax for the hyper-rich.

Useful Scraps of Empire

At openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how millions of pounds were pumped into the Leave campaigns in the first place. That money came through the same British Overseas Territory and Crown Dependency secrecy areas that the billionaires of the world use to stash the cash they can no longer figure out how to get a return from – the same post-empire that the Pentagon is so keen to get a closer grip on.

For while the UK’s network of semi-colonies is useful as a money-laundry for the world’s oligarchs, we’ve seen in recent weeks how it plays a different strategic role, too – why America might see it as a valuable asset to begin to enclose under its wings.

When the British territory of Gibraltar captured an Iranian tanker, supposedly to enforce an EU embargo against oil to Syria, it did so despite the fact that Iran isn’t in the EU, and the EU doesn’t force non-members to comply with its embargoes. The Spanish have, according to The Guardian, claimed that the UK is acting under the influence of the US, and the former Swedish prime minister and senior EU figure Carl Bilt has hinted as much. It looks very much like this wasn’t so much an act of British foreign policy as one of submission to the US Department of Defense.

Britain captured Gibraltar in 1704 because of its strategically important location. To this day, one-third of the world’s oil and gas passes through its straits. Likewise, another strategically vital waterway will define this conflict: the Gulf of Oman, which connects the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian sea. Oman isn’t formally a British territory, but it has been a de facto UK colony since the nineteenth century, with London helping to prop up the slave-owning ruling family over two centuries. As Ian Cobain has outlined, its current sultan was put in place by an MI6 coup in 1970.

The relationship remains strong. Shell owns 30% of the national oil company and Britain’s military presence is significant. According to Duncan Campbell, the journalist who originally revealed the existence of GCHQ, the Snowden leaks revealed Oman hosts a vital British intelligence base, tapping the vast number of communications cables that run under the Gulf. Last year, the UK opened a permanent naval base in the country, and in February this year, the British government announced it had signed an historic defence agreement with the sultanate, “bringing us even closer to one of our most important partners”.

For those with long memories, this might start sounding familiar: the 45-minute claim intended to frighten the British into accepting the 2003 Iraq war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready to deploy not against London, but against the British Overseas Territories in Cyprus.

If the Pentagon is to keep a firm grip on the world, Britain’s post-imperial web of semi-colonies will be vital fingerholds, and Brexit offers the US a unique opportunity to expand its control over the UK and its overseas assets.

The Great British Asset Striptease

This wasn’t inevitable. In theory, Brexit could genuinely have been about ‘taking back control’ for the British people. It would be possible to turn the UK into a new Cuba, for instance, substituting home-grown products for international imports. Not a suggestion that would please the millions of Leave voters who opted to quit the EU essentially because they wanted to become another Japan instead: wealthier than the UK, industrialised, with less income inequality, richly forested and deeply racist.

But these are not the options before us.

Instead, Brexit means plonking the corpse of post-imperial Britain in a vulture restaurant for US asset strippers, and pretending not to notice that China perches nearby, ready to pluck at whatever it fancies too.

The Great British Asset Striptease isn’t new, of course. For decades, the country has mostly stayed afloat in the world by auctioning off the plunder we accumulated through centuries of empire. As Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna point out, the Treasury has calculated that Britain sold off 40 per cent of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.

But as the new foreign secretary heads off on his ‘everything must go’ tour of North America, the people of the UK are going to have to fight hard to stop him selling the whole country to Trump and his friends. Just as thousands mobilised against the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP, we’re going to have to stand together and fight against any UK/US trade deal. We’re going to have to fight to protect our public services and our workers’ rights and our ecosystems from the new plunderers of the planet. Because Britain doesn’t have any power in its negotiations with Trump. And we have a government that will be delighted to turn the country into an offshore theme park for American, Saudi and Chinese billionaires.

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

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jobsearchtips02 · 5 years ago

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Why Another Coronavirus Stimulus Package May Be Tough to Craft

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bountyofbeads · 6 years ago

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Spies, harassment, death threats: The Catholic Church in Nicaragua says it’s being targeted by the government

https://wapo.st/2SwKJrg

Spies, harassment, death threats: The Catholic Church in Nicaragua says it’s being targeted by the government

By Mary Beth Sheridan | Published July 23 at 4:37 PM ET | Washington Post |Posted July 23, 2019 |

MASAYA, Nicaragua — There was something about the woman who turned up at St. Michael the Archangel church in this bustling market town one recent day. She was tall, about 40, nicely dressed in slacks and a blouse. Maybe an office worker, the Rev. Edwin Román figured.

Then she settled into the pew where he was hearing confessions and leaned in.

“Where can I get bombs?” she whispered.

Román says he quickly realized what was going on.

“I can tell when people are infiltrators,” said the priest, a well-known supporter of Nicaragua’s pro-democracy movement. Spies for the government of President Daniel Ortega, he said, were trying to entrap him.

Ortega has responded to Nicaragua’s worst political unrest since the 1980s by banning protests and smothering dissent. As conflict still simmers, the Catholic Church, one of the country’s last venues for protest, finds itself besieged.

Ortega supporters try to infiltrate parishes. Security forces surround churches during Mass. Priests suffer harassment and death threats. Police ring the Jesuit university when students dare to wave Nicaraguan flags and chant anti-government slogans.

There are echoes of the 1980s, when Nicaragua’s pro-Marxist government clashed with conservative bishops in a Cold War standoff. Like then, Ortega’s Sandinista party is in power. Now, though, the dispute is over democracy, at a time of rising populism and authoritarianism.

Ortega, 73, has accused church leaders of being “committed to the coup plotters,” as he calls the young activists who organized mass demonstrations last year

The clergy deny they’re trying to undermine Ortega. But as Nicaragua has become one of the most repressive countries in Latin America, the church has become a refuge for dissenters.

Threats against church leaders have become so intense that the Vatican recently called the outspoken auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio Báez, to Rome.

“There’s an attack on religious freedom like we’ve never seen in Nicaragua,” said Félix Maradiaga, a Harvard-trained political scientist and opposition activist. “And it’s occurring under the world’s nose.”

When the bullets started flying in Masaya, Román was in his bedroom, watching TV. He heard a pounding on his garden gate.

“A young person appeared asking, ‘Father, do you have gloves, alcohol, gauze?’ ” the 59-year-old priest recalled. “I looked around. The only gloves I had were oven mitts.”

It was a spring night in 2018. Masaya, about 14 miles from the capital, was once a Sandinista stronghold. Now it was at the heart of a national revolt. What had begun as protests against pension cuts had swelled into rallies against Ortega’s 11-year rule and his dismantling of democratic institutions.

Román started making calls. Soon the rectory at St. Michael’s became an informal clinic for wounded demonstrators.

“For me, it was a humanitarian service,” the priest said.

Throughout the country, priests and bishops found themselves on the front lines of the crisis. They rescued demonstrators who fled to churches as police and heavily armed paramilitaries moved in. They counseled parents distraught over the arrests of their teenagers.

Ortega has a turbulent history with the church, widely influential in this majority-Catholic country.

In the 1980s, he defied its leadership, inviting leftist priests into his cabinet and encouraging the creation of a pro-government “popular church.” (That earned his government a public scolding from Pope John Paul II.) More recently, he tried to reconcile with the Catholic hierarchy, backing one of the strictest antiabortion laws in Latin America.

As Nicaragua’s political crisis intensified last year, Ortega asked the bishops to broker a national dialogue. There were few other institutions that could do it: Most opposition parties had been co-opted, or stripped of their legal status.

But the talks soon stalled, and the backlash was swift.

Ortega charged — without presenting evidence — that churches were being used “to store weapons, to store bombs.” As paramilitaries and police dislodged protesters who had occupied college campuses and neighborhoods, churches were caught in the crossfire. Priests and bishops tried to give protesters sanctuary; pro-government mobs attacked them. At one point, Báez was knifed in the arm as he tried to defend young people in a church.

More than 300 people, most of them demonstrators, were killed, according to human rights groups. The Nicaraguan government claims the protesters are part of a coup attempt financed by the U.S. government.

Nicaraguan authorities have denied targeting priests. They did not respond to a request for an interview.

A year after the crackdown, the barricades are gone, but the death threats continue. Román says he’s followed by plainclothes security agents. He has been detained by police twice, for several hours each time. Officers have surrounded his church when he has celebrated Mass in remembrance of those killed or to commemorate the release of political prisoners. After the services, worshipers hold impromptu protests at the church entrance, waving the country’s blue-and-white flag — a symbol of the rebellion.

Inside his quiet, airy church, someone has placed a Nicaraguan flag alongside a statue of St. Michael. Blue-and-white ribbons dangle from a figure of the risen Christ.

“This is how people now protest,” said the priest. Anything more could land them in jail.

Security forces still generally refrain from entering Catholic Church property. That’s why a blonde 36-year-old woman traveled to Managua’s soaring modernistic cathedral on a recent sunny afternoon. She joined a handful of demonstrators outside, waving Nicaraguan flags and chanting anti-Ortega slogans.

“This is the only safe place we can come,” said the woman, who provided only her nickname, Chela.

But she gazed anxiously at the police special forces trucks ringing the fenced perimeter. “They’re on top of us. In our neighborhood, they’re watching us.”

In April, the cathedral lost its most powerful voice when Pope Francis recalled Báez to Rome indefinitely.

The bishop had become an unlikely face of the Nicaraguan opposition. A 61-year-old scholar with a receding hairline and a doctorate in theology from the Vatican’s Gregorian University, he was a hit with young people.

That was due, in part, to his human rights advocacy over a decade in Managua. But the cleric was also an ace at Twitter.

“Whenever an event happened, everyone wanted to hear a pronouncement from a bishop,” said the sociologist José Luis Rocha, a frequent contributor to the Jesuit publication Envío. “And out pops the tweet from Báez.”

While the Vatican did not explain Báez’s move, the bishop said in interviews that he had been the target of an assassination plot. In May, the Nicaraguan bishops’ conference said the clergy, and Báez in particular, had been subjected to “discredit and death threats.”

In recent months, the church has taken a lower profile. The bishops’ conference is no longer organizing the talks with the government, although the papal nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Sommertag, is participating.

Maradiaga said some bishops were uneasy about the church assuming a prominent political role. And unlike in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II backed Nicaragua’s bishops amid a U.S.-funded insurgency, the current conflict has received little attention abroad.

“Priests opposing the regime don’t have the strong international support that existed before,” said Maradiaga, who heads the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies, one of several civil-society groups that have been outlawed by the government.

The isolation is evident in the northern city of Esteli, where Monsignor Juan Abelardo Mata, the 73-year-old head of the Nicaraguan bishops’ conference, holes up in a church compound watched by five unarmed security guards. The longtime human rights advocate has been a prominent critic of the Sandinistas.

Mata and seven of his archdiocesan priests have received death threats, he said. At least four Nicaraguan priests have fled the country.

Under the glass of his dining room table, Mata keeps a picture of Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was gunned down in 1980 while celebrating Mass. Last year, Romero was canonized.

Mata said Nicaragua’s church would not be intimidated, even if a priest is killed.

“The church doesn’t die,” he said. “The church has watched as the caskets of its persecutors pass by.”

Ismael López Ocampo contributed to this report.

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tragicbooks · 8 years ago

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<p>20 things Mike Pence did while you weren't looking — and why it matters.</p>

He may not always be in the shadows.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

With the exception of an infamous trip to see Hamilton last November and a controversy about whether it's OK to dine with women other than his wife, we've heard relatively little about Vice President Mike Pence since the election. In May, CNN even ran a story with the headline, "Mike Pence's Disappearing Act."

He's a heartbeat away from the presidency and seems interested in following his own political ambitions beyond this administration, so what exactly has Mike Pence been up to lately? A lot, actually.

Here's 20 things Mike Pence has done since taking office:

1. In January, Pence and others lobbied Trump to take hard-line positions on abortion, making good on some of his anti-choice campaign pledges.

Just days after taking office, Trump signed a slew of executive orders. Among them was the reinstatement of the so-called "Mexico City policy," restricting foreign aid from going to groups that offer abortion services.

The Independent wrote about the decision to reinstate the policy, saying that pro-choice activists "feared [Trump] would reintroduce the policy as a gift to Vice President Mike Pence, known for his staunch opposition to abortion rights."

Proud to stand w/ President Trump signing EOs: withdrawing US from TPP, prohibiting int'l abortion funding & freezing hiring except military http://pic.twitter.com/PaHV2XGoAv

— Vice President Pence (@VP) January 23, 2017

2. Pence has led the charge to advance Trump's policy agenda.

You may have seen him popping up on the Sunday morning political talk shows to push Trump's agenda items. This has especially been the case when it's an issue where Trump himself may not appear to have a total grasp of the policy being discussed, such as health care.

ObamaCare will be replaced with something that actually works—bringing freedom and individual responsibility back to American health care.

— Vice President Pence (@VP) February 22, 2017

3. He's been very vocal about supporting the use of tax dollars to fund religious schools.

Under the guise of "school choice," Pence has been a long-time supporter of using tax dollars to fund charter schools and religious schools. As governor, Pence expanded Indiana's charter school program and opted out of the nationwide "Common Core" standards. One of the side effects of Pence's reign in Indiana was an uptick in the number of publicly funded schools teaching creationism. Pence, himself, hasn't given a clear answer on whether he believes in evolution.

Trump was short on specifics about education policy during the campaign. In office, he's rallying behind Pence's ideas.

This is Nat'l School Choice Week. @POTUS & I are committed to making a great education possible for all our children https://t.co/TdsCfhqtxy

— Vice President Pence (@VP) January 26, 2017

4. In January, Pence met with anti-abortion activists at the White House and delivered a speech at the annual March for Life.

During his address at the anti-choice march, Pence riled up the crowd with a pledge to "work with Congress to end taxpayer funding for abortion and abortion providers," along with promises to support Supreme Court nominees who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

It was my honor to speak at the @March_for_Life today w/ my family & share the commitment of @POTUS to restore culture of life in America. http://pic.twitter.com/2ucCZBAdHj

— Vice President Pence (@VP) January 27, 2017

5. Pence spent much of February selling the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court as "mainstream."

Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat on Jan. 31. Gorsuch, who had a record as a far-right, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ judge, would face an uphill climb. That's where Pence came in.

Rather than nominate someone who could receive the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, Trump picked Gorsuch, and Pence immediately began work urging Republican leaders in the Senate to blow up the filibuster. They eventually did, and Gorsuch was sworn in on April 10.

Rest assured, we will work w/ Senate leadership to ensure that Judge Gorsuch gets an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor- one way the other

— Vice President Pence (@VP) February 4, 2017

6. Pence cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, the first time a vice president has done so on a cabinet pick.

In February, DeVos was under immense scrutiny from Democrats and moderate Republicans. The billionaire heiress had zero education-related qualifications to run the department, but she did have a history of donating to far-right causes and championing the use of public money to fund schools that would "advance God's kingdom," in line with Pence's own views on education.

With Republicans Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) voting against DeVos' confirmation, the 50-50 vote went to Pence to break the tie. He voted to confirm her.

JUST IN: Vice President Mike Pence casts tie-breaking vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as Education secretary, 51-50 https://t.co/niuQfDYB6u http://pic.twitter.com/8TYfhlTndo

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 7, 2017

7. In May, Pence was named the head of Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

This commission was established based on Trump's unproven and unfounded claim that there was widespread voter fraud during the 2016 election. Pence was named commission chair, with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair. Together, Pence and Kobach have begun making requests for extensive voter information from states, with many voting rights groups worried that the commission will lead to widespread voter suppression.

8. Pence invited anti-abortion activists to the White House to discuss how to merge their agenda with that of the administration.

On March 9, Pence met with anti-abortion activists to discuss what sort of provisions they would like to see in the American Health Care Act bill, later pitching it to conservative members of the House of Representatives.

Grateful to host pro-life leaders today & reaffirm @POTUS Trump's commitment to the sanctity of life in the Obamacare repeal & replace plan. http://pic.twitter.com/W3yHUhOGZ1

— Vice President Pence (@VP) March 10, 2017

9. Later that month, he would cast the tie-breaking vote to nullify an Obama-era rule allowing that Title X funds be used for family planning services.

In his eight years in office, Joe Biden never cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Pence, just months into the job, has broken four ties (confirming DeVos, the motion to proceed on blocking the Title X rule, the final vote on blocking the Title X rule, and the motion to proceed on the Senate's health care bill).

Gutting the Title X rule is bad news, especially for low- and middle-income women across the country.

It was my honor to break tie vote in Senate overturning last minute Obama rule & restoring state control over Title X family planning funds. http://pic.twitter.com/jebspF3F3K

— Vice President Pence (@VP) March 30, 2017

10. Pence has met with members of the financial industry and championed efforts to roll back Dodd-Frank consumer protections.

Shortly after taking office, Pence addressed the GOP retreat, promising to dismantle the legislation enacted in the aftermath of financial collapse and its "overbearing mandates." In May, he spoke out in favor of Republican Rep. Hensarling's (Texas) CHOICE Act, which would deregulate the financial markets once again.

With Community Bankers at the @WhiteHouse, I said the CHOICE Act is a common-sense bill that repeals Dodd Frank & empowers consumers & biz. http://pic.twitter.com/a9U83FnIHc

— Vice President Pence (@VP) May 1, 2017

11. In May, Pence addressed the Susan B. Anthony List "Campaign for Life" gala.

Touting the administration's successes when it came to curtailing reproductive rights, Pence declared, "For the first time in a long time, America has an administration that’s filled top to bottom with people who stand without apology for life."

To cheers, he would later promise to ensure that people receiving health care subsidies would not be able to purchase insurance coverage that includes access to abortion.

Let's strive to finish the work of Susan B. Anthony—to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ring true. #SBAgala http://pic.twitter.com/8NtQ3SvfId

— Vice President Pence (@VP) May 4, 2017

12. Pence played a role in urging Trump to sign a "religious liberty" executive order during a National Day of Prayer ceremony.

While the final order was viewed by many conservatives as simply being one step in the right direction and not everything they wanted, the move showed just how much pull the extremely religious vice president has over his boss.

Proud to stand w/ @POTUS on the #NationalDayOfPrayer as he signs an exec order that reaffirms the role faith plays in our nation. http://pic.twitter.com/8ztIB2dIOI

— Vice President Pence (@VP) May 4, 2017

13. Pence addressed the first-ever World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians on May 11.

The speech bolstered the administration's narrative that Christians are the true victims of terrorism in the Middle East. The truth is that people of all faiths have been targeted by ISIS, and messages about how Christians are the most persecuted only help advance some of the inherent Islamophobia in actions such as the travel ban — which only helps ISIS.

It was humbling to join people of faith at the first-ever World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians: https://t.co/bHlUhsBytT http://pic.twitter.com/5qF1Bv4MVb

— Vice President Pence (@VP) May 11, 2017

14. At the University of Notre Dame, Pence delivered a fiery commencement address, targeting "political correctness."

The idea that college campuses are suppressing freedom of speech is a popular talking point, especially among conservatives. Pence used his platform to stoke that fire, saying, "Far too many campuses across America have become characterized by speech codes, safe zones, tone policing, administration-sanctioned political correctness — all of which amounts to nothing less than the suppression of freedom of speech."

Proud to address @NotreDame's 2017 Class. To the over 3,100 who graduated: strive every day to lead for good w/ courage & conviction #ND2017 http://pic.twitter.com/NfSBovg2Ub

— Vice President Pence (@VP) May 21, 2017

15. In May, Pence started his own political action committee called the "Great America Committee."

Marking another first for a sitting vice president, the formation of a PAC signals that maybe he has some larger political ambitions that go beyond the Trump administration and his role as VP. Coupled with outgoing White House press secretary Sean Spicer saying that he'd be on board with a Pence run in 2024, this is worth keeping an eye on.

When and if @mike_pence runs in 2024 I would proudly play any role he asks Good to know you have already conceded that https://t.co/cHMSKHM07e

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) July 31, 2017

16. In June, Pence was put in charge of U.S. space policy.

Pence, being someone who likely doesn't really believe in that whole "evolution" thing and once claimed that "smoking doesn't kill," seems like an odd choice to dictate anything related to science. But that's what President Trump did after signing an executive order bringing back the National Space Council.

It's still unclear what sort of direction Pence will take, though he has made promises to put people on Mars.

"Under President (@POTUS) Trump, America will lead in space once again." - @VP Pence. Watch live: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi #VPinFL http://pic.twitter.com/OEEmIwlyR4

— NASA (@NASA) July 6, 2017

17. He's raised money for his own PAC and other political causes.

What's the point of having a PAC if you're not going to raise money for it, right? In July, The New York Times reported that Pence has been playing host to "a string of dinners held every few weeks at the vice president’s official residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington," courting "big donors and corporate executives."

18. On June 23, Pence addressed Focus on the Family, a powerful anti-LGBTQ organization, for its 40th anniversary.

Speaking about the administration's commitment to helping "persecuted people of faith" and protecting their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people under the guise of "religious liberty," Pence told the crowd, "This president believes that no American, no American should have to violate their conscience to fully participate in American life, and he has taken action to protect the expressions of faith by men and women across this nation."

This is the same organization, mind you, that has called homosexuality "a particularly evil lie of Satan" and has called transgender people "mentally ill" and "like Cinderella in a fantasy world."

19. As special elections have popped up across the country, Pence has been hitting the campaign trail in support of his fellow Republicans.

It's not so surprising that Pence is getting out there. A little curious, however, is how little Trump has done comparatively — and how little coverage Pence's presence has garnered. This once again shows Pence for the shrewd politician he is, able to help prop up other candidates. Trump, on the other hand, is mostly good at promoting one person: Trump.

20. Pence has been pressuring Congress to implement anti-transgender policies in the military.

Days before Trump tweeted that he was banning trans people from serving in the military, Foreign Policy reported that Pence was lobbying hard to fight back against trans inclusion in the military. Pence was reportedly putting pressure on members of Congress to hold the 2018 defense authorization bill hostage unless it included a rider barring funds being used on transition-related health care.

According to Politico, Trump was motivated to outright ban all trans people from the military for fear that the defense bill would stall and he wouldn't receive the funding he requested for his wall. In the end, however, Pence got what he asked for and more. Though the Department of Defense is holding on implementing the tweeted policy until Trump formally submits a plan, it's nearly a done deal.

This matters because Pence might not always be in the background.

It's pretty clear that Pence's political ambitions don't end with being Trump's vice president. With scandals rocking the White House on what seems like a daily basis — including calls for investigations and even some for Trump's impeachment — it's pretty important to take a long hard look at the man next in line for the position.

During the campaign, Pence's extreme positions were largely whitewashed. His extreme anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion views were rarely talked about. As vice president, Pence has shown himself to be the man he's always been: a smooth-talking politician with far-right social conservative views. So let's keep a watchful eye on what he's doing now because he might just be president one day.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

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everettwilkinson · 8 years ago

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WHITE HOUSE ‘squeezes’ Jeff Flake — No new timetable for health care vote — SECRET SERVICE v. Jay Sekulow — BIDEN’s new book — CAITLIN HAYDEN welcomes a daughter — B’DAY: Kayla Tausche

Good Monday morning. SIREN — ALEX ISENSTADT: “White House squeezes Jeff Flake”: “The White House has met with at least three actual or prospective primary challengers to Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in recent weeks, a reflection of Donald Trump’s strained relations with the senator and the latest sign of the president’s willingness to play hardball with lawmakers who cross him — even Republican incumbents. Flake, a longtime Trump critic who refused to endorse the president during the 2016 campaign, is one of a handful of undecided Republican votes on the Obamacare repeal effort. He’s also one of the most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection in 2018.

“Since taking office, Trump has spoken with Arizona state Treasurer Jeff DeWit, a top official on his 2016 campaign, on at least two occasions, according to two sources familiar with the talks. Since June, White House officials have also had discussions with former state Sen. Kelli Ward, who has announced her bid, and former Arizona GOP Chairman Robert Graham, who like DeWit is exploring a campaign.” http://politi.co/2tid77g

Story Continued Below

— IF TRUMP BACKS a challenger to Flake, it will be a big, big deal. The White House merely meeting with candidates is certain to raise ire in the Senate Republican Conference. Loyalty is a big deal in the Senate. The NRSC vociferously tries to head off primary challenges, and senators often bristle when outsiders try to displace one of their own. Despite apparent ideological differences with the White House, Flake is a pretty popular senator. We can’t imagine Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will be happy with this. Bottom line: Trump needs McConnell in order to get virtually anything done in Congress. And this is sure to get him riled up. BUT, BUT, BUT … The Trump team has threatened and ultimately abandoned primary challenges in the past.

IMPORTANT READ — MCCAIN COULD BE OUT FOR TWO WEEKS — “McCain’s Surgery May Be More Serious Than Thought, Experts Say,” by NYT’s Denise Grady and Robert Pear: “The condition for which Senator John McCain had surgery on Friday may be more serious than initial descriptions have implied, and it may delay his return to Washington by at least a week or two, medical experts said on Sunday. …

“The statement from Mr. McCain’s office said a two-inch blood clot was removed from ‘above his left eye’ during a “minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision” at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, ‘following a routine annual physical.’ … A craniotomy is an opening of the skull, and an eyebrow incision would be used to reach a clot in or near the left frontal lobes of the brain, neurosurgeons who were not involved in Mr. McCain’s care said. …

“But many questions have been left unanswered, including whether Mr. McCain had symptoms that prompted doctors to look for the clot. In June, his somewhat confused questioning of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, led to concerns about his mental status, which he later jokingly dismissed by saying he had stayed up too late watching baseball the night before. ‘Usually, a blood clot like this is discovered when patients have symptoms, whether it’s a seizure or headaches or weakness or speech difficulties,’ Dr. Baxi said. ‘Generally, it’s not found on a routine physical because doctors would not know to look for it.’” http://nyti.ms/2u0Rs0A

— A TWO-WEEK MCCAIN ABSENCE would put a vote during the first week of August. That’s a long time for this bill to linger. This timeline means the House would likely be forced back into session in August if the Senate passes its bill when McCain returns.

BY THE WAY … The Congressional Budget Office will not release a budgetary score of the healthcare bill today. Burgess and SMK say it could come Tuesday.

**SUBSCRIBE to Playbook: http://politi.co/2lQswbh

BURGESS EVERETT and SEUNG MIN KIM: “Obamacare repeal bill plunges into new uncertainty”: “Republicans’ long-held plans to repeal Obamacare are again in serious doubt, with no clear timetable for a Senate vote following the surprise news that John McCain will be out as he recovers from surgery. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) shelved a vote planned for this week following the disclosure of McCain’s procedure, which leaves the GOP clearly short of support to advance the bill. McConnell’s office could give no new schedule for the vote, and most on Capitol Hill are waiting for a pathology report to assess how long it will be before McCain returns after undergoing surgery to remove a blood clot above his eye.

“Privately, Republicans said the delay could be as little as a week as McCain recovers in Arizona, though others worried it could stretch for several weeks and jeopardize the entire repeal effort. … Whether the bill would advance even if McCain were in Washington is another question altogether, as the Arizona senator is one of more than half a dozen undecided Republicans, any one of whom could tank the bill.” http://politi.co/2uxiYFX

DOH! — “How the White House and Republicans underestimated Obamacare repeal,” by Nancy Cook and Burgess Everett: “The Trump transition team and other Republican leaders presumed that Congress would scrap Obamacare by President’s Day weekend in late February, according to three former Republican congressional aides and two current ones familiar with the administration’s efforts. Republican leaders last fall planned a quick strike on the law in a series of meetings and phone calls, hoping to simply revive a 2015 repeal bill that Obama vetoed. Few in the administration or Republican leadership expected the effort to stretch into the summer months, with another delay announced this weekend, eating into valuable time for lawmakers to tackle tax reform, nominations or spending bills.

“‘It’s easier to rage against the machine when you’re not in control of the machine, No. 1. And the perception that we are in control of the machine is inaccurate,’ said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). ‘Needing 50 out of 52 members on the same page in the Senate? I think that is not being in control of the machine.’” http://politi.co/2v97w0v

— ANOTHER KEY QUOTE IN NANCY AND BURGESS’S STORY: Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.): “I would have much preferred to start off with tax. But that wasn’t my decision. Tax is the heavy lift here. It’s not going to be easier than health care. And we’ve been doing this for seven months.”

A GOOD REMINDER: tax reform is going to be hard. Really hard.

NUMBERS DU JOUR: 9 LEGISLATIVE DAYS until the planned August recess. Still lingering: Obamacare repeal and replace, executive branch nominations and the debt ceiling. 53 LEGISLATIVE DAYS left in 2017, per the House’s calendar.

****** A message from the National Retail Federation: {Video} Small business owners work hard to build their businesses and turn their dreams into realities. Under the House-proposed Border Adjustment Tax, they are at risk to lost it all. Watch Vivian’s story. ******

TOUGH JOB – “Meet Obamacare repeal’s top salesman: Sen. John Cornyn faces his toughest task yet as the GOP’s whip,” by Seung Min Kim and Burgess Everett: “Senate Republicans are in a grumpy mood these days. Then there’s John Cornyn, who’s almost unfailingly optimistic about the GOP’s chances of passing its Obamacare repeal bill despite the increasingly long odds. ‘I mean, if you’re going to be in a leadership role, you don’t have the luxury of public hand-wringing,’ Cornyn, the Senate majority whip, said in a recent interview in his Capitol office. Whether he’s wringing his hands in private is another matter, but the Texas Republican is facing his toughest test yet in his 4 1/2 years as chief vote-counter for the Senate GOP: rounding up 50 votes to dismantle Obamacare. …

“Though Cornyn keeps a literal whip on his desk, his style isn’t heavy-handed; it’s more gentle pushing and information-dispensing, senators say. Cornyn acknowledges: ‘If you try to strong-arm a senator, they’re just as likely to push back or punch back.’ … In the POLITICO interview, Cornyn also essentially ruled out any bipartisan health care fixes with Democrats even if the GOP’s repeal effort fails, saying problems with Obamacare are too big to solve without major structural changes.” http://politi.co/2vsiKMV

— FRED BARNES in the WSJ: “Republicans Aren’t Team Players: GOP Senators who defect from ObamaCare repeal will hurt themselves, their party and the country” http://on.wsj.com/2t75hcg

BREAK IN — “Burglary at Heller’s Las Vegas office investigated,” by the Las Vegas Sun’s Ricardo Torres-Cortez: “Metro Police say they are investigating a Sunday morning burglary at U.S. Sen. Dean Heller’s southwest Las Vegas office. Officers were dispatched about 9 a.m. to Heller’s local office … Metro Lt. Patricia Spencer on Sunday night confirmed that ‘entry did occur’ at Heller’s office, but only said that the investigation was ongoing. Further details were not immediately available.” http://bit.ly/2u09oZ7

JARED WATCH — “Fate of Kushner’s security clearance could ultimately lie with Trump,” by Austin Wright and Josh Dawsey: “Kushner’s actions — including initially failing to disclose meetings with Russian officials — would be more than enough to cost most federal employees their security clearances, according to people familiar with the security-clearance process. … Not having a security clearance would hobble him from doing large swaths of his job. On many days, he receives classified briefings, according to a senior administration official — and he is often in the room with his father-in-law for sensitive decisions about classified issues. …

“Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer for Kushner, said her client had ‘prematurely’ filed the first security clearance application form but has since done everything possible to be accurate and transparent with his meetings. … Omitting facts from a security questionnaire could be disqualifying if it was part of a deliberate effort to conceal them, according to federal guidelines; an inadvertent omission would not be so costly. Similarly, making ‘prompt, good-faith efforts’ to correct the omission can mitigate security concerns.” http://politi.co/2thrgRW

FACT CHECK — “U.S. Secret Service rejects suggestion it vetted Trump son’s meeting,” by Reuters’ Arshad Mohammed and Howard Schneider: “The U.S. Secret Service on Sunday denied a suggestion from President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer that it had vetted a meeting between the president’s son and Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign. … In an emailed response to questions about [Jay] Sekulow’s comments, Secret Service spokesman Mason Brayman said the younger Trump was not under Secret Service protection at the time of the meeting, which included Trump’s son and two senior campaign officials. ‘Donald Trump, Jr. was not a protectee of the USSS in June, 2016. Thus we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time,’ the statement said.” http://reut.rs/2tvSM9O

THE COST OF WAR — “President Trump’s Air War Kills 12 Civilians Per Day,” by Samuel Oakford in The Daily Beast: “Civilian casualties from the U.S.-led war against the so-called Islamic State are on pace to double under President Donald Trump, according to an Airwars investigation for The Daily Beast. Airwars researchers estimate that at least 2,300 civilians likely died from Coalition strikes overseen by the Obama White House—roughly 80 each month in Iraq and Syria. As of July 13, more than 2,200 additional civilians appear to have been killed by Coalition raids since Trump was inaugurated—upwards of 360 per month, or 12 or more civilians killed for every single day of his administration.” http://thebea.st/2upNNMq

MIDDLE EASTERN PALACE INTRIGUE — “UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites, sparking regional upheaval, according to U.S. intelligence officials,” by WaPo’s Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima: “The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials. Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done. … In a statement released in Washington by its ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE said the Post story was ‘false.’” http://wapo.st/2t5IEVV

POLLS DU JOUR — “Americans Feel Good About the Economy, Not So Good About Trump,” by Bloomberg’s John McCormick: “Just 40 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing in the White House, and 55 percent now view him unfavorably, up 12 points since December. Worse, even more — 61 percent — say the nation is headed down the wrong path, also up 12 points since December. … And despite his assurances that he and congressional Republicans will repeal Obamacare and replace it with a ‘beautiful’ new health care bill, 64 percent of Americans say they disapprove of his handling of the issue. That’s especially significant because health care topped unemployment, terrorism and immigration as the issue poll respondents chose as the most important challenge facing the nation right now.” https://bloom.bg/2vtqezb

–“Iowa Poll: As independents sour on Trump, disapproval rating tops 50%,” by Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble: “Self-identified independents have turned against Trump, with 59 percent now saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing compared with 35 percent who approve. In an Iowa Poll five months ago, his disapproval rating among independents was 50 percent, 9 percentage points lower than now.” http://dmreg.co/2vsnHoY

TRUMP’S MONDAY — The President will have lunch with Vice President Pence and then will meet with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Later in the day, he will take part in a “Made in America product showcase.”

THE JUICE …

— NYT: “Joe Biden’s New Book to Be Released in November,” by Concepcion de Leon: “On Monday, Flatiron Books revealed that the acquisition, which was first announced in April as part of a joint deal with Mr. Biden’s wife, Jill Biden (details about her book have yet to be given), would be titled ‘Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose’ and be released on Nov. 14. In it, Mr. Biden will reflect on that painful year and the challenges he faced fulfilling his political duties while mourning the death of his son. …

“This fall Mr. Biden will also embark on a tour, traveling to 19 cities across the country, starting with New York on Nov. 13, to host panel discussions with local leaders. (The events will be overseen by Creative Artists Agency, which represents Mr. Biden.) He hopes to start conversations that go beyond ‘the 24-hour news cycle and 140-character arguments,’ a statement said. Tickets, which go on sale July 28, will include a copy of his book.” http://nyti.ms/2u0paDl

— THE BLUE DOGS, a group of conservative Democrats, gathered more than 250 people at the Greenbrier in West Virginia this weekend. Up for discussion: planning for 2018 and candidate recruitment. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who is in charge of the PAC, and Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) headed up the weekend. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), both non-Blue Dog members, were special guests.

SPOTTED: Ryan Guthrie, Katreice Banks, Libby Greer, Dan Turton, Jeff Murray, Jay Vroom, Chris Long, Norberto Salinas, Jesse Price, Lee Friedman, Angela Reimer, Gordon Taylor, Matt Sulkala, David Burns, former Reps. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) and Allen Boyd (D-Fla.), Kelley Williams and Jen McPhillips.

SPORTS BLINK — HELP ON THE WAY — WAPO: “Nationals acquire Sean Doolittle and Ryan Madson from Athletics in exchange for Blake Treinen, two others,” by Chelsea Janes: “For months, a deal to repair the Washington Nationals’ broken bullpen seemed inevitable, and Sunday, after months of frustration and speculation, they finally made one. The Nationals acquired right-hander Ryan Madson and left-hander Sean Doolittle from the Oakland Athletics in exchange for Blake Treinen, left-handed pitching prospect Jesus Luzardo, and 2016 second-round pick Sheldon Neuse. The move immediately adds two experienced relievers to the Nationals’ bullpen for the rest of this season and at least all of next, though the team will have a club option for Doolittle in 2019 and 2020, too. In other words, this is not just a patch — it is a legitimate upgrade around which the Nationals can build next season, too.” http://wapo.st/2uqoda0

PHOTO DU JOUR: President Donald Trump turns to the clubhouse crowd as he arrives to enter his presidential viewing stand on July 16 during the U.S. Women’s Open Golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. | Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

SUSAN GLASSER’S THE GLOBAL POLITICO – “Don’t Compare Trump to Nixon. It’s Unfair to Nixon”: “Are we watching Watergate the rerun? … [I]nevitably, the magazine articles and essays, radio talk shows and book lists all mention a single remarkable work: Elizabeth Drew’s Washington Journal. Drew, at the time the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent and host of a weekly interview show on PBS, wrote the journal as a real-time diary of how the American political world handled the spiraling investigations of 1973 and 1974 … [I]f anything, Drew has come to believe that the Trump investigation could yield even more serious abuse of power or failure to execute the office than the years’ worth of Nixon probes. What’s more, the Russia scandal, she says, ‘is in many ways more complicated than Watergate was.’” http://politi.co/2vt7Fev … Transcript http://politi.co/2u0np9g … Subscribe http://apple.co/2kJ9q1U

POLITICO HEALTH CARE GURU DAN DIAMOND has two major policy stories looking at the key drivers of health care costs and focuses on how big hospitals are increasingly being run like big businesses.

— “How hospitals got richer off Obamacare”: “The Affordable Care Act drove billions of dollars in new revenue to hospitals while cutting their charity care spending and protecting their valuable tax exemptions — and not necessarily making their communities healthier, a POLITICO investigation reveals. And while Sen. Chuck Grassley led the battle to crack down on not-for-profit hospitals ahead of Obamacare negotiations, local leaders have since suffered repeated defeats and no one in Washington has stepped forward to pick up the fight.” http://politi.co/2v8KG95

— “How Cleveland Clinic gets healthier while its neighbors stay sick”: “The Cleveland Clinic has brought patients, pride and revenue to this Midwestern city — but also stirred up tensions, as residents ask if the world-renowned Clinic is doing enough to save its local neighborhood, where many residents are poor, in ill health and worried about the gunshots they hear every night.” http://politi.co/2vtmEVD

WHAT MIKE FLYNN IS UP TO THESE DAYS – “Flynn returns to hometown, surfing in respite from scandal,” by AP’s Michelle R. Smith in Middletown, Rhode Island, and Jennifer McDermott in Providence: “Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, at the center of multiple probes into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, seeks sanctuary from the swirling eddy of news coverage in the beach town where he grew up surfing and skateboarding, one of nine siblings crammed into a 1,200-square foot house. Middletown is his refuge and the ocean is his therapy, and he’s spent recent weeks here surfing and figuring out his path forward, according to friends and family members. …

“‘Have you seen that in the news? They talk about Mike as a traitor? The thought of that is absolutely insane to me,’ said older brother Jack. … Thomas A. Heaney Jr., a retired Army colonel who has known Flynn since they were 9 years old, said Flynn has been doing well and has begun work again as a consultant after shutting down his old firm. … Middletown could even become his permanent base, Heaney said. Flynn and his wife, Lori, who started dating as high school sophomores, grew up here and have deep family ties in the area.” With a great pic of Flynn surfing http://bit.ly/2vtfwZn

DATA DU JOUR — “South Carolina May Prove a Microcosm of U.S. Election Hacking Efforts,” by WSJ’s Alexa Corse: “To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina. On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report by the South Carolina State Election Commission. And South Carolina wasn’t even a competitive state. … In harder-fought Illinois, for instance, hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections ‘5 times per second, 24 hours per day’ from late June until Aug. 12, 2016, when the attacks ceased for unknown reasons, according to an Aug. 26, 2016, report by the state’s computer staff. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records.” http://on.wsj.com/2uyPzLG

DEEP DIVE – NATHAN HELLER in The New Yorker, “Mark as Read: What do we learn when our private e-mail becomes public?”: “Not long after the Enron Corporation imploded amid revelations of accounting fraud, in 2001, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seized the e-mail folders of a hundred and fifty one mostly high-ranking employees … The Enron archive came to comprise hundreds of thousands of messages, and remains one of the country’s largest private e-mail corpora turned public. … Only six per cent of the e-mails … had any greeting at all; most began in medias res. The employees most likely to use a friendly greeting were women not in positions of authority, followed by men in subservient positions. Powerful men were the most likely just to open an e-mail window and start typing. In some cases, an e-mail would simply be addressed ‘Guys.’” http://bit.ly/2upINYh

****** A message from the National Retail Federation: The overwhelming majority of retailers are small businesses, with more than 98% of all retail companies employing fewer than 50 people. While small in size, their voices are loud and clear when fighting to be heard on decisions and policies that impact their businesses and the customers they serve every day. Hear more industry stories on NRF’s Retail Gets Real podcast. ******

VALLEY TALK — “Google San Jose: Can the search giant prevent traffic, housing woes?” by San Jose Mercury News’ Ethan Baron: “Google will be traveling a razor’s edge of love and hate all the way to its planned new 20,000-worker San Jose campus as it brings jobs and star power to a city that needs both while delivering extra helpings of the ills that have sparked public ire against Silicon Valley’s big technology companies. The potential downsides to Google’s planned campus in the heart of downtown check all the boxes on the list of Bay Area horrors: escalating traffic, overburdened transit systems, skyrocketing housing costs, displacement of lower-income people.” http://bayareane.ws/2uyJfDH

ON THE WSJ OP-ED PAGE: “Why Europeans Oppose the Russia Sanctions Bill,” by Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference http://on.wsj.com/2vsVy0I

MEDIAWATCH — OOPS — “Dow Jones Inadvertently Exposed Some Customers’ Information,” by WSJ’s Robert McMillan: “An error by Dow Jones & Co. in configuring a cloud-computing service left addresses and other information about subscribers to some of its products, including The Wall Street Journal, exposed to possible unauthorized access. About 2.2 million subscribers’ records were affected, a Dow Jones spokesman said. Some of the records included customer names, usernames, email and physical addresses, and the last 4 digits of credit-card numbers, although some records were missing parts of that information … The exposed data was discovered by UpGuard Inc., a cybersecurity firm, which said they notified Dow Jones of the leak on June 5.” http://on.wsj.com/2uyztSl

FLAGGING FOR SPICER AND SANDERS — ABC NEWS TO LAUNCH A W.H. BRIEFING AFTER-SHOW — Per Morning Media’s Hadas Gold: “The new live digital show, launching today, is called ‘The Briefing Room,’ and will cover the ‘White House press briefings and the latest political reporting from Washington,’ the network announced. Following the briefings (when they actually happen), correspondents like Jonathan Karl, Cecilia Vega, Mary Bruce and Rick Klein will cover the “news and announcements from the press conference with a play-by-play rundown of the topics discussed from the podium and context on the current political climate.’”

— @PhilipRucker: “We saw President Trump & family watching @jessebwatters’s Fox show on jumbo TV aboard Air Force One tonight en route home from Bedminster.”

— “Top Republicans Aren’t Signing Up For Trump’s War With The Media,” by BuzzFeed’s Alexis Levinson: “While Trump spews bile and a narrative-hungry Twitter machine looks for evidence of a trend, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are emphatically not on board with the president’s attacks and are, indeed, openly supportive of the free American press.” http://bzfd.it/2uqk0mP

–EMILY SCHULTHEIS has been named a 2017-18 Robert Bosch Foundation fellow and has arrived in Berlin, where she will be working on a year-long reporting project on populism and elections in Europe. She is a CBS News, National Journal and Politico alum and most recently covered the French elections. http://bit.ly/2u0OwBb

SPOTTED: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her husband on last night’s 8 p.m. American Airlines Boston to DC shuttle seated in the exit row.

TRANSITIONS — Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) has hired senior staff to prepare for his 2018 re-election campaign. Keren Dongo, a Kaine aide and deputy state director for Hillary’s 2016 Virginia campaign, will be campaign manager. Ian Sams, a Hillary and DNC alum and recent comms director for Tom Perriello’s Virginia governor campaign, will be comms director. Jenny Nadicksbernd, Kaine’s PAC director and longtime finance aide, will be finance director. Jess Reid, a DNC alum and Hillary’s 2016 Virginia digital director, will be digital director. Megan Apper, a BuzzFeed, Maggie Hassan and American Bridge alum, will be research director.

… Katherine Charlet has been named the inaugural director of the Washington-based Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Charlet has spent the past decade at DoD and the White House and most recently was the principal director and acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. http://ceip.org/2upmdyI

WELCOME TO THE WORLD – OBAMA ALUMNI: Caitlin Hayden, an Obama NSC alumna who now works at Edelman, and Erlingur Erlingsson, deputy chief of mission at the Embassy of Iceland in DC, email friends and family: “On July 15, 2017 at 9:14 p.m., Erlingur and I were thrilled to welcome Sophie Ásta Erlingsson to the world, weighing 6 pounds and 9 ounces. … Sophie’s middle name was chosen in honor of Erlingur’s mother, whom we lost to cancer a year ago. Our hope is that we can raise Sophie to be the same kind of fearless, generous, loving woman that Ásta was and that my mother, Ramona, is.” Pics http://bit.ly/2vsegWo … http://bit.ly/2theR0l … http://bit.ly/2thrjNG

OUT AND ABOUT — SPOTTED on Saturday night at Obama alum Zaina Javaid’s 30th birthday party at a backyard in Bloomingdale: Amb. Pete Selfridge and Parita Shah, Mike Brush, Tim Hartz, Kaitlin Gaughran, Maju Varghese, Michael Donovan, Rachel Ruskin, Peter Velz, Desiree Barnes, Alex Evans, Jennifer Close, Elizabeth Pan, Morgan Finkelstein, Andy Estrada, Kate Berner, Charlie Fromstein, Alice Muglia, Hannah Orenstein, Bailey Cox, Kenny Thompson and Jeremy Slevin.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Kayla Tausche, CNBC Washington correspondent. How she’s celebrating: “Close friends, a glass of bourbon, and my balcony on the actual day. My husband and I will celebrate with a long weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.” Read her Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2uuquk4

BIRTHDAYS: Catherine Frazier, senior comms adviser for Sen. Cruz … Katie Zezima, who covers “drugs, guns, gambling & vice,” for WaPo, per her Twitter … former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios … Seth Bringman is 36 … David L. Wade … Reuters’ Mike Stone … Politico’s Caitlin O’Connell, Jessica Cuellar, Collin Greene and William Hackney … German Chancellor Angela Merkel is 63 … Kyle Dropp, co-founder and chief research officer at Morning Consult, is 31 … Opal Vadhan of HRC HQ (hat tip: Nick Merrill) … coach Kathy Kemper, a Washington fixture who hosts all sorts of gatherings with admin. officials, lawmakers and diplomats (h/t Juliet Eilperin) … Stacy Helen Schusterman (h/t Jewish Insider) … Axios’ Caitlin Owens … Eeda Wallbank … Ben Deutsch … Jon Graham … Cathie Levine Isay … Jon Monger … Jonathan Lee … Laura MacInnis … Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) is 54 … Matt Berger, senior adviser for strategic comms at Hillel International …

… Anna Bross, senior director of comms at The Atlantic … Andy Barr … Steve Spinner, founder and CEO of RevUp, the campaign fundraising software firm … Mercury’s Caitlin Klevorick … Ben Shannon, a manager in the health care practice at Burson-Marsteller in D.C. who formerly held multiple roles at HHS in the Obama Administration and worked on President Obama’s reelection campaign (h/ts Fabien Levy and Ben Chang) … Politico Europe’s Lawrence Wakefield … Dan Comstock is 33 … David Vandivier … Dani Simons … Shannan Butler Adler … Ben Softy … Sara Clinton Lowenstine … Steph Anderson … Cat Gross … Carter Baer … David A. Steinberg … Annabel Ascher … Myrna Lim … Shell’s Marnie Funk … Chris Buki, senior LA in House T&I Chairman Bill Shuster’s personal office, is 28 (h/t Walt Roberts) … Caroline Koss … Suzy Wagner … Nicole Tarbet … Bashir Rostom … Lizzie Cooper … Evi Wareka … Susan Kennedy … Rich Judge … Tony Sheehen (h/ts Teresa Vilmain)

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