#race baiting

[much-discourse-wow]

Remember kids, context is bad.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: John McWhorter

Published: Dec 12, 2024

Since Monday, when a jury found Daniel Penny not guilty in the death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway, the conversation has threatened to go off the rails.

Penny was the man who stepped up when Neely caused a commotion on the F train, shouting at passengers, “I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” Penny put him in a chokehold and held him for about six minutes. Neely died from compression to his neck, according to the medical examiner.

It should have been a story about the horror of a mentally ill person abandoned by the city and left to fend for himself in subway tunnels or on street corners, or about how scary it can be for those around him to navigate the wreckage, or about how one 24-year-old Marine veteran tried to protect a group of strangers, taking action that ended in unintended tragedy.

But Penny is white and Neely, 30, was Black. So instead it became a story of race — and all the more so after the jury’s verdict — a variation of Daniel Pantaleo going free after choking Eric Garner in 2014. But that’s not what happened here, and I wish those describing Penny or his acquittal as racist might consider things from another vantage point.

Chivona Newsome, a founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York and a recent congressional candidate, said, “They will not find a white man guilty of killing a Black man in modern-day America.” Her brother and fellow founder, Hawk Newsome, declared that “the K.K.K., the Klansmen, the evil in America, got another victory,” and after the verdict made a call to “Black vigilantes.” Supporters of Black Lives Matter and the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network were at the courthouse for Penny’s trial every day, chanting, among other things, “If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace.” The NAACP declared that “the acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely has effectively given license to vigilante justice to be waged on the Black community without consequence.” Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African-American Policy Forum and a prominent speaker on antiracism, called Penny a “racist, classist, ableist murderer.”

The claim that Penny acted out of racism implies that if he had seen a white man scaring subway passengers in that way, he either would not have restrained the man at all or would have done so for a shorter time.

I am unaware of how we could know such a thing. Some will think of the white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd as he begged for his life. The common assumption was that Floyd’s race informed Chauvin’s behavior. How then should we think of the case of Tony Timpa, a white man who died four years earlier under very similar circumstances in Dallas?

To claim Penny was acquitted because he is white implies also that if he were Black, he would have been convicted and imprisoned.

I am unaware of how we could know this, either. Any lawyer defending a Black Marine veteran in this instance would be sure to invoke his service to his country and to his fellow passengers, and to warn jurors against making him another statistic in the annals of judicial bias. Given the circumstances and the setting, it seems likely to me that they would take that responsibility seriously.

This is one of those subjects that leads readers to tell me they like my newsletters “but….” When I raise these ideas, in conversation or print, I am often told that I’m missing the centrality of racism in the American experience, or that Penny’s racism is too obvious to require discussion or proof. I wish those who believe that would consider that reality is more complex than just “America hates Black people.”

For a long time, that was clearly true. Even 40 years ago, the evidence was still there. But it’s easier to pretend change never happens than to recognize that it unfolds slowly. The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that about one in four recently married Black American men had a spouse from another race or ethnicity, as did more than one in 10 recently married Black women. The same report said that in 1990, 63 percent of non-Black Americans said they would be opposed to a close relative marrying a Black person; that figure has since dropped to only 14 percent. Hip-hop, the Blackest music in America, is now a staple at some of the whitest weddings, as I have often observed.

American English grows Blacker by the decade — and how you speak casually is who and what you are. A Black man was president for not one but two terms. While time has blunted the post-2020 hegemony of D.E.I. and racial reckoning, anyone who doubts academia and the arts, especially, are now more antiracist than anything imaginable in 2019 is not an academic or an artist.

America does not hate Black people.

If Daniel Penny had been Black, there would have been no one outside the courthouse protesting vigilante justice. Those now invoking the K.K.K. would have considered the genuine terror of being enclosed in a subway car with someone who is visibly unstable — a situation of which I have written as a father who rides the F train often. They would have readily perceived that a man can kill by accident while trying to do good.

Penny’s blond all-American looks seem to have invited a kind of punitive typecasting, and a very narrow view of what happened on that train: A white man killed a Black man. This reductive perspective discourages the empathic spirit that celebrated by the civil rights leaders who created our America.

*

In the spirit of seeing people unfamiliar to us in a human light, Jenny Lyn Bader’s new play, “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library,” portrays the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt finding an intellectual and spiritual connection with the German Gestapo guard who arrests her for allegedly illegal research. It is a 90-minute lesson on perceiving humanity and even dignity in all people under even the toughest of conditions.

--

By: Rafael A. Mangual

Published: Dec 9, 2024

New Yorkers concerned about public safety are breathing a sigh of relief today, after a Manhattan jury acquitted Daniel Penny of criminally negligent homicide in the May 2023 death of Jordan Neely. Aside from small groups of far-left agitators calling for Penny’s head, many observers seemed skeptical from the get-go of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s effort to imprison Penny for physically restraining Neely, who burst into a New York City subway car in the midst of a psychotic episode and began threatening and menacing riders.

The public skepticism was well founded: prosecutors should never have brought this case in the first place.

Neely was a repeat criminal offender. He had racked up some 42 prior arrests, including for assaults on women on the subway. He had a documented history of serious mental illness, worsened by repeated drug use. This isn’t to say, of course, that he deserved to die. It is to say that Neely fit the definition of a ticking time bomb. Instead of being put in jail or compelled to enter an inpatient psychiatric-care facility, he was permitted to roam the streets. This was a choice, which means that the situation in which Penny and his fellow commuters found themselves in May 2023 was the byproduct of the government’s failure—one of many such failures (lest we forget about Ramon Rivera’s alleged stabbing spree just last month).

Forcing commuters to deal with the fallout from unwise policy choices is bad enough. But for the government then to prosecute someone for a good-faith effort to navigate the dangerous situation created by those choices is a step too far for many New Yorkers.

The Penny prosecution is even harder to swallow given the evidence suggesting that perception of Neely as a threat was reasonable; that the decision to restrain him in response was also reasonable; that, whatever one makes of his specific method of restraint, Penny was not trying to kill Neely (he released him as soon as he became aware that Neely had lost consciousness and could no longer fight); and that Penny’s lack of criminal history, military service, and cooperation with authorities undermine any suggestion that the public would benefit from his incarceration.

Adding to the sense of unfairness here is the reasonable belief that Penny’s prosecution was politically motivated—the byproduct of a calculation made in response to the racialized protests following Neely’s death. (It’s worth noting, too, that Bragg rode into the DA’s office on a magic carpet of promises to be more lenient toward the kind of repeat offenders New Yorkers are sick of dealing with.)

Why would Bragg, who so strongly believes in restricting the use of prosecutions to cases with “real” public safety implications, put so much effort into trying to convict a college student and Marine Corps veteran with no criminal history for a death he obviously didn’t mean to cause, which occurred in an attempt to protect his fellow New Yorkers from Neely? Is there a better answer to this question than, because it was the most politically beneficial move for a DA who didn’t want to risk losing his “progressive” base in his reelection bid? The Penny case certainly isn’t Bragg’s first politically motivated prosecution with no obvious public-safety upside.

Making matters worse, the prosecutor who litigated the case against Penny once touted her decision to go easy on a robber who accidentally killed an elderly man by striking him during a holdup at a Manhattan ATM. Rather than pursue a felony murder charge, the prosecutor charged the man with manslaughter—the same offense Penny was charged with. Does anyone believe that Daniel Penny merited comparison with a thief who would slug a man in his eighties for a few bucks? Could Bragg not see the difference? A better question: Should New Yorkers reelect a DA who can’t?

--

==

As with Ma'Khia Bryant, it's not about whether he "deserved to die." It's the fact that he made himself dangerous and forfeited the right to safety in the process. People are allowed to protect themselves and other people from threats. Nobody is required to accept themselves as a target of violence to satisfy "racial justice."

BTW, not only did Neely have a pulse when the police were on-site, but the police declined to administer first aid.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14030841/daniel-penny-jordan-neely-chokehold-trial-nyc-subway.html

Among witnesses on the first day of evidence was an NYPD Sergeant who testified that none of his team performed mouth-to-mouth on Neely because he was a 'drug user'. 

'He seemed to be a drug user.. he was an apparent drug user. He was very dirty. I didn’t want them to get… hepatitis.

'If he did wake up he would have been vomiting. I didn’t want my officers to do that. 

'He was filthy. He looked like a homeless individual. You have to protect your officer,

'I wouldn’t want my officer to get sick if the person throws up,' he said. 

[thatonebasicfan]

My biggest issue with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the race stuff that's kinda in it. Like it's tried to make the NINETIES look like it was really racist. Like the Nineties were not nearly as bad as all the racism that we have now.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ Not a good look for somebody regarded as a "God-Emperor" by the MAGA cult.

Though Trump's unearthly hair is probably the least of his problems these days.

The 'Donald Trump show is over' says New York attorney general at civil fraud trial

"The Donald Trump show is over," (Letitia) James told reporters after the 77-year-old former president left court at the midpoint of Wednesday's proceedings. Before leaving, Trump railed against James and complained that the "rigged" trial with a judge "run by the Democrats" was keeping him off the presidential campaign trail. "I'd rather be in New Hampshire, South Carolina or Ohio or a lot of other places," Trump said. "But I'm stuck here because I have a corrupt attorney general." Responding to Trump, James said "I will not be bullied" and denounced his decision to attend the opening days of the trial as "a political stunt, a fund-raising stunt." James, who is African American, said Trump's personal attacks on her this week were "offensive, they were baseless, they were void of any facts or of any evidence. "What they were, were comments that unfortunately fomented violence, comments that I would describe as race-baiting, comments unfortunately that appeal to the bottom of our humanity. "This case was brought simply because it was a case where individuals have engaged in a pattern and practice of fraud," James said. "I will not sit idly by and allow anyone to subvert the law."

This is a civil trial, so it won't end with Trump behind bars where he belongs. 😞 But he still faces 91 counts in four indictments which could send him from Mar-a-Lago to the Rod Blagojevich Suite at the Federal Correctional Institution at Englewood, Colorado. 😃

h/t to Jimmy Kimmel for pointing out that Trump hair photo a couple of days ago.

BTW, ever notice that when Trump tries to look intimidating that he ends up looking like he's constipated? 🚽

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

The greatest trick white supremacy ever pulled was to convince working-class white people that they had a stake in it

[W]orking-class white people have historically and repeatedly been expected to underwrite the crimes of the white capital class.

[lesser-mook]

When Athletes Shut Down Woke Reporters...

Rousey handled such dumb questions so smooth, they keep baiting the ladies to feed into this gaslighting. They NEED the women to reinforce this crap to keep the division going strong, it's sick.

Keep weaponizing the daughters against the sons and for what, you think you're going to have a successful nations keeping women bitter and men frustrated.

Pure sabotage, these reporters are agents that don't realize what they're doing, they just follow orders & parrot.

[neo-cato-the-elder]

https://rumble.com/v58x479-race-bating-must-stop.html

[mc-posts]

Yes Virginia, look at how Harris labeled Joe Biden.

We hear how six or eight years ago JD wasn’t a fan of Donald Trump. He’s since taken it back. But what about what Harris said about Biden? Has she taken that back? During a 2019 Democratic presidential debate, Senator Kamala Harris directly challenged former Vice President Joe Biden’s record on race. She recounted her personal experience as a child in California who was part of the second class…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nina Golgowski at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump defended himself in a recent interview against those who think he’s racist, saying he can’t be because he has “so many” friends who are Black. “I have so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast,” he said in an interview with Semafor published Friday. “They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist — and I’m not racist!” Several Black male celebrities came to his defense in separate interviews with the news outlet. Those men included heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, retired MLB slugger Darryl Strawberry, boxing promoter Don King, and former NFL star Herschel Walker, who lost a 2022 Senate race in Georgia. Trump listed his “strength” and others’ desire to be like him as reasons that these men speak so warmly about him. “They see what I’ve done and they see strength, they want strength, okay,” Trump said. “They want strength, they want security. They want jobs, they want to have their jobs. They don’t want to have millions of people come and take their jobs.”

Trump’s response follows a long history of race-baiting. In the late 1980s, the now-presidential candidate called for the death penalty in full-page advertisements, after five Black New York teens were accused of rape. (All were later exonerated.) More recently, after President Barack Obama’s election, he helped spearhead a conspiracy that the first Black U.S. president was born in Kenya and not the U.S. He defended attendees of the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.” He indiscriminately smeared Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S. border as criminals and rapists and he championed a ban on migrants from several Muslim-majority countries.

Noted racist Donald Trump stated in an interview with Semafor that he has “so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends.”

The “I have Black friends, so therefore I can’t be racist” trope is a load of white privilege, especially considering Trump’s long history of anti-Black racism and racism in general.

[kittyrinn-aiko]

When race-baiting goes horribly wrong.

The Carren who accused this little kid of racism for clicks doubled down on their entitled rhetoric even though the kid's grandfather, Raul Armenta, sits on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, California.

The kid dressed up to support his team, and these novelty headdresses are for sale in many tribal-run gift shops. The kid has Native American heritage, I'd think he can wear the headdress if he wants to. The facepaint is also something indigenous people did and still do.

[klanced]

can we start placing bets about the live action voltron movie. everyone download draftkings right now

[penguinlover27]

Charlie Kirk is a right-wing propagandist and appears to be a pathological liar, a trait that goes hand-in-hand with that line of work. He’s one of the leaders of the fascist Turning Point USA group.

If you have the stomach to watch the video referred to in the article, you will hear Kirk assert that the reason that the train derailment happened is because the Biden administration, the Secretary of Transportation and the entire 80+ million of us who voted for Democrats in the last election hate white people, specifically working people.

This is, of course, utter and complete nonsense. It does serve, however, to further the grievance-based politics that is very much a part of the fascist MAGA movement. It is propaganda intended to lure working class white men to join their cause, against their own self-interests.

The train derailment and the associated chemical exposure is indeed a serious and tragic situation, but it is wrong to assert that the situation is not being taken seriously because of some ideological campaign against white people.

I happen to be a white man and can assure you that my support of Democrats and my overall political leanings to the left are not based in hatred of my own whiteness or for working people in general. In fact, the opposite is true: I support Democrats and left-leaning causes specifically because I support working-class people of all races, creeds and colors.

It is stomach-turning to watch these propagandists use situations like the train derailment to not only spread false and incorrect information, but to assert without any evidence whatsoever that there is a massive conspiracy against working-class whites. That belief is based on the mistaken belief that any advances made by POC, the LGBT+ community, etc. are won only by taking away rights and privileges of white, heterosexual, Christian conservatives.

In any case, don’t buy the poison that Charlie Kirk and his fellow propagandists and fascists are spewing on the internet and over the airwaves. It’s nothing but codswollop and hot air. More lies from the lying liars on the right. 

[tomorrowusa]

Don't risk a rerun of the 2000 election.

In the first presidential election of the 21st century many deluded progressives voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

Their foolishness gave us eight years of George W. Bush who plagued the country with two recessions (including the Great Recession) and two wars (one totally unnecessary and one which could have been avoided if he heeded an intelligence brief 5 weeks before 9/11).

Oh yeah, Dubya also appointed one conservative and one batshit crazy reactionary to the US Supreme Court. Roberts and Alito are still there.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post offers some thoughts.

Why leftists should work their hearts out for Biden in 2024

Ask a Democrat with a long memory what the numbers 97,488 and 537 represent, and their face will twist into a grimace. The first is the number of votes Ralph Nader received in Florida in 2000 as the nominee of the Green Party; the second is the margin by which George W. Bush was eventually certified the winner of the state, handing him the White House. Now, with President Biden gearing up for reelection, talk of a spoiler candidate from the left is again in the air. That’s unfortunate, because here’s the truth: The past 2½ years under Biden have been a triumph for progressivism, even if it’s not in most people’s interest to admit it. This was not what most people expected from Biden, who ran as a relative moderate in the 2020 Democratic primary. His nomination was a victory for pragmatism with its eyes directed toward the center. But today, no one can honestly deny that Biden is the most progressive president since at least Lyndon B. Johnson. His judicial appointments are more diverse than those of any of his predecessors. He has directed more resources to combating climate change than any other president. Notwithstanding the opposition from the Supreme Court, his administration has moved aggressively to forgive and restructure student loans.

Three years ago the economy was in horrible shape because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic. Now unemployment is steadily below 4%, job creation continues to exceed expectations, and wages are rising as unions gain strength. The post-pandemic, post-Afghan War inflation rate has receded to near normal levels; people in the 1970s would have sold their souls for a 3.2% (and dropping) inflation rate. And many of the effects of "Bidenomics" have yet to kick in.

And in a story that is criminally underappreciated, his administration’s policy reaction to the covid-induced recession of 2020 was revolutionary in precisely the ways any good leftist should favor. It embraced massive government intervention to stave off the worst economic impacts, including handing millions of families monthly checks (by expanding the child tax credit), giving all kids in public schools free meals, boosting unemployment insurance and extending health coverage to millions.

It worked. While inflation rose (as it did worldwide), the economy’s recovery has been blisteringly fast. It took more than six years for employment rates to return to what they were before the Great Recession hit in 2008, but we surpassed January 2020 jobs levels by the spring of 2022 — and have kept adding jobs ever since. To the idealistic leftist, that might feel like both old news and a partial victory at best. What about everything supporters of Bernie Sanders have found so thrilling about the Vermont senator’s vision of the future, from universal health care to free college? It’s true Biden was never going to deliver that, but to be honest, neither would Sanders had he been elected president. And that brings me to the heart of how people on the left ought to think about Biden and his reelection.

Biden has gotten things done. The US economy is doing better than those of almost every other advanced industrialized country.

Our rivals China and Russia are both worse off than they were three years ago. And NATO is not just united, it's growing.

Sadly, we still need to deal with a far right MAGA cult at home who would wreck the country just to get its own way.

Biden may be elderly and unexciting, but that is one of the reasons he won in 2020. Many people just wanted an end to the daily drama of Trump's capricious and incompetent rule by tweet. And a good portion of those people live in places that count greatly in elections – suburbs and exurbs.

Superhero films seem to be slipping in popularity. Hopefully that's a sign that voters are less likely to embrace self-appointed political messiahs to save them from themselves.

Good governance is a steady process – not a collection of magic tricks. Experienced and competent individuals who are not too far removed from the lives of the people they represent are the best people to have in government.

Paul Waldman concludes his column speaking from the heart as a liberal...

I’ve been in and around politics for many years, and even among liberals, I’ve almost always been one of the most liberal people in the room. Yet only since Biden’s election have I realized that I will probably never see a president as liberal as I’d like. It’s not an easy idea to make peace with. But it suggests a different way of thinking about elections — as one necessary step in a long, difficult process. The further you are to the left, the more important Biden’s reelection ought to be to you. It might require emotional (and policy) compromise, but for now, it’s also the most important tool you have to achieve progressive ends.

Exactly. Rightwingers take the long view. It took them 49 years but they eventually got Roe v. Wade overturned. To succeed, we need to look upon politics as an extended marathon rather as one short sprint.

Republicans may currently be bickering, but they will most likely unite behind whichever anti-abortion extremist they nominate.

It's necessary to get the word out now that the only way to defeat climate-denying, abortion-restricting, assault weapon-loving, race-baiting, homophobic Republicans is to vote Democratic.

[airasilver]

Anon, you are so out of touch I have no clue what to tell you here.

#6020

People being angry about racebending are the problem. If you want to hate poc in the fandoms created and run by poc, maybe you should get out and leave our safe space. Fandom is made by and for poc so they can have an escape from reality, but hard to do that when the racists flood in to push us out.

STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT RACEBENDING!

BLACKWASHING DOES NOT EXIST AND IS NOT THE SAME AS WHITEWASHING!

BLACKWASHING IS DONE WITH RESPECT AND LOVE FOR A CHARACTER AND THEIR FANDOM WHILE WHITEWASHING IS DONE OUT OF HATE FOR A CHARACTER!

Posting as a response to a previous problem.

[backmarkerbaby]

And if I said I teared up at the end of the sprint today, what then?

[mc-posts]

Yes Virginia, look at how Harris labeled Joe Biden.

We hear how six or eight years ago JD wasn’t a fan of Donald Trump. He’s since taken it back. But what about what Harris said about Biden? Has she taken that back? During a 2019 Democratic presidential debate, Senator Kamala Harris directly challenged former Vice President Joe Biden’s record on race. She recounted her personal experience as a child in California who was part of the second class…