#where I live is 94 percent white I never ever see people from other countries

[soliusss]

helping a customer with a heavy accent who doesn’t speak a lot of English VS helping a middle aged white woman

[skypalacearchitect]

Sandy Saeteurn grew up in Richmond, California, where Chevron’s massive 3,000-acre oil refinery reigns supreme. She’s no stranger to the refinery’s chemical flares, and she spent many of her childhood days home sick. She’s not the only one who has learned to link the refinery and the presence of illness in her community: A 2008 study (co-authored by Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch) found that almost half of all homes in the area had indoor levels of refinery-related particulate matter pollution that exceeded the state’s air quality standards.

Every day for nearly 120 years — longer than the city has existed — the refinery has processed thousands of barrels of oil. Its flares regularly paint the sky burnt orange before thick grey clouds of smoke cover the city. Chevron’s influence stretches beyond its pollution and the 3,500 refinery jobs it provides as the city’s largest employer — it also showers money on local elections and even runs a local newspaper, the Richmond Standard, which has been known to cast a positive light on the company.

Ever since Black residents first arrived in large numbers in the 1940s, people of color have been relegated into low-quality housing surrounding the city’s large industrial zones. Today the city, which is 82 percent non-white and home to large groups of migrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, has worse air pollution than 94 percent of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has cited the refinery for environmental violations roughly 150 times since 2016. The city’s childhood asthma rate is more than double the national average and, in the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the refinery in 2012, more than 15,000 people were forced to seek medical treatment for respiratory distress.

Chevron funds around one-third of Richmond’s annual budget through taxes and municipal services the company provides, which includes education and workforce development programs. When the company wanted to modernize its facility in 2008, it offered the city $11 million for the Richmond Police Department to “increase the number of police officers on the street,” according to a document outlining Chevron’s community benefits agreements with the city. The modernization project was eventually blocked after community groups sued the city for failing to do a proper environmental impact analysis, but a 2015 agreement between Richmond and Chevron ultimately set aside $2 million for Richmond police. Over the past decade, Richmond police have arrested hundreds for protesting the plant’s emissions.

As a child, Saeteurn and her family didn’t think to connect the Chevron plant and their disposition to illness. “Growing up there was a lot of explosion drills, and we never understood what they meant,” Saeteurn told Grist. “In elementary school, Chevron would come and have certain programs for kids, giving us money for books and school supplies. I left elementary school thinking ‘oh wow, Chevron’s a great company,’ when in reality they were slowly killing us.”

Saeteurn’s lighthearted view of Chevron didn’t last long. By age 14, she was a dedicated organizer and member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, which is based in both Richmond and nearby Oakland. She’s used her struggles against environmental injustices to fuel her work, helping to organize influential campaigns such as the first-ever county-wide multilingual warning system, which now warns Richmond residents of looming chemical flares in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Lao.

In response to questions from Grist, Chevron provided a statement saying that its Richmond workforce “takes its role as good neighbors seriously and continually works to reduce our environmental footprint and to improve reliability.” The statement listed modernization projects, such as a new hydrogen processing unit, which have contributed to reducing the site’s “air emissions by 86 percent over the last 40 years,” according to the company.

Because of the way issues like a growing housing crisis, immigration, and police violence intersect in the San Francisco Bay area — where more than 350 refineries and fossil fuel companies are based — Saeteurn and other organizers at APEN have been at the forefront of reframing the environmental justice movement to incorporate all aspects of residents’ encounters with their lived environments, whether that’s unwanted interactions with the police or gentrification and the displacement of poorer people from their home communities. This is a reimagining of the traditional focuses of environmental organizations that have long prioritized organizing around issues like toxic waste or access to public parks, while leaving issues like housing and criminal justice to different organizations.

“We think of environmental justice as being about how our communities get to be in relationship with our environment,” Alvina Wong, APEN’s campaign and organizing director, told Grist. “That means trees, air, and water — but also our neighborhoods, our homes, and how we get to be in relationship with each other.”

Saeteurn, a local political director with the group, said that this message resonates with the residents APEN serves.

“When the community talks about the environment, they’re not talking about clean air or water — what they’re really talking about is their struggles,” she explained. “So when we talk with the community about how the environment is impacting them, they’re not saying ‘oh yeah, Chevron’s in my backyard.’ They’re saying, ‘I can’t afford my rent. Oh yeah, the energy bill is going up and now I can’t afford food.’”

Besides continuing a long struggle with Chevron in Richmond, APEN has also been a crucial part of recent campaigns to move millions of dollars away from Richmond and Oakland police to do things like building new supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness and mental illness, as well as increasing residents’ access to healthy food through affordable markets. The organization has worked on recent campaigns for rent control and tenant rights in both cities, including mutual aid projects to crowdsource funds for rent and food for community members. It has fought to pass the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which would grant tenants two months notice and the first opportunity to purchase their home if their landlord plans to put their building on the market.

“Our work is trying to make the connection to a bigger kind of struggle related to racism,” said Saeteurn. “We’re here next to a refinery because of racism, which is the same reason why our members get stopped by the police or harassed on the streets. Environmental justice is about who we can call community, and what access we have to the environment around us.”

APEN came to fruition after a proposal at the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit in 1991, when summit participants noticed that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were largely underrepresented. The summit was attended by activists from everywhere from Puerto Rico to Vietnam and Laos, as well as other territories struggling with American chemical waste. During and following the American bombing of Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Southeast Asian migrants fled to the Bay area and Richmond in particular. Connecting the dots between environmental injustices in America and the environmental fallout from American firebombing and the use of Agent Orange in their home countries, Bay area delegates decided to form an organization centered on the leadership of Asian immigrant and refugee communities.

“APEN is so successful because our organizing incorporates our cultural heritage and our own legacy fighting aggression and chemical warfare in our homelands,” Wong said. “For us, this memory of how our homelands were affected both physically and culturally by environmental violence and war allows us to really address the root causes of injustice.”

Since 1991, APEN has been an unstoppable organizing force, working to pass bills mitigating pollution, like SB32, which in 2016 laid the foundation for many greenhouse gas emission goals we see today. In 2018, they were part of a coalition that helped push Chevron to pay out a $5 million settlement for its 2012 explosion. Most recently, APEN helped spearhead the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force in Richmond, which just passed a reallocation of $10 million away from Richmond police to fund various community services. (In a short phone interview with Grist, Richmond Mayor Tom Butt acknowledged Chevron’s mighty role in city life and said that the city council is doing everything in its power to act as a counterweight to the fossil fuel giant.)

APEN is hardly alone in its expansive approach to environmental justice. It’s a member of the California Environmental Justice Alliance, which includes Bay area groups like Communities for a Better Environment, or CBE, and People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights, or PODER. Two weeks ago, APEN, CBE, and PODER led Richmond’s participation in the 8th annual Global Anti-Chevron day of protest, drawing more than 100 people who participated in chants and painted murals in front of the refinery to protest the refinery’s emissions and hold it accountable for its alleged commitment to racial justice.

Denny Khamphanthong, an APEN community organizer who worked on the campaign to reallocate funds from Richmond’s police budget, says APEN’s approach to justice is not only about saving the environment around him, but also about building a safer future for his family’s next generations.

“What we’re all trying to do is build a better world so that our community can thrive,” Khamphanthong told Grist, “which requires our community to be funded and resourced in a way that feels most important to us, whether it be less police on our streets or less pollution in our air.”

[orbemnews]

Barefoot Dreams and the Conquest of Cozy The first time Amanda John glimpsed a Barefoot Dreams blanket, she was watching “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” “Khloé was wearing her little leopard blanket and I was like, ‘What is that?’ Then, when I Googled it, I had a little bit of sticker shock,” said Ms. John, 32, who lives in Atlanta and whose blog, Strawberry Chic, focuses on “sharing style for the everyday girly girl.” Ms. John received a gift card, then waited for a sale, to finally buy her own. Now, “I have two or three of the blankets, maybe. I have a robe. I think two cardigans,” she said. “I’m pregnant right now with my first, and I’ve even got her first Barefoot Dreams blanket ready to go.” To look at the unassuming blob of oatmeal-colored fuzz is not to understand why celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Kate Hudson and Chrissy Teigen swaddle themselves in Barefoot Dreams; why the blankets consistently sell out during Nordstrom’s big annual sale; why bloggers, influencers and YouTubers painstakingly weigh the $180 price tag with their followers. But after a brutal winter, closing out Year 1 of a pandemic, many have sought relief in the nubby fabric: a nation of Linuses with blankets spread across laptopped laps, grasped tight in anxious fingers. “It is the ultimate comfort lifestyle brand,” Melia McGee, the merchandise director of home goods at Nordstrom, wrote in an email of Barefoot Dreams. “We see a lot of repeat customers for the brand who may start out by purchasing an entry item like pair of slippers, and expand their collection to include multiple throw blankets for every room in their house.” “That’s obviously where I’ve spent more of my money — having this sense of feeling comfortable and cozy during a time that is kind of traumatic,” said Kelsey Boyanzhu, 29, who blogs for Blondes & Bagels in San Francisco. “I make money from affiliate links on my website and I’ve absolutely seen a shift. I saw traffic to some of my most popular fashion posts plummet off a cliff.” But her December 2020 post, “Are Barefoot Dreams Blankets Worth It?” is now one of her most popular. “We’re not necessarily looking for a handbag in the same way that we’re looking for a blanket,” she said. Indeed. ‘It’s Very Spongy’ While Barefoot Dreams only recently seems to be everywhere, it was actually founded in 1995 by Annette Cook, a mother of young children who started a line of baby clothes and products from her garage in Burbank, Calif. She traveled to trade shows in Las Vegas and boutiques around the country, and she trademarked the term “CozyChic” in 2002. In 2003, Oprah Winfrey named the robe one of her “favorite things.” Ms. Cook died in 2012 from cancer, but her husband, Stan, has remained on as C.E.O., her brother-in-law Steve serves as sales director, and her son Grayson, 25, has joined the business. “She put her whole life into this,” Steve Cook said. “She hasn’t seen what it is today, but she had a pretty good idea of what was happening and where it was going.” Thanks in part to the company’s P.R. firm, Rogers & Cowan, a parade of celebrities now post Barefoot Dreams blankets; here’s Kate Hudson’s teenage son, Ryder, sprawled on a white throw, or Chrissy Teigen’s toddlers with creamy leopard print puddled at their feet. “I use mine 365. It stretches and wraps over your shoulders and feet and nothing else compares,” Ms. Teigen tweeted about her blanket in 2019. She has also touted a full outfit, top and bottoms, from the line in Instagram Stories. “She even said, ‘Oh, if you make a scrunchie, I will wear a scrunchie, too,’” said Frederic Barrouquere, the sales manager at Barefoot Dreams. “Well, we’re going to do some scrunchies!” QVC reported strong sales of Barefoot Dreams apparel in the pandemic, especially the wrap and cardigans, and Mr. Cook said that with “everybody dressing down and wanting to get comfy,” the company did exceptionally well last year and vowed “this year, we’re going to be double that.” The Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe said she has been “a forever fan” of the company, especially the ponchos. “Their robes also make the best gifts,” she said. The exceptional softness of the polyester microfiber fabric is what seems to make fans at first touch. “The hand feel is definitely unique. It’s very spongy,” Ms. Boyanzhu said. “I haven’t felt a fabric quite the same as that.” ‘The Coastal Vibe’ “This is not your father’s polyester,” said Deborah Young, a textile historian and professor at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, of the fabric used to make Barefoot Dreams. “Microfiber is incredibly fine, like silk. We never managed to imitate silk chemically, but ultimately came closer by making one finer than silk.” Of course, Barefoot Dreams isn’t the only manufacturer of synthetic fluff. Its competitors have similarly dreamy names. Urban Outfitters offers a “Stargazer” knit throw in nubby gray, while Target’s “Stars Above” line has a velvety cream chenille robe. Even Sam’s Club has found fuzz fans with its Crafted by Catherine throw, a steal at $30. “I know I personally have tons of fuzzy socks and blankets around my house, so we wanted to add in something that we were really shopping for,” said Tori Gerbig, the C.E.O. of Pink Lily, a company that sells a $94 leopard print blanket. Pink Lily started offering more soft “stay-at-home basics” last fall. Many of these products echo the dusty palette or instantly recognizable animal pattern of Barefoot Dreams. “It really goes with the Malibu vibe, the coastal vibe,” Mr. Barrouquere said of the color scheme; the brand distinguishes colors like “graphite,” “stone,” “pewter” and “beach rock,” all subtle variations on gray-taupe — or dishwater, if feeling uncharitable. As bloggers breathlessly catalog the best dupes, the company has began running a banner on its home page warning customers of unauthorized sellers. “Wash it! That’s where the others fall apart,” Mr. Cook said. The popularity of these fluffy products — and that very machine washability — scares environmentalists, who in recent years have observed the horrors of certain synthetic fabrics on the global water supply. “Polyester in general and microfiber especially are really under scrutiny right now because of their environmental impact,” said Patrice George, a professor of textile development at FIT, who cringes at Barefoot Dreams’ beachy website and aesthetic. “All those little tiny microfibers go into the waters and they’re polluting the ocean.” It’s the very delicacy of the synthetic textile that makes it more likely to shed and shred in the washing machine, she said, “but they do feel great.” The effect can be mitigated by washing the blanket or apparel inside a microfiber-catching gadget, like the Cora Ball or Guppyfriend bag. Later this year, Barefoot Dreams will release EcoChic, a new product line made with 70 percent recycled fabric. “Textiles have always had that dichotomy of protection and revelation,” Ms. Young said. “On the one hand, what you’re wearing reveals who you are, but on the other hand, when we go home, we always crawl under the blankets. There’s something so secure about that.” “Security” is a word Mr. Barrouquere returns to as well. “You know when you’re a baby and you’re carrying one everywhere?” he said. “That’s why people get really addicted to our product. You want the sweater, you want the socks, you want the slippers. We’re just taking you throughout the day.” Ms. Boyanzhu understands that Barefoot Dreams may not be achieved, or even desired, by everyone. “The reality is, I don’t know that there’s ever going to be a way for me to say that a $180 blanket is worth it,” she said. “So I want to acknowledge that. Do I regret my blanket purchase? No.” Source link Orbem News #barefoot #conquest #Cozy #Dreams

[cactusrefun1d-blog]

Former President George H.W. Bush Dies at 94

George Herbert Walker Bush, who as the 41st president guided the United States out of the Cold War and led an international coalition into the Gulf War, has died. He was 94. 

Bush died at 10:10 p.m. Friday, according to a statement from family spokesman Jim McGrath.

"Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro, and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died," said former President George W. Bush in a statement. "George H. W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens."

Bush's final words were to his son George W. on Friday night, a source close to the family told NBC News. George W. Bush was on speakerphone to say goodbye to his father, telling him he had been a “wonderful dad” and that he loved him.

“I love you, too,” H.W. Bush replied.

The former president was quickly remembered as a humble patriot, dedicated public servant and beloved family man by President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama and others.

"Through his essential authenticity, disarming wit, and unwavering commitment to faith, family, and country, President Bush inspired generations of his fellow Americans to public service—to be, in his words, 'a thousand points of light' illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world," Trump and first lady Melania Trump said in a statement."

Bush was a World War II naval pilot who survived being shot down over the Pacific, led the CIA and spent eight years as vice president before taking the Oval Office. He was the father of the 43rd president, George W. Bush.

His wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush, who used her time as the first lady to advocate for literacy, died on April 17. 

George H.W. Bush became the first former U.S. president to turn 94 on June 12. The nation's 41st president was receiving calls and taking it easy at his seaside home in Maine eight days after being released from a hospital where he was treated for low blood pressure, said Chief of Staff Jean Becker.

Bush's office shared a birthday letter from the president in which he said, "My heart is full on the first day of my 95th year."

"As many of you know, for years I have said the three most important things in life are faith, family and friends. My faith has never been stronger," the former president wrote in the letter.

Several of his children had been in town, including former President George W. Bush, who posted a smiling photo of the two of them on Instagram.

"I'm a lucky man to be named for George Bush and to be with `41' on his 94th birthday," wrote Bush, the nation's 43rd president.

"I already miss the greatest human being that I will ever know. Love you Dad!" son John "Jeb" Bush wrote on Twitter.

Another son, Neil Bush, called on people in a newspaper opinion piece to volunteer and "to become a point of light."

H.W. Bush, a Republican who served as President Ronald Reagan's vice president for two terms, was elected to the country's highest office in 1988. He beat Democrat Michael Dukakis in an electoral landslide and with 54 percent of the popular vote.

In his inaugural presidential address, Bush spoke of "a thousand points of light" across the country, community organizations that were doing good and with which he promised to work. He pledged in "a moment rich with promise" to use American strength as "a force for good." 

A member of a longtime politically influential American family, Bush led the United States during a time of intense international change, including the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and turmoil in the Middle East. His public approval rating soared to 89 percent after he presided over a U.S.-led coalition of 32 countries that drove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army from Kuwait in 1991. After signing a strategic arms reduction agreement to reduce nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush accomplished a second agreement in early January 1993 with Russian President Boris Yeltsin after the USSR collapsed. 

"Even as president, with the most fascinating possible vantage point, there were times when I was so busy managing progress and helping to lead change that I didn't always show the joy that was in my heart," Bush said in his final State of the Union address. "But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." 

Despite his strength in foreign policy, Bush was ultimately limited to a single term as president over a sputtering U.S. economy. The unemployment rate, at 5.3 percent during his first year in office, rose to 7.4 percent in 1992. Confronted with rising deficits, Bush famously signed a bill that raised taxes despite the Republican's earlier campaign vow: "Read my lips: no new taxes." His public approval, once sky-high, plummeted in his final year in office to below 50 percent. 

While he lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992, his work laid a foundation for his son George W. Bush to win the White House in 2000.

"Two presidents in one family, that's pretty good," George H.W. Bush told his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager for a "Today" interview on his 88th birthday. 

Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, lost a bid for the Republican nomination in 2016 to Trump. Bush even saw his grandson, George P. Bush, enter politics. The Fort Worth resident won the position of Texas land commissioner in March 2014. 

George H.W. Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. He was raised in Connecticut by his mother Dorothy Walker Bush, and his father, Prescott Bush, who served as a U.S. senator. 

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bush enlisted in the military on his 18th birthday and became the Navy's youngest pilot at the time. He flew 58 combat missions in World War II before being shot down by the Japanese in 1944. Bush was rescued by a submarine and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in action. 

Back home, Bush married Barbara Pierce on Jan. 6, 1945, and the couple went on to have six children; George, Pauline (who was known as "Robin" and died as a child of leukemia), Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. 

Bush was accepted to Yale University before enlistment, and once stateside, enrolled in an accelerated program that allowed him to graduate in two and a half years instead of four. While at Yale, the left-handed first baseman played in the first College World Series. 

In 1948, Bush graduated from the university with a bachelor of arts degree in economics. He moved the family to West Texas and achieved success in the oil industry, but like his father, he was drawn to politics. 

After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 1964, Bush won a House seat in 1966 representing Houston. He was re-elected in 1968 but gave up his seat two years later to run for the Senate again, and lost to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.

Bush was appointed to a string of government positions in the 1970s, including United Nations ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, envoy to China, and CIA director. At the CIA he was credited with boosting morale. 

In 1980, Bush made a run for the White House, but the Republican Party nominated Reagan, who selected Bush as his running mate. The match was a good one. The pair went to Washington in 1981 and won a landslide re-election victory four years later.

As vice-president, Bush traveled the world, pushing his anti-drug programs and became the first vice president to stand in as president while Reagan underwent surgery in 1985. Bush spent most of the eight hours on the tennis court. 

Then, after eight years of loyalty, Bush tried again for the Oval Office. 

Bush chose Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate. At the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Bush made the "no new taxes" pledge that would spark a backlash among some Republicans when he later reversed course.

In 1988, Bush defeated Michael Dukakis and his running mate, Texas nemesis Lloyd Bentsen. He was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 1989. 

Bush’s high popularity in the wake of a decision to send American troops into Panama to bring General Manuel Noriega to face drug charges in the U.S, and later the Persian Gulf War, would prove ephemeral. 

Bush described his defeat in his re-election bid as having given him a "terrible feeling, awful feeling."

"I really wanted to win and worked hard. And later on, people said, 'well he didn’t really care', which is crazy," he told his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager on "Today." "I worked my heart out and it was terrible to adjust. Well then you figure life goes on." 

After leaving office, Bush returned to private life by splitting his time between Kennebunkport, Maine, and Houston. It was not uncommon to see Bush 41 at a Houston Astros baseball game.

In 2005, he teamed up with his former rival, Bill Clinton, to raise money for relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami.

His son George W. Bush published "41: A Portrait of My Father," in 2014, a wide-ranging and intimate biography of his father. In an interview on "Today" with his son and his granddaughter Bush Hager, the elder Bush talked about the intersection of family memories and key political events in their lives. 

Asked about his presidential legacy, Bush said that he'd banned the use of "the legacy word." 

"I think history will get it right, and point out the things I did wrong, and perhaps some of the things we did right," he said. 

In recent years, Bush was hospitalized because of various ailments. He broke a bone in his neck when he fell in his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and suffered from shortness of breath and a bronchitis-related cough and other issues in Houston.

Bush also made headlines in recent years for skydiving on at least three of his birthdays, according to The Associated Press, the last on his 90th, when he made a tandem parachute jump in Kennebunkport, Maine. In the summer of 2016, Bush led a group of 40 wounded warriors on a fishing trip at the helm of his speedboat, three days after his 92nd birthday celebration.

And he made headlines in July 2013 when he shaved his head in support of a little boy — the son of a member of his Secret Service detail — battling leukemia. Later that summer, he was honored at a White House event celebrating volunteerism. 

Bush put his presidential library at Texas A&M University in College Station and his name now is on the CIA headquarters, Houston's largest airport and a North Texas toll road.

There is also an aircraft carrier that bears his name. In 2009, Bush 41 and Bush 43 attended the commissioning of the USS George H.W. Bush, the 10th and last Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy. 

Bush had the distinction of being one of only three U.S. presidents to receive an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama in 2011. 

Bush is survived by two siblings, his five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife of 73 years, Barbara; his second child, Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush; and brothers Prescott and William “Bucky” Bush.

He told Bush Hager that he was happiest while spending time with his family at sea. 

"Aging is all right," he said in June 2012. "It's better than the alternative, which is not being here."

Air Force One is being sent to Texas to transport Bush's casket to Washington, where his body will lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. The public can pay their respects from Monday evening through Wednesday morning.

Bush will be buried Thursday on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University at the family plot next to his wife Barbara, who died in April, and their 3-year-old daughter Robin, who died in 1953. The Bush family is still arranging funeral services, but the White House said President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump plan to attend.

Source: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/Former-President-George-HW-Bush-Dies-184974861.html

[6dogs9cats]

Today we live in a polling bubble – surveys taken from the perches in New York, Washington and Los Angeles may be obscuring rather than illuminating many of the underlying views and trends of the American electorate. How else can one explain that although many polls showed a close race last November, almost no one (myself included) predicted a lopsided victory for Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Most media analysts and modelers concluded a Hillary Clinton victory was in the bag. One Princeton professor even agreed to eat a bug if Trump won. As President Trump enters his 100th day, several of the same organizations are using their polls to proclaim that he has had the worst start of any modern president and the worst ratings of a president at this time in his presidency. While Trump is no FDR when it comes to forming a political coalition, a fairer reading of the polls and the election results shows his performance is probably 5 or 6 points better than is being touted and that his base of support with which he won the election remains intact. There are several reasons for this mismatch between likely reality and the interpretations we are seeing. Most polls have moved away from voters or likely voters to U.S. adults with no screen for registration or even citizenship. And the questions often focus on storylines and narratives critical of Trump. Rarely are they written from the perspective of having missed the major swings and economic discontent that upended the election. The current crop of stories also sets Trump ratings expectations, as though America went through the typical process of coming together around the winner. Instead we had recounts, Russian conspiracies, investigations and rallies unlike any seen after any election. The country was sharply politically divided on Election Day and remains that way today. That is the backdrop of any realistic assessment of what is happening in America. But there are some facts and trends that are being missed in the polls. First, Trump is likely NOT at 40 percent approval with the American electorate. He is likely higher. Trump got 46.1 percent of the popular vote, several million votes less than Clinton did, but neither candidate got a majority. Six million voters opted for a libertarian candidate and most of those votes would never go to a liberal Democrat. And when all of the congressional votes were tallied, Republicans got 3 million more votes than the Democrats and won a majority of both the popular vote and of the seats in Congress. The recent special election in Georgia came out about the same as the Trump/Hillary vote, with Republicans nosing out Democrats. As The Washington Post poll reported, a replay of the Trump/Hillary race would today come out more for Trump than Hillary. So what is the disconnect between polls that show his job rating at 40 and the electoral results? The major network polls all now report “U.S adults” as the sampling frame, not people who voted in the last election or expect to vote in the next one. The non-voters include 11 million undocumented aliens and a lot of folks who liked neither candidate and stayed home, as well as younger people who have lower rates of participation. These polls should not be confused with the views of the American electorate. If you look just at the past voters, Trump is holding his base – The Washington Post said that 94 percent of Trump voters approve of the job he is doing. That would be 43.1 percent of the voting electorate. Trump then conservatively gets 10 percent approval from the remaining voters (30 percent from voters to other candidates and 8 percent among Clinton voters) which would give him another 5 percent or about 48 percent approval among the group that voted in the last election. That’s a more realistic assessment. And attitudes towards the economy are surging, which is usually good news for whoever occupies the White House. Third, the media echo chamber has, I think, made it more difficult for people to express their political views, especially to live interviewers. With the growing gender gap, I’m not sure most men are even telling their spouses or partners what their real views are on the president. In a recent Harvard Harris poll we did, only about 60 percent in the country now feel free enough to express their views to friends and family. Consequently, it's no surprise that polls done online show a consistently better picture for Trump than most live interviewer polling, and today reaching America through the phone is an increasingly difficult task compared to new methods available through the internet. But another piece of this polling bubble is also created by the narrow questioning in many of the polls. Many of the hot-button issues and expressions Trump uses are rarely if ever polled compared to questions about Russian election interference. No major poll in five years had polled on the support for local law enforcement contacting immigration authorities when they arrest someone, for instance. While many polls have picked up the genuine sympathy Americans have for “Dreamers” or for those who work hard and pay taxes, none of the polls examined what they think should be done with undocumented aliens who are arrested for crimes, or the deep support out there for something like Kate’s law. Trump campaigned on a unique set of issues that indicted bad trade deals for economic dislocation, supported the police over the Black Lives Matter movement, called for making NATO members pay their fair share, and deporting criminal undocumented aliens. He called for repeal and replacing ObamaCare, lower taxes, more immigration police and a border wall paid for by Mexico. You will find plenty of polling on what a bad idea Americans think the wall is and on the “Muslim ban” (often without even mentioning security), but where is the polling on the rest of his themes and messages? On the power of “Buy American, Hire American”? On tax cuts to stimulate jobs? In the end, Trump had a fairly powerful message that spoke to a lot of voters. He is now attempting to turn that message into policy. So far, the results have been mixed. The Ryan healthcare plan was neither fish nor fowl and didn't immediately lower premiums, making ObamaCare look better. The executive order on immigration was a Steve Bannon-led disaster. But despite these two clear setbacks, we should not be too quick to dismiss and trivialize the overall power of the rest of his message. That was the ultimate mistake of 2016 and the polling bubble: The election turned not on Hollywood Access or Huma Abadein’s laptop, it turned on serious issues too easily dismissed by polling focused on Trump’s temperament, conflict of interest, tweets and Russian conspiracies. And because none of the pollsters or analysts saw it that way, they concluded that Trump, the developer/entertainer, could not possibly win even if the polls had in fact tightened up. So as we enter the second hundred days, Trump has not crossed the 50 percent mark to expand his base, but he is also not down at 40 percent. On key issues he has a lot of support, especially when it comes to America being taken advantage of by its allies and trading partners, failing to stand up to its red lines, and the need for change that drains the corruption and gridlock of Washington. Don’t let the polling bubble obscure the fact that the forces – pro and con – that produced the surprise upset last November are just as powerful today. IT'S NOT TRUMP, well it is but MOSTLY, It's his supporters and mostly the people who see Bernie as the "only" person who has the answer "to everything" even when his actions or votes have done otherwise. When the majority in this country are Bystanders and 70% of the millennial generation refuses to vote, be involved or care about the future....it's a anarchists recipe for disaster.

[cordlock7-blog]

Former President George H.W. Bush Dies at 94

George Herbert Walker Bush, who as the 41st president guided the United States out of the Cold War and led an international coalition into the Gulf War, has died. He was 94. 

Bush died at 10:10 p.m. Friday, according to a statement from family spokesman Jim McGrath.

"Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro, and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died," said former President George W. Bush in a statement. "George H. W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens."

Bush's final words were to his son George W. on Friday night, a source close to the family told NBC News. George W. Bush was on speakerphone to say goodbye to his father, telling him he had been a “wonderful dad” and that he loved him.

“I love you, too,” H.W. Bush replied.

The former president was quickly remembered as a humble patriot, dedicated public servant and beloved family man by President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama and others.

"Through his essential authenticity, disarming wit, and unwavering commitment to faith, family, and country, President Bush inspired generations of his fellow Americans to public service—to be, in his words, 'a thousand points of light' illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world," Trump and first lady Melania Trump said in a statement."

Bush was a World War II naval pilot who survived being shot down over the Pacific, led the CIA and spent eight years as vice president before taking the Oval Office. He was the father of the 43rd president, George W. Bush.

His wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush, who used her time as the first lady to advocate for literacy, died on April 17. 

George H.W. Bush became the first former U.S. president to turn 94 on June 12. The nation's 41st president was receiving calls and taking it easy at his seaside home in Maine eight days after being released from a hospital where he was treated for low blood pressure, said Chief of Staff Jean Becker.

Bush's office shared a birthday letter from the president in which he said, "My heart is full on the first day of my 95th year."

"As many of you know, for years I have said the three most important things in life are faith, family and friends. My faith has never been stronger," the former president wrote in the letter.

Several of his children had been in town, including former President George W. Bush, who posted a smiling photo of the two of them on Instagram.

"I'm a lucky man to be named for George Bush and to be with `41' on his 94th birthday," wrote Bush, the nation's 43rd president.

"I already miss the greatest human being that I will ever know. Love you Dad!" son John "Jeb" Bush wrote on Twitter.

Another son, Neil Bush, called on people in a newspaper opinion piece to volunteer and "to become a point of light."

H.W. Bush, a Republican who served as President Ronald Reagan's vice president for two terms, was elected to the country's highest office in 1988. He beat Democrat Michael Dukakis in an electoral landslide and with 54 percent of the popular vote.

In his inaugural presidential address, Bush spoke of "a thousand points of light" across the country, community organizations that were doing good and with which he promised to work. He pledged in "a moment rich with promise" to use American strength as "a force for good." 

A member of a longtime politically influential American family, Bush led the United States during a time of intense international change, including the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and turmoil in the Middle East. His public approval rating soared to 89 percent after he presided over a U.S.-led coalition of 32 countries that drove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army from Kuwait in 1991. After signing a strategic arms reduction agreement to reduce nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush accomplished a second agreement in early January 1993 with Russian President Boris Yeltsin after the USSR collapsed. 

"Even as president, with the most fascinating possible vantage point, there were times when I was so busy managing progress and helping to lead change that I didn't always show the joy that was in my heart," Bush said in his final State of the Union address. "But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." 

Despite his strength in foreign policy, Bush was ultimately limited to a single term as president over a sputtering U.S. economy. The unemployment rate, at 5.3 percent during his first year in office, rose to 7.4 percent in 1992. Confronted with rising deficits, Bush famously signed a bill that raised taxes despite the Republican's earlier campaign vow: "Read my lips: no new taxes." His public approval, once sky-high, plummeted in his final year in office to below 50 percent. 

While he lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992, his work laid a foundation for his son George W. Bush to win the White House in 2000.

"Two presidents in one family, that's pretty good," George H.W. Bush told his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager for a "Today" interview on his 88th birthday. 

Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, lost a bid for the Republican nomination in 2016 to Trump. Bush even saw his grandson, George P. Bush, enter politics. The Fort Worth resident won the position of Texas land commissioner in March 2014. 

George H.W. Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. He was raised in Connecticut by his mother Dorothy Walker Bush, and his father, Prescott Bush, who served as a U.S. senator. 

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bush enlisted in the military on his 18th birthday and became the Navy's youngest pilot at the time. He flew 58 combat missions in World War II before being shot down by the Japanese in 1944. Bush was rescued by a submarine and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in action. 

Back home, Bush married Barbara Pierce on Jan. 6, 1945, and the couple went on to have six children; George, Pauline (who was known as "Robin" and died as a child of leukemia), Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. 

Bush was accepted to Yale University before enlistment, and once stateside, enrolled in an accelerated program that allowed him to graduate in two and a half years instead of four. While at Yale, the left-handed first baseman played in the first College World Series. 

In 1948, Bush graduated from the university with a bachelor of arts degree in economics. He moved the family to West Texas and achieved success in the oil industry, but like his father, he was drawn to politics. 

After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 1964, Bush won a House seat in 1966 representing Houston. He was re-elected in 1968 but gave up his seat two years later to run for the Senate again, and lost to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.

Bush was appointed to a string of government positions in the 1970s, including United Nations ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, envoy to China, and CIA director. At the CIA he was credited with boosting morale. 

In 1980, Bush made a run for the White House, but the Republican Party nominated Reagan, who selected Bush as his running mate. The match was a good one. The pair went to Washington in 1981 and won a landslide re-election victory four years later.

As vice-president, Bush traveled the world, pushing his anti-drug programs and became the first vice president to stand in as president while Reagan underwent surgery in 1985. Bush spent most of the eight hours on the tennis court. 

Then, after eight years of loyalty, Bush tried again for the Oval Office. 

Bush chose Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate. At the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Bush made the "no new taxes" pledge that would spark a backlash among some Republicans when he later reversed course.

In 1988, Bush defeated Michael Dukakis and his running mate, Texas nemesis Lloyd Bentsen. He was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 1989. 

Bush’s high popularity in the wake of a decision to send American troops into Panama to bring General Manuel Noriega to face drug charges in the U.S, and later the Persian Gulf War, would prove ephemeral. 

Bush described his defeat in his re-election bid as having given him a "terrible feeling, awful feeling."

"I really wanted to win and worked hard. And later on, people said, 'well he didn’t really care', which is crazy," he told his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager on "Today." "I worked my heart out and it was terrible to adjust. Well then you figure life goes on." 

After leaving office, Bush returned to private life by splitting his time between Kennebunkport, Maine, and Houston. It was not uncommon to see Bush 41 at a Houston Astros baseball game.

In 2005, he teamed up with his former rival, Bill Clinton, to raise money for relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami.

His son George W. Bush published "41: A Portrait of My Father," in 2014, a wide-ranging and intimate biography of his father. In an interview on "Today" with his son and his granddaughter Bush Hager, the elder Bush talked about the intersection of family memories and key political events in their lives. 

Asked about his presidential legacy, Bush said that he'd banned the use of "the legacy word." 

"I think history will get it right, and point out the things I did wrong, and perhaps some of the things we did right," he said. 

In recent years, Bush was hospitalized because of various ailments. He broke a bone in his neck when he fell in his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and suffered from shortness of breath and a bronchitis-related cough and other issues in Houston.

Bush also made headlines in recent years for skydiving on at least three of his birthdays, according to The Associated Press, the last on his 90th, when he made a tandem parachute jump in Kennebunkport, Maine. In the summer of 2016, Bush led a group of 40 wounded warriors on a fishing trip at the helm of his speedboat, three days after his 92nd birthday celebration.

And he made headlines in July 2013 when he shaved his head in support of a little boy — the son of a member of his Secret Service detail — battling leukemia. Later that summer, he was honored at a White House event celebrating volunteerism. 

Bush put his presidential library at Texas A&M University in College Station and his name now is on the CIA headquarters, Houston's largest airport and a North Texas toll road.

There is also an aircraft carrier that bears his name. In 2009, Bush 41 and Bush 43 attended the commissioning of the USS George H.W. Bush, the 10th and last Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy. 

Bush had the distinction of being one of only three U.S. presidents to receive an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama in 2011. 

Bush is survived by two siblings, his five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife of 73 years, Barbara; his second child, Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush; and brothers Prescott and William “Bucky” Bush.

He told Bush Hager that he was happiest while spending time with his family at sea. 

"Aging is all right," he said in June 2012. "It's better than the alternative, which is not being here."

Air Force One is being sent to Texas to transport Bush's casket to Washington, where his body will lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. The public can pay their respects from Monday evening through Wednesday morning.

Bush will be buried Thursday on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University at the family plot next to his wife Barbara, who died in April, and their 3-year-old daughter Robin, who died in 1953. The Bush family is still arranging funeral services, but the White House said President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump plan to attend.

Source: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/Former-President-George-HW-Bush-Dies-184974861.html

[theliterateape]

The Women of the Democratic Party Have One Year Left to Keep Screwing Things Up

By David Himmel

Before we dive in, let’s be real clear up front: The Patriarchy and all its ills must burn and die. But if the future is female, then the women of the Democratic Party need a Come to Jesus Moment like no other.

In two weeks, the Democratic Party might win enough seats to turn the House blue. That’s a good thing for the balance of power and it’s a great thing to help slow any further dangerous actions President Donald Trump hopes to take during the rest of his first term. This victory, I’m concerned, will be short-lived. Unless the Democratic Party can unglue its head from deep within its bowels, it will not win the Senate or the White House in 2020. And it will probably lose the House.

For a party claiming to be pro-gun control, the Democratic Party has shot itself in the foot with everything from .30-caliber muzzle loaders to AR-15s to .22-caliber wheel guns. The fault should be shared by all elected Dems currently serving in the United States Congress and those associated with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). But lately, a small section of the party’s most influential women leaders have been screwing things up for the rest of us. Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz have said and done things that have fractured the Democratic Party, alienated moderates and true believers alike, and fed the beast that is President Trump and his supporters. All of this has led to heating up our Cold Civil War and put the Dems in a position to receive another ass lashing in 2020.

That said — and this is important — the screw ups we’re about to get into do not justify any violence or attempted violence against anyone. The packages sent to members of the Democratic Party last week is abhorrent. Good people who do dumb things do not deserve to be hurt or threatened by some dongbucket who thinks he’s doing America a favor.

“But what about the men of the Democratic Party, David?” Like I said two paragraphs above, they’re culpable, too. However, the men of the Democratic Party have been feckless in recent years. Tim Kaine is their spirit animal. The real leaders of the Party right now are the women, which is why their screw ups are so alarming.

The mid-terms are important. The election in 2020 is more important. It’s two years away, which means that the women of the Democratic Party have one year left to keep screwing things up before it’s too late to save the sinking ship.

To fix the problem, we must address the problem. Let’s look at the culprits and their crimes.

Rep. Maxine Waters Back in June, Maxine Waters became the Left’s champion of divisive politics, unseating Hillary Clinton, when she said “If you see anybody from [Trump’s] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.” We saw it happen in restaurants with White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mitch McConnell. And that’s just the big three we know about. I don’t like the politics or demeanor of any of them, not one bit, but why aren’t they welcome?

If I owned a restaurant, a department store or a gasoline station, and Huckabee Sanders, Cruz and McConnell walked in, I wouldn’t kick them out. I might spit in their soup or keep bringing them the wrong item of clothing or shut off the gas to their pump but I wouldn’t protest against them. And if I did, that would be my choice as the owner of the private establishment. In the actual instances, the owners didn’t tell them they weren’t welcome; it was patrons, strangers off the street — people who had no right to tell anyone whether they were or were not welcome in a private establishment.

It’s bad sportsmanship. It makes the Left look like assholes. If the Right is the place where the hateful assholes live — and it might be, because when you consider the broad opinions of the base on issues like race, LGBTQ equality, police brutality and bro-country music, they do — the Left needs to stop appropriating their behavior.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein Fully acknowledging the immeasurable love I have for my grandmothers (ages 94 and 82) and that this sounds a little ageist, there are just some things the elderly shouldn’t do. This includes, but is not limited to running with the bulls, learning to rollerblade on a rocky hill covered in ice and legislating for a first world country. Feinstein, who is 85, was elected to the Senate during the first Year of the Woman in 1992 following the Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court that turned Anita Hill into a harlot. Feinstein has been around long enough to know better, which is why I hold her 100 percent responsible for allowing history to grossly repeat itself with the debacle that was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford submitted her concern over Kavanaugh’s temperament to Feinstein in July when Kavanaugh was still on the short list. Ford wanted to remain anonymous. Feinstein could have and should have brought those concerns quietly to the Senate Judiciary Committee and any other area of government to prevent the alleged sexual assailant from becoming the nominee. There were other conservative stooges on that short list who would have caused less of a fight and fuss. Instead, Feinstein held onto it until Ford’s identity leaked and Feinstein used the accusation as a Hail Mary play to discredit Kavanaugh and embarrass the Republican Party.

We all know that’s not what happened. What happened was that things got worse. Sexual assault victims of all stripes are now perceived by many to be liars first, sluts second and Clinton operatives third. Feinstein never cared about Ford or about women or sexual assault victims. She was playing party politics and it backfired. Hard.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Warren thought she was President Barack Obama. She thought she could shut down insults from Donald Trump by proving that she was, in fact, of Native American descent. But where Obama brandishing his birth certificate removed all ability to doubt and insult (save for the morons) Warren’s genetic test revealed nothing. She’s as Cherokee as the rest of us, which is to say, not at all. Not enough to claim that heritage, anyway. My wife, Katie, who was raised evangelical Christian, did not convert to Judaism when we married, has never been to a bar or bat mitzvah and does not believe in God, is more a Jew than Warren is Cherokee.

This move, as Hall wrote last week, was the truest display of submitting to Trump’s bullying and, thus, playing right into his hands. Warren revealed herself as someone too concerned with the shiny penny glistening on the sandbar when she should be focusing on the squall overhead and the bull shark headed straight for her. There’s a lot of talk about Warren running for president in 2020. I used to think she wasn’t a bad option, but now, no. Warren can’t be president. She’s too entrenched with the Liberal American pettiness that continues to fraction the Left and the Democratic Party and embolden the Right and the Republicans. And it’s now clear that she’d make a losing opponent to Trump because she’d crumple at every jab he threw. What’s most concerning is that this kind of behavior is what alienates the undecided moderates — the very people the Dems need if they’re ever going to win again.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Where do I start? OK, first, HRC would have been a perfectly fine president. Yes, she would have been dogged by accusations from the Right every single waking moment of her presidency but she is a knowledgeable, experienced public servant. She knows the world and the world knows her. And while a sizable clot of America hates her, the rest of the world doesn’t mind her. She can get along with people. Sort of.

HRC is the only person in the known universe who could have lost to Donald Trump. She’s too polarizing; been in the Washington game too long; has been beaten down by the media over the last 30 years so bad that she’s barely human. It is unfortunate and unfair. And because of that, she was a horrible candidate. Would have been a fine president, but fine presidents can’t be horrible candidates. Her campaign should be used in political science, marketing and advertising classes as an example of what not to do. Ever.

“I’m with Her” is not about the country. It’s a decree of a cult of personality. That campaign slogan makes her election to the Highest Office in the Land about HRC and not about the future and benefit of the United States and its people. It is egotism at best and Trumpian narcissism at worst. (And just a quick comment on Trump’s campaign: You know what helped him win? “Make America Great Again.” That slogan was brilliant. It was about the country, and maybe for the first time in his life, not directly about Trump. It was specific enough that people could envision a great America but vague enough that it required no hard supportive evidence. Trump’s campaign followed the exact same marketing logic as Barack Obama’s in 2008; “Hope” is just as specifically vague and made the American people feel good and, yeah, hopeful about the future of their country.)

“Love Trumps Hate” is bad copywriting. One rogue apostrophe and she’s rooting for the other guy. And for Christ’s sake, why would anyone in her campaign sign off on using the other guy’s name in their campaign materials? Why would you ever allude to your competitor when trying to get people to think about you? It’s just stupid.

When HRC came down with the flu, she hid the truth for no good reason. Now, this is less about her poor thinking as it is the result of decades of having to protect herself from possible attacks over the smallest of infractions. The system broke her and this flu denial thing was the sad result. But she had an opportunity to rise above it. If she had said outright, “I had the flu and pushed myself too hard,” most people would understand. We’ve all had the flu. Hell, admitting it from the start would have humanized her — something she desperately needed. But instead, HRC and her campaign ducked and dodged the assumption out of concern that Trump and his people would accuse her of being too ill to be president. That is, of course, ridiculous. And anyone who worked “But her flu symptoms” into their “But her emails” arguments would most likely be perceived, rightfully, as a fucking moron. However, by hiding the flu fact, HRC managed to do what HRC does best, give credence to the fear that she’s hiding something can’t be trusted.

Only a member of the 1919 White Sox and Butch Coolidge — people who want to lose — would think insulting the electorate was a good idea. No doubt that every presidential candidate from George Washington on up said some pretty wretched things about their opponent’s base, but never in public. Calling Trump’s base deplorables only empowered them. And, I’m afraid, it encouraged the Them vs. Us Cold War we’re in right now.

And then there’s the alleged collusion with the DNC to cheat her way to the nomination…

HRC is unquestionably a leader. She should set the tone here. She can start by backing off the campaign trail. She is much like Trump in that all her presence does is rile up the loyalists and upset the opposition. She’ll never win over the desperately needed moderates and undecided voters.

Former Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz Allegedly, and quite obviously, in this writer’s opinion, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was part of a coordinated attempt to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 democratic primary race for president favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Even Elizabeth Warren believed there was collusion. This is problematic because it’s cheating. And the only reason anyone has to cheat is if they know they can’t win. Part of the allegation is that the Clinton people bought the support of Wasserman Schultz and the DNC. Sanders would have likely won the primary, and because HRC was the only person on the planet who could lose to Trump, the Dems blew the whole lot. If Wasserman Schultz had let the electorate of her party speak instead of (allegedly) manipulating the odds to favor a deeply flawed candidate, we might not be living in Trump’s America. Although, that would mean Stormy Daniels would likely have never received a book deal, which would have been unfortunate for her and a travesty for historians who will look back and laugh their assess off at 2016–2018 America.

✶

As I said at the start of this piece: the Patriarchy and all its ills must burn and die. But if the future is female, then the future needs a Come to Jesus Moment like no other. If they don’t, the future will be lost to the mongrels currently in the lead. Scoundrels in the image of Sen. Orin Hatch, Sen. Lindsey Graham, McConnell and Cruz will be the future. If this occurs, the Dems will have no one to blame but themselves.

Even if the Dems pull off a win in 2020, if the Party’s most prominent don’t stop acting without thinking of the consequences, the future may indeed be female, but it will be a future led by women who are just as self-serving and stupid as any man ever has been.

I hope they can get their act together. I’m rooting for them.

[oselatra]

Chintan Desai is trying to turn the Delta blue

Despite long odds, the Democrat challenging U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford means business.

Chintan Desai knows a little about learning on his feet. In August 2010, the day after he graduated from the University of California-Davis, he moved cross-country to teach fifth-grade social studies in Helena-West Helena at KIPP: Delta College Preparatory. The charter school serves a student body that's 92 percent low-income and 94 percent African American. A new Teach for America corps member, Desai had never set foot in the South.

"Take everything where I grew up in California, and take the exact opposite, and that was Helena, Arkansas," he recalled. "It's a poor town, it's got a lot of challenges, it's got racial dynamics which were very different from what I grew up with. ... And on top of that, I was learning a new skill, a new profession, at the age of 21. ... I struggled pretty mightily, but I made it through — not without thinking about quitting a few times."

One criticism leveled at Teach for America is that its young recruits often leave K-12 education as quickly as they entered. The nonprofit requires a two-year commitment in the classroom, after which many TFAers head to grad school, law school or a more lucrative career track. Desai was one of those who stuck around. Eight years later, he owns a house in Helena and works as a project manager — a generalist administrator position — for KIPP's small network of East Arkansas schools. (KIPP also runs over 200 schools nationally.)

This fall, Desai is applying for a new job: U.S representative for Arkansas's 1st Congressional District, which comprises most of the eastern half of the state. Republican Rep. Rick Crawford has held the seat since 2010, when Democrat Marion Berry declined to run for re-election. Crawford has been re-elected three times since then, each cycle with a higher margin of victory than the last; he didn't even draw a Democratic opponent in 2016. Barring some extraordinary development in the next two weeks, he'll win again on Nov.6.

Glance at a county-by-county map of 2016 election results and one might think the region holds a glimmer of hope for a Democrat. Out of the eight Arkansas counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, six were in the 1st District — Delta counties like Phillips and Crittenden, with large African-American populations. But they are more than offset by white, rural, Trump-loving north Arkansas counties such as Randolph, Baxter and Independence. The numbers are grim for Desai: A Talk Business & Politics/Hendrix College poll in September showed the incumbent leading by 35 points among likely voters.

Dr. William McLean, the chair of the political science department at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, said Desai had run a good race, considering the odds. "I think he's done all the things that he's supposed to do. ... He's very, very effective at retail politics. It's not him personally that can't get elected; it's the institutional barriers that prevent it."

First, national politics dominates most any race these days, McLean said, and the 1st District is simply a conservative place. Second, Desai has low name recognition, having never held office before. (He ran for city council in Helena-West Helena in 2016 and lost.) Having a name that sounds unusual to many Arkansans likely doesn't help, either, nor does the color of his skin. The child of first-generation Indian immigrants, Desai doesn't fit neatly into the white/black racial dichotomy that shapes life in many Delta towns.

He's become a well-known community figure in Helena-West Helena, but Desai acknowledged that he's encountered "a little bit" of racism traveling to other places in the district. "And you know, I get it in a certain way," he said. "When my parents moved here, if they had believed everything they had learned about American pop culture based on the movies and the music and the TV they had seen and heard, they probably would have thought their only kid growing up in America would, you know, join a gang and start selling drugs. ... They had a fear of the Other, and they wanted to make sure I lived a good and safe life. So if you haven't encountered personally people who look differently or have a different cultural background, I can understand the fear that you might have initially.

"But my argument is ... if you meet me and you actually talk to me, you'll see that I'm not that scary," he added, grinning.

McLean said Desai's ethnicity hasn't come up as an issue in the campaign. "Obviously, I think any nonwhite candidate faces some kind of uphill battle," he said. But in rural Arkansas, he added, "I think it probably hurts him more just being an outsider/interloper rather than race per se: 'Hey, you're not from here, you're from California.' "

Desai has the same answer to each of these obstacles: Get out there and work. "We're trying to meet as many people as possible. We went to all 30 counties in the district in 30 days in July." Just as national Republicans once wrote off the 1st District as unwinnable, national Democrats now do the same, he noted. "I don't know if Barack Obama ever came to Arkansas. I'm here. I'm getting everywhere. ... That, to me, is the missing link," he said.

"There's a clear contrast between what we were doing and what Congressman Crawford has been doing for years, which is being very inaccessible," he added. Crawford has held one town hall in the past eight years and has shut down his social media page, Desai said. "Congressman Crawford has unfavorables north of 50 percent. ... If you get my message out to enough people, I think we can surprise a lot of people in terms of how well we do," he said.

Asked for comment, Crawford's campaign manager issued a statement: "Congressman Crawford has balanced his time as a legislator and with his family while traveling internationally doing his part to keep all Americans safe through better relationships with America's strategic partners. He's also sought to find new ways to connect and communicate with his constituents while trying to ensure online mobs and fake people aren't degrading the engagement he has through platforms [that have] been compromised on multiple occasions. He will continue to do all of this, as well as the many meetings and visits he's had all across the 1st District, should the voters choose to send him back to Washington to fight for smaller government, greater fiscal reforms, and a safe and secure America through enforcement of current immigration laws and stronger border security."

***

So what drives an ambitious young person to give up the better part of a year running full tilt at a goal that seems so clearly out of reach?

Desai, who majored in political science in college, said he's always had a "political itch." When he pondered his logical next step in life, "the obvious answer was go to Capitol Hill and work as a staffer in D.C. ... but I didn't want to leave Helena yet. This area means a lot to me. I think the work that we're doing [at KIPP] is really important. ... So, I looked up the race, saw there wasn't a Democrat, and I got mad."

"And, you know, the Trump thing a year before," he said with a laugh.

His family had "zero" interest in politics when he was growing up. "They voted for the first time in 2016, because I made them," he said. Desai's parents emigrated from Mumbai in the '80s in search of a better life. In India, his mother had worked at a bank and his father had studied microbiology, but after they found their way to California — "with $50 in their pockets and not much else" — they had to take whatever work they could find.

"My dad — there's probably regret on his end, but you can't just move to America and get a job as a researcher in microbiology. ... When my mom got pregnant with me, he had to pay the bills, so he got a job at a fast-food restaurant. It's just kind of what he was then locked into. He worked his way up, and he's been a general manager at a Carl's Jr. for the past 20-plus years. My mom worked at a motel, and eventually they saved up enough money to buy a house."

They settled in San Luis Obispo, a mid-sized city between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which, Desai said, afforded them (and him) "all the opportunities in the world." That included access to great K-12 schools and California's famed university system. "I realized at some point in college I got that great public education simply because of my ZIP code," he said. That's when he found out about TFA. "Learning about the educational equity gap kind of fired me up. ... I was fortunate enough to get in, and I ended up in Arkansas."

Desai's core campaign message attempts to link his parents' immigrant experience with one of the great structural challenges facing East Arkansas: outmigration.

"It is not easy to leave everything that you know — your friends, your family, everyone you love — to come to a place where you don't know anyone, where you don't have any resources," Desai said. "[My parents] had to start from scratch, and I want that to be first and foremost in people's minds when they think about immigration.

"What I'm seeing is that there are too many Arkansans that are faced with a similar dilemma. They feel like they have to leave Arkansas, leave where they grew up, to find a better life. Young people — they don't think there are jobs here. Seniors, whose families have left them. That is the theme we hear over and over again, and to us it is about restoring opportunity right here in Arkansas."

His proposed remedy, unsurprisingly, starts with a national investment in public education, including universal pre-K, a boost in teacher pay, and more affordable college and career and technical education. He also proposes a massive national investment in infrastructure and expanding the social safety net, including an embrace of "Medicare for All."

Desai is only one among several former or current educators to run for office this cycle, a trend also seen in other red states. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jared Henderson ran Teach for America's operations in Arkansas until last year. Several other teachers are running for state legislative seats as Democrats. But some education advocates see charter schools as an existential threat to traditional public schools and may be wary of Desai's extensive background at KIPP.

Little Rock has some charters that are underperforming and "ought to have been closed yesterday," Desai said, but he defended KIPP's results in the Delta. "We're quadrupling the national low-income average in terms of college graduation," he said. He also pointed to recently improved relations between KIPP and the Helena-West Helena School District, including a partnership in which the charter provides college counseling to students in the traditional schools.

Desai said charters and traditional schools share a common enemy: "the general lack of resources that are attributed to public school education in the U.S. ... Me, I think we need to widen the pie."

What's next after Election Day? "I'm thinking until Nov. 6, and then we'll see," he said. "Hopefully, I'm a congressman-elect, right?"

Chintan Desai is trying to turn the Delta blue

[allofbeercom]

White man pathology: inside the fandom of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump

Stephen Marche goes on a road trip and enters the fray at back-to-back Iowa conventions and gets a view of US politics from the perspective of his whiteness

The border

You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police dont bother you so you dont notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you dont notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.

Not at the border.

My sons Guyanese-Canadian teacher and the Muslim Milton scholar I went to high school with and the Sikh writer I squabble about Harold Innis with and my Ishmaeli accountant, we can all be good little Torontonians of the middle class, deflecting the differences we have been trained to respect. But in a car in the carbon monoxide-infused queue waiting to enter Detroit, their beings diverge drastically from mine.

I am white. They are not. They are vulnerable. I am not.

Heres the thing: I like the guards at the American border. Theyre always friendly with me, decent, even enjoyable company. At the booth in between the never-was of Windsor and the has-been of Detroit, the officer I happened to draw had a gruff belly and the mysterious air of intentional inscrutability, like a troll under a bridge in a fairy tale.

Where are you headed? he asked.

Burlington, Iowa.

Why would anyone ever choose to go to Burlington, Iowa? he asked philosophically.

Im going to see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Then, because it did seem to require an explanation: Theyre giving rallies within a couple of days of each other.

Why would anyone ever choose to go see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?

I didnt argue, because it was the border, but I could have said that the police chief of Birmingham estimated that 30,000 people showed up in Alabama to see Donald Trump in August and that in Dallas, he had filled the American Airlines Center, and that his counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has generated equally unprecedented numbers vastly more than Barack Obama drew at comparable moments in the 2008 campaign.

Im curious, I said instead.

At this point he asked me to roll down my window. But it was all fine. Like I said, Im white.

As I drove through the outskirts of the ruins of Detroit, across the I-94, one of the ugliest highways in the United States, the old familiar lightness fluttered to my heart. I love America. America is not my mother. Canada is my mother. But America is an unbelievably gorgeous, surprisingly sweet rich lady who lives next door and appears to be falling apart. I cannot help myself from loving it.

For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: The white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers.

The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic. This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.

In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis according to the report. It was not so easy to account for the accounting. Why were middle-aged white Americans drinking and drugging and shooting themselves to death? The explanations on offer were pre-prepared, fully plugged into confirmation bias: it was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs.

Case and Deaton call it an epidemic of pain. Fine. What does that mean?

On the I-94, you do find yourself asking: what the fuck is wrong with these people? I mean, aside from the rapid decline of the middle class obviously. And the rise of precarious work and the fact that the basic way of life requires so much sedation that nearly a quarter of all Americans are on psychiatric drugs, and somewhere between 26.4 and 36 million Americans abuse opioids every day. Oh yes, and the mass shootings. There was more than one mass shooting a day. And the white terrorists targeting black churches again. And the regularly released videos showing the police assassinating black people. And the police in question never being indicted, let alone being sent to jail.

And you know what Americans were worried about while all this shit was raining down on them? While all this insanity was wounding their beloved country? You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll?

Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it.

The American dream is dead but Im going to make it stronger!

My body is white and it is male. It is six foot tall and weighs 190lbs. It is 39 years old and it has had to start running. It has had to start counting calories. There is a tingle in the joint of my right thigh, so I try not to think about my body. The tingling comes and goes. I know my body is going to kill me.

A man who fears suffering already suffer what he fears, as Montaigne said. Thats one of the reasons why men die so much younger than women six years younger on average in America. Ninety-two percent of men say they wait at least a few days to see if they feel better before they go to a doctor, but I know what they mean by a few days. They mean a few more days that makes sense. It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness. In the same breath, my body cannot bring itself to believe it is the personification of power, though it evidently is in any rational accountancy of social status. It feels like a mere body. It feels mortal.

Ive never been to a place as white as Iowa. Thats the honest truth. Photograph: Darren McCollester/Getty Images

Ive never been to a place as white as Iowa. Thats the honest truth. Whenever I go to America its New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Florida. In Burlington, at Jerrys Main Lunch, the signature dish is the hot mess, eggs and bacon cooked right into the hash browns. The sugar shakers all have white crackers in them, to prevent clumping a classic bit of common-sense American know-how. The hot mess is delicious. Why dont they make these everywhere? Why isnt there a chain of Jerrys Main Lunches serving hot messes all across the midwest?

The answer is in the rest of the town: everything thats going to leave has already left Burlington. The beautiful brick buildings downtown are mostly vacant. The most interesting street is the road out of town.

The Memorial Arena, on the banks of the Mississippi, filled up early. Trump wasnt speaking until 6pm but by 4.45 the parking situation was grim. Outside the building, the hawkers who follow Trump on the road, event to event, sold T-shirts and buttons, three for $10. We shall overcomb. Cats for Trump, the time is Meow. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Inside, every seat had been taken and the floor filled quickly with a standing room only crowd. Burlington is 10% black. The rally was 99.99% white.

The people who attend political rallies in America are a specific genre of humanity, like the people who stand outside in lines for nightclubs. They know where theyre supposed to go and how theyre supposed to behave when they get there. They have gear.

An elderly lady sat beside me wearing a sequined stars-and-stripes-hat she clearly takes out for just these occasions. Yall from Illinois? she asked. Im not but I can pass. She goes to all the rallies, she explained. Shes been a Republican her whole life, an active Republican, an Iowa Republican. For 30 years, shes been in crowds like this one. She plans to go, one time in her life, to the national convention. Like going to see the Stones. When the organizers passed around hand signs reading The Silent Majority, she grabbed a dozen so she could pass them around to others.

Cheerful helpful women were half the crowd. Angry and absurd men were the other. They wore T-shirts with whole paragraphs written on them: I am a United States Military Veteran. I once took a SOLEMN OATH to defend the CONSTITUTION against ALL enemies, foreign and Domestic. Be advised No one has ever relieved me of my duties under this Oath!

There were cars in the parking lot slathered with bumper stickers. We the people are 100% FED UP! So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat. Im straight, conservative, Christian, and I own a gun. Is there anything else I can do to piss you off? A picture of Obama with Does this ass make my car look big? The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor. Behind comedy, absurd rage: America is the greatest country in the world but America is falling apart, government is the problem which is why government must solve it.

This was a Trump production so naturally there was a VIP section. A door guarded by bald, unsmiling men, the bouncers who stand forever as the bored sentinels of indifferent celebrity. A swinging door at the side of the stage received and dispensed the best-looking people, the ones with the buffed neutrality of political professionals, the women whose faces have been tautened to a perma pout, the men who get their hair cut before every event.

The woman beside me Stars n Stripes Hat was wearing a pewter elephant pendant. A young girl in a bright orange dress passed out of the VIP entrance wearing an elephant pendant encrusted with diamonds. Elephant pendants were a theme, I noticed, and elephant brooches and elephant rings and elephant T-shirts. They came in all different price points and in all different styles: round elephants reminiscent of French cartoons from the 1960s, and strange pseudo-sexual shimmies, and with 1920s straw boater hats leading parades. There was one kind of elephant you couldnt find. An elephant that actually looked like an elephant. A realistic elephant might serve as a memento to the hundred elephants killed for their ivory every day. A naturalistic elephant would be inherently environmentalist. The elephants must all be fabulous.

Like any good show, there was a warm-up act. In fact, there are two three if you count the recitation of the pledge of allegiance. The first was Tana Goertz, an Iowa woman who had been runner-up on the third season of The Apprentice. What a good-looking crowd, she pandered. She vouched for Trump as a woman (He loves women!) and as someone who had returned to Iowa (How could you live in New York City if you didnt love people?). She promoted the idea which is at the core of every last thing that Trump does, that simple contact with the man brings prosperity. When youre in the Trump train youre going places! She walked off to polite Iowan applause. The crowd would probably, all things considered, rather have listened to the Elton John music playing on the speakers instead, but at least she made the effort.

A more standard hype man followed. Sam Clovis hosts a conservative radio show and is a tea-party activist who has run and lost a bunch of Iowa Republican positions. He just started right in with it. Trump was one of the greatest men to ever walk the face of this earth, a good line the crowd could have laughed but instead they applauded, thus proving that they were not paying attention or would swallow anything. Clovis compared Trumps recent speeches to Reagans A Time for Choosing at the Goldwater convention in 1964, which must have been, to his way of thinking anyway, roughly like comparing it to the Sermon on the Mount.

Clovis knew what the crowd had come to hear and he gave it to them. America and Americans will be first again! A collective roar shook the Burlington Memorial Arena. They so badly wanted to be first again. First in what was unclear but definitely first.

After the roar died, the crowd was ready for Trump. But, showmanship. Trump let the tension build; the angry absurd men and the cheerful, helpful women hollered. Trump! Trump! Trump! I could barely imagine the pleasure the muted sound of his chanted name, from backstage, must have been bringing the man.

When he finally took the stage, the crowd surged; their phones surged. It was an orgy of phones. The men behind Trump scanned the crowd with their phones. The cameras in the back were recording everyone recording each other. Trump was the only person not holding a screen, the absence that brought desire. He started roaring, as everybody in the crowd stopped to check the footage they had gathered.

Trump started out with the clip he knew would appear on the news the next morning Joe Biden had dropped out of the race and Trump approved of his decision because Biden never had a chance and Trump wanted to face Hillary. The mainstream media adroitly handled, Trump began his disquisition on the subject dearest to his heart: his own success.

The Burlington rally marked the 100th day he had lead the polls. He read the polls, poll after poll. He paused only to ask the crowd how great the polls were. Beating Hillary nationwide do you love that? The crowd approved of his approval numbers. And so he moved on to the more qualitative aspects of his greatness. His opponents just werent winners. I speak from the brain but I also speak from the heart, he said, rambling like a rich know-it-all uncle Im bringing back the jobs from China! with brief digressions into self-pity: Macys was very disloyal to me. They dont sell my ties anymore.

He described, in twists intermittently frank and self-deluded, the brilliance of his own capacity for political manipulation. He talked to the people he was spinning about how cleverly he was spinning them. So he declared Im a good Christian and that if he became president were going to be saying merry Christmas, but then he couldnt stop himself from acknowledging the cleverness of his Christian electioneering: I walked onto a stage with a bible, everybody likes me better. Trump brought meta to Burlington, Iowa. And he did not deny the crowd that taste of celebrity they desired. What would he say to Caroline Kennedy, the ambassador to Japan? Youre fired! Youre fired!

A few spectators started to drift out to beat the traffic and Trump shouted about the silent majority and about how he says what nobody else dares to say and about how he will end free trade and how Mexicans are car thieves (big laugh) and how he wants a piece of the action from the Keystone pipeline and how hes going to help womens health and how America used to be emulated. The American Dream is dead but Im going to make it bigger and stronger! he shouted. At this moment he appeared to me the way every celebrity I have met in the flesh does, like a living pagan idol awaiting sacrifice, a puff-faced Baal. Were going to win so much, he promised before leaving the stage to Twisted Sisters Were Not Going to Take It.

Trump supporters at the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. Photograph: Scott Morgan/Reuters

I stayed to watch Trump work the line. Up close, in person, the hair is much more intricate than it appears on screen. Its construction is tripartite, its significance polyvalent. First and foremost, there is the comb-over, although it can be called a comb-over only in the sense that the mall in Dubai with a ski hill inside it can be called a building. It is hair as state-of-the-art engineering feat, with the diaphanous quality of a cloak out of Norse legend or some miraculous near-weightless metal developed in an advanced German laboratory. It floats over the skull, an act of defiance not only against aging and loss but against time and space, against reality.

Behind the technical display of the comb-over, as counterpoint, the back is as traditional and old-fashioned as a haircut can be. Its a classic ducktail. Its such a classic that I have only seen it in movies set in the 1950s. Not movies from the 1950s I should be clear, but movies from the 1970s about the 1950s. In between the comb-over and the ducktail, between the two follicular spaces representing the modernistic and the atavistic, the fantastical and the nostalgic, there is a third tranche. Even in person you have to look closely to catch sight of it. It bulges, slightly but only slightly. It is the real part of the hair, the human part, the actual hair. It is the hinge of Donald Trump.

As Trumps campaign for the Republican nomination has unfolded, in all its unlikeliness, he has shaken hands with many thousands of Americans, and posed with many thousands for many thousands of selfies. And among those many thousands, not one has reached up to mess up his hair. Though he regularly brings up the physical appearances of his opponent, none of the other candidates even mention the fact that he looks ridiculous. Trumps hair is an act of defiant social pre-emption: call me a phony. I dare you. I fucking dare you.

A few hardcore fans lingered on the fringes, just like at a concert. Everybody else had drifted into the parking lot and the town center of Burlington was soon returned to its emptiness. A Trump show is good value for the money, especially since its free. They dont even ask for donations.

The view from Fun City

The morning after the rally, it has become clear that Iowa may be the bramble in Trumps path. A scandal over an errant tweet has cloudburst.

He blames the insult on a young intern. But the eight-point rise of Carson must be galling. Trump possesses the weakness of anyone who lives by the strength of their results. Results vary. When the results are down, where are you? Who are you? Trump is in the business of winning. Does Trump losing even exist?

I had a day between Trump and Sanders, and all I had to read was a pdf of Ta-Nehisi Coatess Between the World and Me, which I had agreed to look at for a book of the month club. After another hot mess at Jerrys Main Lunch, and a run to burn it off, I spent a day at the Motel 8 in Burlington reading, while across the street, the Winegard factory, manufacturing satellite dishes 24 hours a day, thudded like a heart without syncopation. Did you know you can buy a six pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon for just a little over 20 bucks in Iowa? What a great country.

The title of Between the World and Me comes from a Richard Wright poem called White Man, Listen! and it was never going to get much whiter or more male than me in the Motel 8 sipping bourbon and beer, on my iPhone, with the Jays and Royals highlights flickering in the background and the thud of the satellite dish factory in the background.

The urgency of the book, the vitality of the historical imagination at play, rose like waves into crests of anger tumbling over their own force. It was all of a piece. And it all made very ferocious sense. Between the World and Me is one of those books that possess the powerful inevitability of a natural phenomenon as if it accrued out of the ether that surrounds us, a crystalline formation of the outrage that defines the moment. To criticize is beside the point. Its just there.

To me, the key passage in Between the World and Me, comes after Coates has been on television explaining to the host the desperate consequences of yet another police assassination of a black boy.

I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.

Right then, reading that passage, I knew that white people were going to love this book. What white people crave more, they require it, they require it to live is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence. There are various alibis available depending on how much stupidity you can tolerate. You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you dont see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows youre not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.

Because that Dream of Whiteness, the dream of treehouses and cub scouts that tastes like peppermint and smells like strawberry shortcake, is a perfect alibi. Who lives that dream? Somebody else may live it but not me, not anyone I know, no one I could see in Burlington. Thats a dream that belongs to somebody else. Always to somebody else.

It certainly didnt belong to the Winegard factory workers who were drifting to their cars at the end of their shift. The whiteness of my existence was my iPhone and the fumes of bourbon and beer, and the game from last night and the tingling in my thigh. The tingling in my thigh was my body the reality I cant look at because Im too afraid of my mortality.

To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, he said. If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then youve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. The obsession of intellectuals over the question of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr active or passive resistance was moot; the pressing matter was why white people were blowing up churches filled with children.

Whiteness is a spiritual distortion, evidently by the fruit ye shall know the tree. And on the question of white pathology, what good answers has America produced since Baldwin asked that question in 1963? And now that white pathology has returned to waste away its host, unexamined and mysterious, a golem.

In the evening, I finished the book and didnt want to think about my white and male body anymore, or the tingling in my thigh.

Across from my hotel, the Fun City complex contained an imitation midway, a bowling alley, a couple of bars, a replica diner and, tucked in between a hotel and a spa, the Catfish Bend Casino. The poker room is dingy but serviceable. A game started at six. I wanted to play. I wanted to find out how much fun can you have in a place called Fun City.

The youngest guy at the table, Curved Baseball Hat, grew beans and corn. A man with an angry mustache ran the conversation, a three-day beard beside him adding an occasional aside. The rest of us sat cooking quietly in the juices of our addictions, like in any casino. Everybody at the table knew everybody else, except for me and a black welder in town for a specialist job. It was happy hour in Fun City, and beer was a dollar. Everybody ordered a mess of them. And I felt just how lucky it is to be in America, despite politics, despite everything. Cheap beer and frank people and an honestly run game in a clean room. Even compared to Canada, the unthinking prosperity of the place is dazzling.

Three Day Beard had seen Trump the night before, and Angry Mustache asked his opinion.

I think he could win, Three Day Beard said cautiously, as if it were a criticism, as if it were all you could say of him, that he might have a chance to take the presidency, for what it was worth.

Dont matter, said Angry Mustache. No matter who gets in, Washington just ruins them.

He might be different because he doesnt need the money.

Angry Mustache quoted a statistic, which I later check and turns out to be bullshit, that all congressmen become millionaires by the time theyve been in office for a year. Everybody agreed that Trumps main advantage is that he comes pre-corrupted.

Its not even the money, Three Day Beard said. They get there. They all have these schemes and plans. They cant do anything. Three Day Beard almost pitied the politicians.

Its all broken, added Angry Mustache as a kind of given, the way youd state any historical fact, like Germany lost the second world war or Frances Farmer was once a star.

The view of American politics in Fun City is snug despair. It is despair not just at who happens to be in power but at whoever could ever be in power. It is despair not simply that the system is broken but that any system, imaginable in the current iteration of the United States, would turn out to be just as broken. The choice is a choice between impotence and coercion. The response was not revolution but a shrug.

Curved Baseball Hat, the guy who grows corn and beans and who had delicate traces of soil in the lanulae of his fingernails, asked about an old gambling hall that used to be in town, and the reminiscences of the way Burlington used to be flowed buildings that had been knocked down, women that were once beautiful and were now dead, fortunes made and vanished.

Eventually the black player, who has said almost nothing except his calls and folds and raises, busted out.

Did you see that guys fingers? Angry Mustache asks when he had left. He gestured an inch past his middle finger. We were all, it was made very clear, in a room of white men. You know what they say. My brother worked in the prison and he says its all true. I guess thats why they say once you go black.

The rest of us nodded or smiled or said nothing, looking down at the cards. Now that we had all shown how white we were, it was a friendlier room. We knew that none of us would object to the evil of the others. What if the answer to Baldwins question is as banal as it appeared to be in Fun City? What if it white people make the nigger to make themselves a little less lonely?

And I said nothing. I offered no resistance, though the line between the man in Fun City and the cop shooting a black child in the face was not hard to trace. Here was my alibi that evening: I am Canadian. Which means I am a spy from nowhere. Or perhaps I am a coward or something in between a coward and spy from nowhere. Its a pretty threadbare alibi anyway. Whose isnt?

Conversation drifted back to Trump. It was more polite.

I can see Trump, said Angry Mustache. Hes not the worst that Ive seen anyway.

Im starting to like that doctor, Three Day Beard adds as an afterthought.

That doctor, Ben Carson, proposes a flat tax of 10% that would put the US government, estimating conservatively, in a $3tn-deficit. He believes that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain, and he believes that Hitler never would have risen to power if the German people were armed, and that Obamacare is worse than slavery, and that Americans are living in a Gestapo age.

I wish that Coates had some crazy scheme, some utopian fantasy for communards in Georgia, or the return to one motherland or another, but he just wants the end of white supremacy. He just wants white people in America to grow up, to cede their inhumane sense of absurd superiority. I cannot imagine why they would. Its fun to drink and to play cards and to imagine what Donald Trump would say to the Mexican president the day after he was elected, or whether Ben Carson would set the flat tax at 10 or 12%. The ultimate alibi is ignorance it lies closest to innocence but if you cant manage ignorance, craziness does nearly as well.

I mean, none of its going to happen anyway, right? Whoever gets elected, its just going to be gridlock and outrage anyway, right? Did I mention that beer cost one dollar? A single, solitary buck.

Ellen Degeneres, eat your heart out!

The Bernie Sanders rally in Davenport was the precise opposite of the Donald Trump rally in Burlington and yet precisely the same in every detail. Make America Great Again was replaced by Feel the Bern. Hawkers sold pins, three for $10. They read Bernie Sanders is my spirit animal and Cats for Bernie and I supported Bernie Sanders before it was cool. Davenport, at least near the Adler Theater, is the same Brooklyn-outside-Brooklyn that has conquered every corner of the world that is not a strip mall. The tattoo artists of Davenport do not go hungry. The cornfed hipsters at the Sanders rally look like they have probably attended a party at which somebody played a bongo. They may even have attended a literary reading.

Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

There were hype men as with Trump, too, although in this case they were twentyish women in glasses screaming Feel the Bern! and Were Going to Build a Revolution! Somebody with a camera from NBC asked a group who has brought their precocious children because they want them to be engaged in the political process Can I get you guys to look like youre excited about Bernie? They carefully placed their drinks on the floor, out of sight, to oblige.

The same specter of angry white people haunts Saunderss rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away. The Bernie crowd brought homemade signs instead of manufactured ones, because I guess theyre organic. They waved them just the same. They were going to a show. They wanted to be a good audience.

The fundamental difference between the Trump and Sanders crowd was that the Sanderss crowd has more money, the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich white people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger.

Sanderss opening act was a congressional hopeful, Gary Kroeger. He hadnt been on The Apprentice but on Saturday Night Live, a forgettable lesser actor from the great period between 1982 and 1985. He started out, naturally, with a half-assed gag: the fresh patchouli in the air is so beautiful. The sign language translator offered a mild smile to indicate it was a joke. Then, after a brief foray into left-wingery, calling America a social democracy also known as a republic, Kroeger took a big selfie with the crowd behind him: Ellen Degeneres, eat your heart out! he shouted. Everyones phones rose up to take pictures of themselves in a picture imitating a picture from the Oscars: such was American socialism in the year 2015.

A few desultory bands followed, performing an assortment of leftwing songs from various historical leftwing movements. They harmonized on The Auld Triangle, a prison ballad that was covered on Inside Llewelyn Davis. The singer from Alice in Chains (remember them?) did an electric version of I Wont Back Down. An old The Clash song, Jail Clang Doors, was sung by the subject of the first verse, Wayne Kramer. And it was all, so obviously, a nostalgia act, the indulgence for a longing of a time when music encouraged politics, when activism possessed an artistic face, and vice versa.

Eventually Bernie wandered out. The phones went up. The phones went down. Enough is enough, he shouted, leaving blank what theres been enough of. And then he talked about how he wanted to end the war on drugs and campaign finance reform and government that isnt for plutocrats, and how they were going to build a revolution (such an embarrassing word to hear uttered out loud), and America was going to be a social democracy, by the people of the people.

Sanderss exasperation was the principal fact to be communicated, more than any political content. Trump was about winning again. Sanders was about having lost. The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. Its all about feelings and God and bullshit. Sanders actually uttered the following sentence out loud: What were saying is when millions of people come together to restore their government we can do extraordinary things. Nobody asked what he meant. Nobody asked for numbers. They applauded. Better to take it in the spirit in which its given, like a Catskills resort comedian.

Sanders reminded me of a line from Seinfeld, maybe because Larry Davids SNL parody was only a few days old. The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli. When Ben and Jerry make a Bernie Sanders ice cream, I hope its chili and ginger: the delicious hot flavour of nasal-passage clearing outrage.

Sanderss speech was much shorter than Trumps. There had already been the music, I guess. I had the impression, as with Trump, that I had traveled many hundreds of miles to look at a mans hair. Bernie Sanderss hair is as much a statement as Trumps. It looks like the hair of a tenured professor whose wife has stopped nagging him to get a haircut because the nagging doesnt work. You couldnt muss Sanders hair. The disorder is just as much an aesthetic as the comb-over. I mean it always looks the same. Somebody is cutting it to droop that way over the ears.

The view from Tampico

As despair has suddenly spread like a fabulous mist over the white people of America, as the white people die off in their unprecedented numbers, the commenters are surprised, a bit, but they have no plan of action. No policy proposals aim at ameliorating the conditions of white people.

How could they? If you believe the Case and Deaton report, white people are victims of their own privilege literally. Their cherished right to own guns, and the vast increase in the ownership of weaponry, means that their suicide attempts are more effective. They have more access to opioids because doctors are more likely to trust white people with them. They have the money to make themselves lonely and drink.

I remember reading a passage from bell hooks once, the kind that circulates on Facebook because it sounds slightly unusual in its predictable virtue. The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males, she wrote, is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage is psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

Her compassion is admirable, glorious even, but also inaccurate. No one is more emotional than a piece-of-shit white man. They are sentimentality personified. How else can so many be moved to rage over the absence of a Christmas tree on a Starbucks cup?

That dream, that white dream that smells like peppermint and tastes like strawberry shortcake, comes with a cost of shit. If you take shit, if you eat shit, if you live through the shit, if you survive the stupid wars and the meaningless jobs, you should be sure of who you are and what you deserve. And if you are not sure and you have not received what you deserved, why did you take and eat and breathe all that shit?

Un-harvested corn stands south of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP

In the aftermath of that deal, the choice, I suppose, is either to be proud to be white, which is a form of insanity, or to fantasize a post-racial cosmopolis, which is a kind of make-believe, or to be ashamed. So much easier to forget those choices, or to defer endlessly the choosing, or to debate the difficulties of choosing infinitely, because white male flesh is not under mortal threat, as the flesh of black men or the flesh of women. Our bodies are safe. Our bodies are the threat.

In medieval monarchies, the state required the existence of a double body, one for the real world and one for the symbolic. There was the flawed and mortal body of the king, which wept and shat and screwed and died, and then there was the Body of the King, sacred, pure, indestructible.

Race gives us all double bodies, double consciousness in WEB Du Boiss phrase, whatever you want to call having to live mortally through the judgment of others. The new white distortion, the sickness at heart, the pathology, may simply be the arrival of the awareness of two bodies: the dizziness and nausea that arrive with the onset of double vision.

Because they have to be like everybody else, their hearts are breaking in half.

The morning after the Sanders rally, I found enough strength to look in the mirror at my white and male body, to examine its mortal and symbolic nature. At the corner of my groin, where it had been tingling, a brown patch spilled like spoiled milk down my skin. A wide brown patch shaped like post-climate change Florida in the corner of my thigh. Instantly, I knew I would die. And the next moment I started driving back to Toronto, to my wife and children, flesh of my flesh.

Bernie Sanders wants a revolution to overthrow casino capitalism but the problem, or maybe just the first problem, is that the American people love casinos. They cant build them fast enough. On the road from Iowa, I passed at least a dozen, a dozen Fun Cities of various shapes and sizes, enduring various conversations about Trump and Sanders. The highways of Illinois are a unique vision of the workings of human desire a nearly limitless marketplace for addiction and its cure. Strip clubs or fried chicken or gambling or church or rehab or cancer treatment. The I-94 spoke right to the unwounded body the promise of processed sugar and pussy, or salvation from them.

There was one other attraction on the route home: Ronald Reagans birthplace in Tampico. The beauty of the landscape around those towns, for some reason, has never been properly romanticized. There are no tourist busses to these fields, as there are to the ocean or the mountains, but the landscape is every bit as sublime. Reagans childhood passed in the loin of the Continent, the grand hinge between the industrial core of the Great Lakes and the agricultural heartland. The historical memory of his presidential monuments has been consumed by fantasies of small town life but it is a landscape of whitewashed buildings against the undulating emptiness, a country roiling with dreams. You can picture Reagan as a boy in these fields, dreaming of movies and America vast screens on which he could project himself. The highway runs like a river of craving through an ancient dream.

The ancient dreams are still so vivid here. In the United States, 240-year-old writings can be recited by heart by people who cannot be described as educated. Documents written by men who owned slaves are spoken of as if they could solve the problems of today and tomorrow and any conceivable future no matter how distant.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the Constitution should expire after 19 years, so that the dead would not have dominion over the living. That fate seems to have arrived. The Americans are in constant debates with ghosts and their conversations with dead people are most powerful, most ferocious, at exactly the points where they are most nonsensical. They state defiantly that all men are created equal when any casual observer of life knows they arent. They claim that men and women should be judged by the content of their character, when nobody can know the content of anothers character. These dreams, these impossibilities, are the absolute and real foundation of their nation. And the dreams are so entrancing that its unclear whether the problem is that the Americans believe them, or that they dont. Its supremely childish, either way.

Back in Toronto, my wife took a look at the brown patch on my groin and sent me to a doctor, and the doctor told me it was a rash from running too much, and I had been given the greatest gift anyone can hope for, in this time and this place. I had been forgiven, for a while, for my body.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/white-man-pathology-inside-the-fandom-of-bernie-sanders-and-donald-trump/

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By Kody Fairfield

In a shocking, yet not so shocking, form of reverse sexism and oppression, a Huffington Post blogger is begging the question: Is it time to deny white men the right to vote?

Shelley Garland, an MA philosophy student and self proclaimed feminist (see: Social Justice Warrior) who you can typically find working on ways to, as she calls it, “smash the patriarchy,” took to her computer to take part in the regressive left’s inherently fallacious marketing program.

Her product to sell? Removing the right to vote, “the franchise,” from “white men.”

The Blog Post

Garland, whose article is subtly titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?,” starts off with a premise that the time for mass theft of another man’s labor, wealth redistribution, has come and since “white men own a disproportionate amount of wealth” around the world which they took through oppression, it’s about time they lose their power to vote. In fact, she directly blames the power held in the vote of “white men” for the stagnation of what she calls the “progressive cause.” This stagnation, she claims, has led to happenings such as the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the Democratic Alliance’s control of large South African cities.

The philosophy student attempts to make the most obvious and sophomoric argument, if you accept her premise, that if you oppress the oppressor, you get less oppression. “If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened,” she wrote.

The “white knighting” continues, with Garland directly blaming “reckless white males” and their power as a “primary” reason for the occurrence of “the Great Recession” in 2008. She argues that “a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners,” would occur if we simply cut down the patriarchy’s power. She says that “white men” and “the imposition of Western legal systems around the world” are used to “reinforce modern capitalism,” and that the “violence of white male wealth and income inequality” needs to become part of the past.

Garland moves to defending her case for reverse oppression, making sure to touch on all of the usual talking points against the “patriarchy.”

“This redistribution of the world’s wealth is long overdue, and it is not just South Africa where white males own a disproportionate amount of wealth. While in South Africa 90 percent of the country’s land is in the hands of whites (it is safe to assume these are mainly men), along with 97 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this is also the norm in the rest of the world. Namibia has similar statistics with regard to land distribution and one can assume this holds for other assets too. As Oxfam notes eight men control as much as wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population. In the United States ten percent of the population (nearly all white) own 90 percent of all assets.”

What is funny about her defense however, is the fact that should there be a statistic she can’t find, she utilizes presumption to fill in the gaps. “It is likely that these assets are largely in the hands of males,” “Although statistics by race are difficult to find from other parts of the world, it is very likely that the majority of the world’s assets are in the hands of white males, despite them making up less than 10 percent of the world’s population,” she speculates.

In an attempt to reconnect her premise, Garland attempts to explain the ideologies behind the patriarchy, liberalism (including both conservatism and libertarianism), and how her idea of reverse oppression is a viable answer to its defeat. She argues, “These ideologies with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation, allow white men to ignore the debt that they owe society, and from acknowledging that most of their assets, wealth, and privilege are the result of theft and violence.”

Now, Garland appeared, at least for a brief moment, to understanding that her ideas may appear a bit extreme, or larger than that, hypocritical (oppression traded for oppression). So instead of calling for the blanket and permanent removal of voting rights, she calls for a 20-30 year moratorium.  She says that “it would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely,” only long enough to see “a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.” She continued, “a moratorium on the franchise for white males for a period of between 20 and 30 years is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others, particularly those with black, female-identifying bodies. In addition, white men should not be stripped of their other rights, and this withholding of the franchise should only be a temporary measure, as the world rights the wrongs of the past.”

She concludes that, “It is time to wrestle control of the world back from white males, and the first step will be a temporary restriction of the franchise to them. Although this may seem unfair and unjust, allowing white males to continue to call the shots politically and economically, following their actions over the past 500 years, is the greater injustice.”

Response

Garland loves the coercion of government.

In response to Garland’s dramatic and misguided “white knighting” against the patriarchy, there are a few things that need to be addressed. The main issue is the hypocrisy of her tactic. The premise of her idea is that those outside of “white males” or the “patriarchy” have been oppressed, and are owed a sort of reparations. Ignoring the more nuanced arguments relating to the fact that the majority of grievances are ex post facto, the “feminist” is either okay with the existence of oppression, so long as it doesn’t occur to her or her community, or she is a hypocrite. Neither option is all that flattering and both prove she does not fundamentally understand the ground she preaches from.

Now, it is true that throughout history, there has been oppression, and that it has even matched her patriarchal view at times, but to pretend that reversing the direction of oppression is the answer, even in limited duration, is simply ludicrous. Simply play out her premise, and you are left to envision a world where oppression is constantly thrown from one victim to another. Garland argues for band-aiding the issue, not for the investigation of the cause.

Garland then attempts to connect capitalism, and liberalism to the patriarchy, summarizing, as was quoted above, that “these ideologies with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation.”

The amount of fallacy in this is beyond the ability to hold back an eye roll.

First, the rise of capitalism, and innovation, NOT cronyism, directly correlate with a sharp decline in global poverty. In 2015, the Washington Examiner reported on a study conducted by Max Roser, a fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University’s Martin School, which gave empirical data precisely to this notion.

From Rosen’s Study:

In 1820, according to data compiled by Roser*, the share of the global population living in poverty was 94 percent while 84 percent lived in “extreme” poverty. By 1992, the poverty rate had dropped to 51 percent, while the “extreme” poverty rate had dropped to 24 percent. Using a different measure of international poverty, the rate has dropped from 53 percent in 1981 to 17 percent in 2011 – representing the most rapid reduction in poverty in world history.”In the past only a small elite lived a life without poverty,” Roser explains. “Since the onset of industriali[z]ation – and as a consequence of this, economic growth — the share of people living in poverty started decreasing and kept on falling ever since.”‘

The Cato Institute, a liberty think tank, has also done studies regarding the correlation of poverty and capitalism, calling the defeat of “global poverty, capitalism’s triumph.”

Even the band U2’s lead singer Bono understands this notion.

“Commerce (and) entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid. … In dealing with poverty here and around the world, welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure. … Entrepreneurship is the most sure way of development.” – 2013 speech at Georgetown University

In the end, Garland’s argumentum ad passiones is just that: emotional playwriting. Like many of today’s generation, it is her attempt to look as if she is doing something to “raise awareness for” or “create momentum for” a cause of which she doesn’t understand. She plays in the world of false dichotomy, ignoring nuanced details about the history (causes) of events, and attempts to pat herself on the back for being “compassionate” and “sympathetic.”

Unfortunately, the world has scars, people are inherently flawed, and will continue to make mistakes, but you do not fix oppression by shifting its application. You fix it by empowering the individuals being oppressed. By allowing each person to become the best they are capable of being: freeing innovation, and exploration, while allowing people to associate or disassociate with ideas or things as they will.

Force or coercion, as suggested, never create “good,” only fear and anger. In fact, it is exactly why the idea of the “patriarchy” exists in the first place.

(Author’s Note: While my name comes off as your typical patriarchal white privileged cis male, most are shocked to know I have more hispanic or latin blood, being second generation United States from Mexico, than I do European.)

EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors.

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