We haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s powerful book yet, but it was recently in the news for being censored in New Jersey prisons. The INTERCEPT noted the irony: “Michelle Alexander’s book chronicles how people of color are not just locked in, but locked out of civic life, and New Jersey has exiled them even further by banning this text specifically for them,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha in a statement. “The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives. Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.”

RELATED to this, there is a conference on racist mass-incarceration on January 20th in Braintree.

• Saturday, January 20, 2018 from 9 AM to 1 PM
• All Souls Church, 196 Elm Street, Braintree, MA 02185

A panel of five people will present views and discuss issues we face regarding mass incarceration as, in the words of Michelle Alexander, a racial caste system that requires a great social movement to effectively deal with it. Her argument is that today’s criminal justice system functions as a framework of social oppression and political suppression, comparable to those of Jim Crow and Slavery, and requires serious consideration.

FEATURING: Elizabeth Herbin-Triant of UMass Lowell, and Jon Huibregtse of Framingham State University to talk about what our society faced under Jim Crow and relate that to what we face today. Franklin Baxley, Director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, Rahsaan Hall, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, and Susan Tordella, from End Mass Incarceration Today, will talk about the issues we face and initiatives under way to build democracy and oppose racial injustice.

Please click here to register for the conference.

Anyone want to carpool?

Last night’s special Senate election in Alabama was balm for weary Liberals — and possibly even held a silver lining for Conservatives. With the repudiation of a xenophobic bible-thumping bigot with multiple accusations of child molestation, Alabamians can almost look themselves in the mirror this morning. Together, Democrats and Republicans breathed a sigh of relief that a man so foul would not be taking a seat in the Senate.

Tennessee GOP Senator Bob Corker called Moore’s defeat “a great night for America.” Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio tweeted: “For their good sense people are praised, but the perverse of heart are despised. Proverbs 12:8,” But these were exceptions from a party that generally stands for everything Moore represents.

For Americans the closely-watched election had everything in it — race, sex, religion, authoritarianism. It was at once a referendum on the role of religion in government and America’s search for its soul. Although America may have dodged a bullet, the slim margin said a lot about the country’s tenuous relationship to democracy, equality and civil liberties. Ezra Klein put the narrow Democratic “win” in perspective:

“If Moore had merely been a candidate who believed Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress, that the laws of the United States of America should be superseded by his interpretation of the Bible, that homosexuality should be illegal, he would have won in a landslide. Even multiple credible reports that Moore serially preyed on teenage girls were barely enough to lose him the election. […] Like Donald Trump before him, Moore is proof that there is no depravity so unforgivable, no behavior so immoral, that it assures a candidate will lose his party’s voters.”

Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, in a piece yesterday, had plenty of criticism for Christian liberals but saved his harshest words for conservative Evangelicals:

“The race between Republican candidate Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones has only put an exclamation point on a problem that has been festering for a year and a half — ever since a core of strident conservative Christians began to cheer for Donald Trump without qualification and a chorus of other believers decried that support as immoral. The Christian leaders who have excused, ignored, or justified his unscrupulous behavior and his indecent rhetoric have only given credence to their critics who accuse them of hypocrisy. Meanwhile the easy willingness of moderate and progressive Christians to cast aspersions on their conservative brothers and sisters has made many wonder about our claim that Jesus Christ can bring diverse people together as no other can.”

Aspersions aside, the facts are these: White Alabamians, in their perversity, overwhelmingly chose a racist multiply-accused of pedophilia who doesn’t really believe in the U.S. Constitution over a Democrat who successfully prosecuted the Klan. And it was black Alabamians — black women, especially — whom the nation can thank for their display of the “good sense” mentioned in Proverbs 12:8.

The Alabama election should dispel any notion that Democrats must abandon so-called “identity politics” and throw their efforts instead into chasing “angry white voters.” Angry white voters don’t vote for them. When Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic luminaries announced their “Better Deal” in Berryville, Virginia, it was a harebrained effort to appeal to white populism. But the Democratic Party is a party of diversity, the working class is much broader than the DNC seems to understand — and that’s where the party’s power must come from. Last night black Alabamians wanted the DNC to remember that.

Before the election, when asked if black Alabama voters would turn out in sufficient numbers, Birmingham City Councillor Sheila Tyson replied, “The problem isn’t going to be with the black voters. If Jones doesn’t win, it’s not our problem.” But black voters delivered. After the votes were in, Democratic strategist Symone D. Sanders told a Newsweek reporter, “Doug Jones would not have won today without the turnout we saw from African-American voters. […] Black women have been absolutely clear in their support for Democratic policies and Democratic candidates. It’s high time for Democrats … to invest in that effort.”

Which was a polite way of telling the Democratic Party to stop focusing on big donors, and losing battles with racists, to democratize and start showing some respect for voters of color who just saved their asses.

But bringing real democracy to the Democratic Party won’t happen easily. In the Monday New York Times Julia Azari and Seth Masket penned an opinion piece, “Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?” In it they object to the DNC Unity Commission’s moves to reduce the number of superdelegates and open up the party to [shudder] Sanders supporters. They write that “part of the problem for parties is our insistence that they be run democratically. That turns out not to be a very realistic concept […] party leaders will always have vastly more information about candidates — their strengths and flaws, their ability to govern and work with Congress, their backing among various interest groups and coalitions — than voters and caucusgoers do. That information is useful, even vital, to the task of picking a good nominee.”

Richard Eskow in his dissection, “Democrats Need More Democracy, Not Less” does a great job of refuting Azari and Masket’s argument, pointing out that — repeatedly — party insiders have either championed candidates who were doomed the moment their names appeared on the ballot — or sabotaged candidates who were objectively more “realistic” than the poor choices insiders made. The 2016 Presidential election was no exception.

If the Alabama election teaches us anything, it’s that the Republican Party has completely lost whatever soul it ever had. Democrats, on the other hand, still have theirs. It’s right underfoot, but they’re knocking around in the dark trying to figure out where the hell they left it.

The New Bedford Branch of the NAACP is celebrating its 100th Anniversary!

On December 10, 1917, the National Board of the NAACP chartered the New Bedford Branch, joining a long history of struggle for civil rights and social justice across the nation. Recently a UMASS Dartmouth branch was formed to work with the city chapter. The New Bedford chapter was formed only eight years after the NAACP itself was established.

To commemorate its centennial, the New Bedford NAACP Branch is holding a 100th Anniversary Gala on (Saturday) December 16, 2017 at White’s of Westport, 66 State Road in Westport, Massachusetts.

The keynote speaker for this event will be Ms. Clayola Brown, President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in Washington D.C. and former National NAACP Board Member. The event will feature a cocktail hour, dinner, music and dancing, an awards presentation, and a historical review of the New Bedford NAACP Branch. The occasion promises to be a memorable event to mark the anniversary of the chartering of a branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

Mark your calendars and please support this tremendous milestone in both national and local history. Tickets for the semi-formal event are $75.00 each and may be purchased by contacting Mr. Peter Silva via e-mail at degbor.silva2@comcast.net. If you can’t attend, buy a ticket anyway and earmark it for a student.

Before the light of brotherly love totally flickers out in this country, it might be a good time to support those fighting for civil liberties and the rights of all of us.

See you on the 16th!

Download the flyer here.

The culture wars are nothing new.

Even a hundred years ago White America had seen the writing on the wall. It knew its power was about to peak and would eventually decline. It also knew that culture war would be a potent brake on the process.

And so the Western canon — a curriculum exalting Western empire — was developed. In 1909 Harvard University’s 51-volume “Harvard Classics” was published. It represented what any well-educated man of the time should know. The Classics were overwhelmingly those of ancient Greek and Roman empires and the rising colonial empires of Europe and America who saw themselves as rightful inheritors. Three non-Western texts were included — the Sayings of Confucius, the Bhagavad-Gita, and several surahs from the Qu’ran. But it was largely a white, Christian — and overwhelmingly male — curriculum.

In 1952 Great Books of the Western World was published by Encyclopedia Britannica. This time the volumes targeted not an academic audience but businessmen who wanted to fill in educational gaps — and put some nice-looking books on their mahogony shelves. Robert Hutchins, a founder of the project along with Mortimer Adler, announced the books at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria, saying: “This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.” One meaning the selection made crystal clear — only the West was of importance to a well-educated man. Confucius, the Hindus, and Muhammad had been banished from even token appearances this time around.

In 1994 academic Harold Bloom — no WASP but another old white male who called himself a “Jewish Gnostic” — came up with another reading list promoting Western civilization: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Bloom’s list focused on 26 authors and now represented what some were calling the Judeo-Christian tradition, although he had added a smattering — and a strangely idiosyncratic selection — of “international” writers. Despite being an update for a post-war America that had received undeniable contributions from Jews, Bloom’s “canon” remained one more reading list of largely dead white men written by a member of a slightly, and only reluctantly, enlarged club.

Around this time another Bloom — University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom — published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that abandoning the Western canon would dumb down students, plunge them into moral relativism, and that modern (and international) culture was bereft of civilizing influences. The book became required reading for neoconservatives like Dinesh D’Souza who himself published one with a similar theme. But what disturbed conservatives the most was that students and academics questioned whether the Western canon actually represented all that was best about the “democratic” Western world — or whether its main purpose was to defend reactionary, colonial, and elitist traditions. Even the other Bloom — Harold — chimed in: “We are destroying all intellectual and esthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice.”

Social justice. God forbid.

The Civil Rights movement had been a shock, and the Sixties were bad enough for conservatives. But now students at Ivy League institutions were turning their backs on the Western world — or at least looking occasionally in other directions. These students were painted as lazy, spoiled children of privilege or angry, ungrateful, minority upstarts spitting on what democracy, consumer culture, and affirmative action had graciously afforded them. They wanted to read post-Colonial literature — Black Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Latin Americans, and Asians. Conservatives saw college students under the sway of Svengali academics attacking all that European civilization had done for those they had colonized.

For decades Joseph Campbell was known for books on mythology, comparative religion, and literature. Even today Campbell’s studies of the folk tale and, specifically, the “Hero’s Journey,” are known by just about every working screenwriter — and now even ISIS. But while the Western canon’s treatment of mythology was limited to Europe — mainly Greece, Germany, and Scandinavia — as early as 1952 Campbell slammed the omission of other cultures in his introduction to the Viking Press Portable Edition of Arabian Nights. Campbell took specific aim at the Great Books:

“… it is remarkable how little is admitted of the Muslim contribution to our culture by those histories (hundreds appear every year) that rehearse the outdated schoolbook story about the Greeks and the Renaissance. In a recent list of”Great Books” not a single volume (save the Bible) is named from east of Suez: Calvin is there, but not Mohammed; Hobbes, but not Confucius; the Iliad (which for the past twenty-five hundred years has had no influence whatsoever on civilization, save as an unmastered model for the litterateurs), but not the Mahabharata (which, during the same period, has been the spiritual sustenance of billions of the world’s living people). One searches in vain for a single Buddhist text (the dominant faith of about one-third the world’s population), a single Oriental philosopher, a single poet or novelist of the great Chinese, Japanese, Arabian, or Hindu traditions. Such a list, in the present century, is ridiculous, and would be incredible were our Occidental megalomania not one of the most conspicuous of the world’s present ills.”

Occidental megalomania, indeed.

Fast forward seventy years and most would acknowledge that the old white men lost the Canon wars. But they do keep trying. In 2008 Americans elected a black president who had spent considerable time as a youngster in Asia — and white America didn’t like it. In 2010, former MIT literature professor, playwright, and old white man A.R. Gurney — best known for a play about a dog — wrote Office Hours, a contrived swipe at lazy plagiarizing students preoccupied with social justice and political correctness — and nasty academic feminists griping about old dead white men. Office Hours was a passionate defense — and among the last I can recall — of the Great Books, and the play had a mercifully short run.

Having lost the Canon wars, Conservatives now have abandoned their traditional role of defending tradition. Nowadays when it comes to higher education, their new strategy seems to be gutting the humanities, focusing on STEM education, licensing fly-by-night for-profit universities, embracing flat earth anti-intellectualism, rejecting science, and embracing creationism.

By the time the 2016 election rolled around, the old white men were in full panic. As always, the deck they had stacked and the bizarre election rules they had written guaranteed their presidency — even while losing by three million popular votes. But the gnarled white knuckles of these men are still clenched in a death grip on the levers of government, commerce, and culture.

But they can’t hold on forever. The known world today is no longer quite so flat, quite so white, quite so male, or quite as Western as it was in 1909.

On Saturday, October 7th, from 5-6:30pm the City of New Bedford’s Department of Community Services and the Asian Pacific Law Students Association at UMASS Law will present a roundtable discussion on community building. The disussion will center around the story of Vincent Chin, whose case sparked the Asian-American civil rights movement depicted in the film Vincent Who?

Speakers include Martin Bentz from the Islamic Society of Southeastern MA, and Thomas Curnalia and Jared Picchi from Human Rights Clinic.

For more information, contact Mali Lim at 508-961-3020 or email mali.lim@newbedford-ma.gov.

Download the event flyer here.

In case you’re curious about Vincent Chin, some context:

Who Is Vincent Chin? The History and Relevance of a 1982 Killing

Why Vincent Chin Matters

The Case Against Vincent Chin

* * *

Unrelated to Vincent Chin – except perhaps for our national dedication to violence – was Sunday night’s massacre in Las Vegas. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that it was a resident of Mesquite, Nevada – the state with the most lax gun laws in the country – who could assemble enough paramilitary firepower to create this kind of carnage.

In 2013 I snapped this photo in the Las Vegas airport. In Nevada, apparently, machine guns are just a part of the culture – a culture of violence.

Yesterday was a dark day for everyone except the white supremacist regime that currently runs this country. Almost a million young Dreamers – Americans in every sense except documentation – will be expelled with the stroke of a presidential pen unless Congress throws them a lifeline. While 2017 is certainly not 1933, it probably feels like it if you’re a Dreamer.

Maybe we should be looking at German history to see how quickly a country can run off the rails. The same history tells us how deeply expulsion hurt Jewish refugees, how painfully friendships, love, and social bonds between Jews and non-Jews were destroyed when an entire people was legislated out of existence. German history also reminds us of the enduring national trauma that white supremacist policies caused – now going on a century later.

We should remember what happened.

In 1933 Hitler’s National Socialists passed a law for the restoration of German jobs. The whole purpose of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums was to make Germany great again for white protestant civil servants.

The gesetz protected German jobs from “foreigners” – non-Aryans. How easily economically-insecure lower and middle class Germans turned on Jews who had lived among them – centuries before Germany was even a nation. German Jews were Germans in every sense – but how easily and arbitrarily they were re-defined as aliens, separated from friends and family and German society with the stroke of a pen.

The president of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, a military man with the gravitas of John McCain, was offended that Jews who had served at the front during WWI were included in the bans, and he wrung a concession from the Nazis. But Hindenburg died the following year and with him so did the concession. Dismissals from the civil service were swift and severe, and expulsions began. People like Albert Einstein, for example, saw the writing on the wall and fled.

In total, 340,000 Jews of lesser fame and resources than Einstein were forced to flee as refugees, often with little time to uproot an entire lifetime in Germany. After all, they were Germans with few connections to any of the foreign lands to which they had to escape. These were among the first victims of Nazi policies and almost a third of them perished in the Holocaust.

Then in 1938 the night known as Kristallnacht occurred. It was a nightmare of shattered glass and shattered lives. It was the beginning of the end for German Jews. The gloves were off. Germany would be a nation for Germans. Germans didn’t know it at the time, but it was also the beginning of the end for Germany.

And the nightmare had started only five years earler with the expulsions.

By now most people know that Donald Trump announced (via Jeff Sessions) that the DACA program will end in six months. Trump’s decision overturns one by Barak Obama to provide temporary protections for “childhood arrivals” in the absence of a permanent legislative solution. Since 2001 the DREAM Act has foundered in Congress, and today’s

Cancellation of DACA passes the buck to Congress to pass its own Dreamer legislation

In addition, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared to admit that

Preserving DACA is a form of extortion designed to preserve Trump’s unnecessary and unpopular wall

Read up on the DREAM Act Legislation itself:

S.1291, the original DREAM Act was introduced in 2001 by Orrin Hatch

Senators Durbin and Graham reintroduced a new DREAM Act on July 20 2017

Text of S.1615 – the new DREAM Act (2017)

Text of H.R.3440 – the House version of the new DREAM Act (2017)

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Petitions, legislative contacts, information and conference calls:

ACLU PeoplePower

FCNL Conference Call

FNCL Petition to Restore Protections

Here to Stay – Top 5 Things to

MIRA Coalition – What you can do as a DREAMer – or ally

Our Revolution

DON’T FORGET

This month things are heating up in Congress. Stay awake and pay attention:

Congress’s Packed September Agenda

After he was elected Donald Trump crowed, “this is the day we take our country back.” The Orange One’s supporters knew what his dog whistle meant. White supremacist Richard Spencer announced: “We won. America belongs to white men.” His buddy Jared Taylor told ABC News journalist Amna Nawaz: “we built a wonderful country that your ancestors could not have [built]. That is why people like you come here.” Taylor put into words what many white Americans believe – that the nation is the crowning achievement of Christian white people and that it’s their country.

But history professor Joe Krulder isn’t buying the myth of America as a lily white nation. In “America was never White” Krulder provides numerous examples of the diversity that actually built America, and of a much more complex history – not simply white settlement – that made the nation.

The founding myths of America that white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are flogging almost seem to have been taken from Nazi and Soviet era propaganda. White farmers braving cold Dakota winters in sod houses, nobly attacking the land with scythes, or pictures of muscular white tradesmen hammering iron or forging the beams of American skyscrapers. It’s quite romantic.

And it’s also a crock. Historians can tell you that the real America was conquered by genocide, ethnic cleansing, and violence. Much of our national wealth was accumulated by stealing the lives and labor of those regarded as less than human and pressing them into slavery. White supremacy had to be invented to justify slavery, but white supremacy has proven to be both versatile and extensible in justifying America’s many wars of choice on brown and yellow people around the world.

White supremacy, in fact, is such a major strand of our national DNA that it leads many to believe that we are something grander than a nation among other nations, that we have a divine mission to minister to our benighted brown brethren in other countries, guide them, murder them if necessary, deliver to them our great institutions of democracy and capitalism through the barrel of a gun. Every aspect of our society – from economic inequality to the prison system – is based on white supremacist myths that people like Spencer and Taylor have long been selling. Even our first black president, a man who lived in other cultures, considered himself an advocate of American Exceptionalism.

Charlottesville reminded us again of this when racists and Nazis mobilized to defend Southern “heritage” in the form of a Confederate statue. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center there are at least 1,500 monuments to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, many of them built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).

The Daughters of the Confederacy describes itself as a patriotic organization. But like Spencer and Taylor the UDC promotes a revisionist history. It is “an organization which has for its purpose the continuance and furtherance of the true history of the South and the ideals of southern womanhood.” The “true history” the UDC is selling is “a heritage so rich in honor and glory that it far surpasses any material wealth.”

Likewise the Sons of Confederate Veterans is committed to “the vindication of the cause for which we fought. […] the perpetuation of those principles […] and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.” Glorious slavery.

But don’t believe me. Believe the slavemasters themselves. The Constitution of the Confederate States spells out the Confederate glories in detail. Slavery is mentioned no less than a dozen times in the document, and it was such a central, glorious “ideal” that the Confederate Constitution contained a clause which prevented slavery from ever being abolished.

But if we really want to look at Southern heritage, let’s begin where the Civil War began – in South Carolina.

The first settlements in the Carolinas date from 1640 to 1650. A second wave of colonists, slave traders from Barbados, arrived in 1665, and a third wave came in 1670 to what is now Charleston, South Carolina. They were a quarrelsome, violent bunch. Authoritarian government, political intrigue, dissension, murder and insurrection were the rule rather than the exception. Brotherly love among white colonists might have been a Christian notion but it was nowhere to be found. British Anglicans prohibited French Protestants from owning land in the colony, for example.

For this, after all, was colonialism. Competitors had to be fought and killed, natives had to be “repealed and replaced.” In 1713 Carolina’s colonists forced Tuscorara, Westoe and Coree Indians to flee north where they were eventually assimilated by the Iroquois. Despite colonial treaties many Indians were pressed into slavery and shipped to the West Indies to serve on plantations. It seems triply obscene that Jeff Sessions won’t let them back in their country.

The French, English, and Spanish were all in the New World to conquer it. And they hated each other. It is laughable to think of Spencer’s and Taylor’s fairytale notion of a monolithic European culture at America’s founding. Queen Anne’s War was a colonial dispute over conquered Spanish territory that played out all over the North American continent. Indians in the Carolinas – when they were not being whipped and shipped into slavery – were pressed into the ranks of militias on both the French and English sides.

But then there are the demographics. If, as white supremacists argue, America was always a white Christian nation, then the early American population should have been demonstrably white.

But census data easily disproves this notion.

Throughout the Deep South, for much of our early history, slaves outnumbered whites. It was slaves who farmed the land. In cities many slaves were skilled tradesmen and artisans. Besides white brethren who refused to see them as such, it was also slaves – and the children of slaves – who were hammering on American iron. Go to Charleston, South Carolina and you can see hundreds of pieces of the enduring iron work of Philip Simmons, who learned his craft from a former slave.

During World War I the 371st Infantry Regiment numbered many black Americans from South Carolina. Pershing didn’t see much use for them and he actually handed over the regiment to French command. But numerous members of the 371st received the Croix de Guerre and the Order of Légion d’Honneur. Then they returned to a nation they had just defended but never heard the phrase: “thank you for your service.”

Census figures from the early 1700’s show a consistent non-white majority in South Carolina until 1920 – that was the year that white people finally edged past 50.38%. The nation was 150 years old; whites could finally claim South Carolina was white.

White supremacist myths can’t hold up to history and fact. It may be true that the reins of the economy have always been in white hands, but the work of building and defending America was done – and always has been done – by those rarely given their rightful credit.

The nation can’t take much more of this. This week alone Donald Trump has edged us uncomfortably closer to both nuclear and civil war.

Anyone disappointed by Trump’s unwillingness to condemn white supremacists and fascists should hardly be surprised. Anyone who believes the GOP’s repudiations of white supremacy should remember how hard Republicans fought for Trump’s cabinet picks and national security appointments (below). And anyone who would like to give the 45th president of the United State the benefit of the doubt on his recent comments should remember that white supremacy is a tradition in the Trump family.

Trump has got to go. Either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, either is fine by me. And those in the following gallery of haters – half of whom are Trump-appointed white supremacists – should all be shown the door.

• Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist and Senior advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Lou Barletta, Immigration Policy advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• John Bolton, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Islamophobe
• David Clarke, Dept. of Homeland Security – Islamophobe
• Kellyanne Conway, Senior advisor and former campaign manager – Islamophobe
• Monica Crowley, Director of Communications at the National Security Council – Islamophobe
• Jon Feere, Dept. of Homeland Security – white nationalist and anti-Semite
• Michael Flynn, Former National Security advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Frank Gaffney, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Newt Gingrich, Unofficial advisor – Islamophobe
• Katharine Gorka, DHS Landing Team advisor – Islamophobe
• Sebastian Gorka, National Security advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe, anti-immigrant, with connections to actual Hungarian Nazis
• Pete Hoekstra, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Julie Kirchner, Customs and Border Protection advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• Kris Kobach, Immigration Policy advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Clare Lopez, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• K.T. McFarland, Former National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Stephen Miller, Senior Policy advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Heather Nauert, State Department spokesperson – Islamophobe
• Walid Phares, Foreign policy advisor – Islamophobe
• Mike Pompeo, CIA Director – Islamophobe
• Jeff Sessions, Attorney General – white nationalist, Islamophobe, and anti-immigrant
• Peter Thiel, Transition Team advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• Beth Van Duyne, Dept. of Housing and Urban Development – Islamophobe
• Frank Wuco, Homeland Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant

Yesterday’s terror attack in Charlottesville reminds us how openly America’s white sheets and brown shirts have been displayed for years, and how dangerous they’ve always been – especially since Donald Trump’s embrace. White supremacists and neo-Nazis were in Charlottesville this week as part of white supremacist Richard Spencer’s “Unite the Right” rally. They were in town to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, a lingering symbol of slavery. Yesterday former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke was out singing Trump’s praises, while the night before Spencer was carrying Klan torches.

And then James Fields, a member of Vanguard America with a Hitler haircut, tore through a pedestrian mall in his Dodge Challenger, mowing down dozens of people and killing one. Most media outlets reported the terror attack as part of a “clash” that occurred at a protest, but after years and dozens of right-wing attacks, the attack illustrated the need to start taking American fascism seriously.

The Great new America Trump promises is founded on toxic, racist and authoritarian politics we haven’t seen since 1925. That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan. Now racists and fascists feel emboldened to march in public. After all, they’re in the White House.

The Trump campaign finally found its winning ticket with a third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis who tapped into the American cesspool of racism and authoritarianism. Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is an unrepentant segregationist. Three of his advisors, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, have ties to neo-Nazi groups. America’s white supremacist in chief himself receives daily cabinet briefings. And, as the NAACP pointed out seven years ago, the House’s Tea Party members are riddled with racist and neo-Nazi elements.

After the Charlottesville attack Republicans issued a series of insincere repudiations of white terror, but took pains not to alienate their base. Paul Ryan, for example, called white supremacy a “scourge.” But scourge or not, racists comprise a majority of Trump’s supporters. David Duke reacted to Trump’s not-quite-a-condemnation of the terror attack, warning: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

And the GOP knows it. They courted it. They count on it.

Unfortunately Democrats have little inclination to fight back. Whether by denial, PTSD, or Stockholm Syndrome, the DNC seems to be moving toward the right along with the Republicans. Rather than convincing DNC leaders that political centrism is an empty husk, the shellacking the party took in 2016 appears to have made it even less willing to be the party to defend Americans from institutionalized racism and bigotry.

When Democrats unveiled their Better Deal marketing strategy, they did so only a hundred miles from Charlottesville, focusing strictly on economic issues – making it clear their purpose was to attract Southern white voters. This appeared to be a repudiation of the “identity politics” some hold responsible for the loss of the 2016 Presidential election. Jamil Smith wrote in Vanity Fair that the Democrat’s new campaign is wrapped in Red, White, and Blue and doesn’t dare tread on issues of social justice: “Party leadership seems to want a divorce from identity politics. Or a trial separation, at least.”

A piece in the New York Times right after the election by Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigated liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla advised liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.” But it wasn’t just bathrooms. As Lilla observed, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans.

In retrospect, the DNC seems to have listened to Lilla and those like him. Besides backing away from “identity politics” the DNC now won’t even unequivocally support abortion rights. Secularism and multiculturalism, it seems, are not to be major efforts of the new Democratic Party.

Steve Phillips, columnist, civil rights lawyer and author, hammers the DNC’s “Better Deal” as not only a repudiation of America’s true majority but as a case of moral delinquency:

“Rather than draw a line in the sand, speak out against that, summon people to their highest and best selves to actually embrace a multi-racial country that we have, the Democrats are putting their head in the sand and ignoring that and simply trying to go after this economic message, which is both mathematically unfounded as well as morally delinquent in terms of speaking up to the outrages and the attacks on the various communities of color and the other marginalized groups in this society that this administration is doing.”

The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been up to the Democratic Party to defend civil rights of all types – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.

But now the DNC has handed in its resignation at the worst possible time.

The petition

Last month I signed a change.org petition demanding the reinstatement of Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey. Durden is also a well-known media commentator who in that capacity crossed swords with Tucker Carlson on FOX News, only to lose her part-time teaching job two days later. On the surface it seemed like just another case of an American discovering the limits of the First Amendment.

But as I read more, the story had components that touched on issues of race, gender, corporatism, worker protections for part-timers, and censorship of all types:

• A Black Lives Matter chapter in New York City wanted to celebrate the black roots of Memorial Day — the roots of which most Americans are ignorant.
• The American Right is always looking for an opportunity to smear Black Lives Matter.
• Durden came to BLM’s defense and was censored and insulted as both a black person and as a woman.
• Two days later the “senior management executive” of her community college fired her because free speech and academic freedom are inconvenient luxuries for an institution in crisis — and also because adjuncts are a cheap, disposable resource — just the way corporate America likes it.

Durden’s experience encapsulates a lot that’s wrong with America.

FOX News and Friends

On June 6, 2017 Lisa Durden, who had previously appeared on the Kelly File at FOX News, appeared on the Tucker Carlson show, also on FOX. Carlson began his segment by showing viewers selected quotes from a Black Lives Matter invitation to a blacks-only Memorial Day Party in New York City. FOX News viewers knew where this was going: demonization of Black Lives Matter, best known for raising hell about the American epidemic of police murders.

But Carlson omitted two key facts in his “set-up”: first, the party was a single event in a single city; and second, the organizers wanted to celebrate the black origins of Memorial Day [more on this in a minute]. Carlson also conflated a single celebration with the entire Black Lives Matter movement — which is actually an umbrella organization with many different tendencies and numerous white allies — and then he asked Durden to respond:

“… I thought the whole point of Black Lives Matter, one of the points would be to speak out against singling people out on the basis of their race and punishing them for that, because you can’t control what your race is, and yet, they seem to be doing that. Explain that to me.”

This was supposed to be an easy score against BLM’s supposed hypocrisy but Durden insisted on putting it in context — something ill-suited for FOX viewers.

The reality of White Privilege

Now, Lisa Durden is no shrinking violet. She is equal parts public intellectual and showman. And there is a very good reason FOX kept asking her back, particularly to debate FOX’s black reactionary Kevin Jackson on police violence — conflict sells. Durden also has a tendency to tune her BS-detector right up to the max. On this particular evening, when Carlson asked her if it wasn’t racist to have a black-only party Durden responded:

“Boo hoo hoo, you white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter, all-black Memorial Day celebration. Wow! Let me contextualize that for you –“

And that was enough. Carlson had heard “White Privilege” and it effectively short-circuited portions of the brain related to high-level executive function. He was seeing White and he was seeing Red. In addition, a woman was challenging him. And not only that, Carlson had heard a strong black woman refuse to play along with his patronizing attempt to catch her in a transparent trap. Carlson interrupted Durden, going so far as to cut off her microphone. She had actually dared to offer viewers an explanation for a black celebration of Memorial Day — to “contextualize” it, as she put it. But Carlson just wasn’t having any.

“No, you don’t need to contextualize anything for anyone considering your logic is nonexistent and your racism abundant.”

Durden’s unsympathetic “Boo hoo hoo” was probably the trigger. But now there would be no opportunity to hear Durden’s reasoning, though she tried unsuccessfully to be heard, to explain to viewers that Memorial Day was a commemoration first celebrated by South Carolina slaves. But the FOX segment only went downhill from there.

Nevertheless she persisted

“A man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man” (Corinthians). “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Ephesians). Today’s white male Republicans love to drag their conveniently medieval theology into the public sphere — whether it’s government or a broadcasting studio.

When Elizabeth Warren argued against Jeff Sessions’ racist history during confirmation hearings, Mitch McConnell invoked an arcane Senate rule barring “insults” to former members of the Senate. When Warren argued Sessions’ record was germane to his confirmation, McConnell angrily defended her harsh censure: “Nevertheless she persisted.” Because once a Good Ole Boy tells you to shut up, you’d better do it immediately.

But if persistence is an offense, derision is a capital offense.

During the same confirmation hearings Desiree Fairooz, a 61-year-old member of Code Pink, was forcibly removed and arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions. Fairooz chuckled when Republican Senator Richard Shelby praised Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans fairly under the law,” adding it “is clear and well-documented.” It is remarkable that there wasn’t even more laughter. For more on this topic, see Maggie Hennefeld’s excellent piece in LA Progressive, “On the Criminalization of Female Laughter.”

Five years ago, when Megan Kelly was still at FOX, she hosted a segment with the express purpose of attacking Elizabeth Warren’s mention of distant Cherokee ancestry. Kelly asked both Tucker Carlson and black feminist Jehmu Greene whether this was laughable. Greene defended Warren, pointing out that even the Chief of the Cherokee Nation was only 3% Cherokee and calling out Carlson’s racist and sexist dog-whistles: “You see Scott Brown really questioning her qualifications because he has to appeal to white, working-class voters who feel marginalized because of affirmative action. This smells real stank to women who do not like being called on their qualifications.”

Typically, Carlson made it patronizing and personal with Greene, again challenging a black woman’s reasoning: “It’s so offensive and dumb. But leaving that aside, it does provide a window into a system that is fundamentally corrupt that awards people based on their DNA.” Greene then called him out on both the misogyny and racism: “[Your attitude] “is going to appeal to folks like you, voters like you: bow-tying white boys.”

With this past as prolog, Durden’s persistence and derision didn’t go over well with Carlson, or at FOX, the 24 hour racism and sexism channel.

Freedom of What?

Durden’s firing is not unique. People are dismissed, censored, or punished all the time for views employers, schools, advertisers, lobby groups, internet service providers, and even foreign governments don’t like. People can be fired whether they are speaking on or off the clock, as representatives of a group, or simply for themselves. They can be fired for saying nothing but simply being who they are — and that includes being gay or pregnant. They can be fired for being whistle-blowers — even when they are exposing criminal acts.

It’s actually quite distressing how little the First Amendment actually protects freedom of expression.

And it’s not just liberals who run afoul of censorship and retaliation. Bill O’Reilly was fired by FOX by his advertisers, though not because of his chronic sexual harassment. Richard Spencer lost a gym membership expressly because he’s noxious white supremacist scum. Tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich lost his seat on the board of Mozilla for his homophobic views.

Right or Left, in America social and political “norms” must be enforced and outliers punished. On the Left it’s frequently gay-bashers and neo-Nazis. On FOX it’s simply progressive black women.

Academic Freedom

But the First Amendment says that government cannot censor you in word or print. This is commonly understood as applying to public or government entities like community colleges and universities. Durden’s firing should certainly trigger a lawsuit for violation of her First Amendment rights.

And there is also a long tradition in colleges and universities of giving faculty members freedom to say what they want without censorship. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) notes that academic freedom as “common law” has existed since 1940. Many of the rights extended to faculty depend on tenure and teaching status, though there are disagreements among Federal Courts about what rights apply to whom.

Still, the Collective Bargaining Agreement under which Durden was hired “declares its commitment to sustain the principles of academic freedom” as well as “retention of all the adjunct faculty members’ rights as a citizen to free speech and publication. Such rights are not, as such, subject to institutional censorship or discipline.” The only caveat in the contract pertains to “the adjunct faculty member’s unusual influence on the opinions and values of the students with whom the adjunct faculty member works.”

But Lisa Durden never identified herself as an Essex faculty member and was attempting only to influence Tucker Carlson’s viewers, not a room full of impressionable undergrads.

Adjuncts

Community Colleges may be called “colleges” but there is a caste system when it comes to teaching in America’s institutions of higher learning. To put it indelicately, adjuncts like Durden are the fast-food workers of the academic world. The AAUP has attempted to show some solidarity with adjuncts but this has never been translated into anything substantial. Instead, it has been up to advocates like Robin Meade, a union organizer for Moraine Valley Community College, to add rights for adjuncts into contracts.

Yet when Meade spoke out about adjuncts being treated as “disposable resources” at her college she had much the same experience as Durden: The “chief of campus police hand-delivered a letter of termination to Meade at her home. Her college email was immediately cut off and locks were changed on the union office at the college.” Meade appealed to the Illinois Department of Labor Relations and she won. Though this was a labor rights case, it also touched on her rights as an academic.

Seventy-five percent of faculty members in American colleges are adjuncts and, shockingly, they earn less than poverty wages. A majority of adjunct faculty members are women — those facing the most discrimination with tenure track positions. And while 60% of adjuncts in Colorado, for example, are women, they earn significantly less than their male counterparts. And the percentage of adjuncts is increasing nationally, just as part-time workers are increasing in the general labor market.

A typical adjunct can expect to earn $3-$5K for a single semester course. Her union will often — as in Durden’s case — be able to do little for her both in terms of wages or representation. Like Meade, after being fired Durden was denied union representation and treated like a criminal.

Because in the end Durden — like all American workers — was just another disposable resource.

College or Corporation?

While its adjuncts earn $7 to $8 an hour, Essex County College’s president, Anthony E. Monroe, a former healthcare consultant, earns $215,000 every year. Monroe was hired in May to deal with a stream of crises that have plagued the predominantly black college.

In May 2017 the former president and former university attorney were fired for pursuing an investigation of financial misconduct and coverup by the same administrators who terminated them. Both women are now pursuing wrongful termination lawsuits against the college. Essex is also at risk of losing its accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education for “enrollment” and “leadership” issues.

Enter Anthony E. Monroe, Ed.D, MBA, MPH, FACHE.

Monroe’s resume describes him as a “Senior Management Executive” and his own effusive description of his abilities oozes like a jelly donut with corporate flummery:

“Dynamic, energetic, and experienced visionary and strategic executive with 28 year career in complex, world-class institutions that is showcased by an impressive record of leadership and management performance. Significant track record and achievements in delivering strong market, financial, and operational results in very complex and large systems. Recognized for innovative leadership in transitioning underperforming organizations into top producers and guiding others through growth and expansion; skilled in negotiations, changing culture, board relations, creating systemness, improving operations efficiency and project management, driving revenues and market shares, improving productivity and quality, generating savings, enhancing customer satisfaction, managing multi-site operations and integrating systems. Expertise in public health systems operations, physician relations, network development, strategy execution, clinical excellence, financial management, and market growth.”

Monroe came from City Colleges of Chicago, Malcolm X College, where he was president for seven years. He revamped a $251 million dollar campus, put his fingerprints on a $524 million capital plan, oversaw an 80% increase in degrees, saw graduation rates increase by 3%, and so on. Numbers. Widgets. Percentages. And “systemness.”

But Monroe’s other talent was making controversies go away. While president of Malcom X College, Dr. Micah Young, Dean of Medical Sciences, informed Monroe that there were four boxes of rotting cadavers stored in an unrefrigerated closet in the James Craig Lab, and that they represented a slew of health and workplace safety violations. Within a week Young was out of a job.

Young’s lawyer, Dennis Stefanowicz, said, “He tried to do the right thing for the families and for the individuals who gave their bodies to science. When he tried to do the right thing, he ran into a brick wall, and when he brought the issue to light, instead of taking the time to figure out how the problem occurred and figure out how to right the wrong, they just terminated the person who brought the issue to light. It was the easy way out.”

Mission Creep

Monroe’s talent for taking “the easy way out” certainly came in handy within weeks of assuming the presidency at Essex County College. Monroe posted a long-winded justification for Durden’s firing — one sounding like it had been concocted in a corporate H.R. department but not an institution of higher learning:

“While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue. […] In consideration of the College’s mission, and the impact that this matter has had on the College’s fulfillment of its mission, we cannot maintain an employment relationship with the adjunct. The College affirms its right to select employees who represent the institution appropriately and are aligned with our mission.”

When Durden’s case finally goes to court Monroe will have to explain precisely why violating an adjunct’s employment contract was necessary, what he thinks the college’s “mission” is, and precisely how Durden’s private opinions were incompatible with that mission. Or was it simply that Durden’s views clashed with Monroe’s corporatist views?

Black Lives Matter

But let’s not forget where this journey began — with Durden defending Black Lives Matter.

Four years ago George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. Many on the jury believed Zimmerman was guilty of murder but they were instructed that Florida’s “stand your ground” laws prevented a finding of guilt. Black Lives Matter was born out of this injustice. The murdering of black people is an important part of the BLM movement, but BLM’s statement describes it as a liberation movement with broader goals:

“Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a Black-centered political will and movement building project turned chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene when violence is inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.

Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.”

The BLM movement foresaw that, especially after the election of Donald Trump, things were going to get ugly — and fast:

“What is true today — and has been true since the seizure of this land — is that when black people and women build power, white people become resentful. Last week, that resentment manifested itself in the election of a white supremacist to the highest office in American government.”

Newsweek cited the Trump administration’s threats:

“The president has targeted the organization, especially protesters who have taken to the streets. The White House website went live after inauguration and promised to end the ‘anti-police atmosphere’ while noting ‘our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.’ Slate wrote about this shift with the headline ‘In One of His First Acts as President, Donald Trump Put Black Lives Matter on Notice.'”

Ignorance of American History

The history lesson Durden hoped to remind America of was lost the moment Tucker Carlson heard the words “white privilege.” But the history is quite relevant to this entire story.

In 2011 historian David Blight looked at the history of Memorial Day in a New York Times piece, “Forgetting Why We Remember.”

“By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. […] Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. […] The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. […] After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway… […] The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”

Though the impulse to honor the half-million Union and Confederate dead was expressed in many such commemorations, black Americans are very likely to have been the first to do so.

This is what Lisa Durden never got to explain to White America.

Four years ago the Massachusetts legislature considered the Massachusetts Trust Act – H.1613 and S.1135 – twin bills which placed limits on ICE but had only a handful of co-sponsors. The bill was not sent directly to hell, but it landed not that far away. This is how spineless state Democrats deal with controversy.

In the last legislative session S.1258 once again tried to protect Massachusetts refugees – and once again the bill was sent to the purgatory known as the House Rules committee. This time it had 25 Senate co-sponsors.

In the current legislative session, S.1305, the Senate version of the Safe Communities Act, has 53 co-sponsors and H.3269, the House version, has 80. Political tides are turning and many Democrats have lost patience with spineless do-nothing representatives like mine and autocratic House speakers. And to those of you (Chris Markey and Robert DeLeo) effectively collaborating with the enemy’s ICE roundups – you have turned yourselves into a list of hacks who ought to be primaried.

MIRA has a great write-up on the Safe Communities Act but in a nutshell this is it:

Massachusetts has its own laws, which must be respected. Police departments, officers, and prisons may not be federalized. The Fourth Amendment must be applied equally to all residents of the Commonwealth, regardless of status. State resources and monies are not to be used for federal purposes. Constitutionally- guaranteed rights are to apply equally to everyone in the Commonwealth. The state will not make its databases available to ICE or Homeland Security. This is the Safe Communities Act.

Progressive Massachusetts has a great script for calling your legislator.

Flood the State House with calls. Remind your representative that sending Safe Communities to purgatory will result in similar political consequences for himself.

Poor Heather Mac Donald. She didn’t get quite the reception she wanted at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) outside Los Angeles. She had come to speak on “The War on Police,” another of her frequent attacks on Black Lives Matter (BLM), and the students weren’t having it. A FOX News video shows what appear to be white allies locking arms and peacefully blocking access to the school’s Athenaeum. Mac Donald’s talk had to continue with whomever had already entered. President Hiram Chodosh live-streamed the talk and put it online. Ironically, as the media and two organizations which sponsored her talk pointed out, more people heard Mac Donald than if no protest had taken place.

Sarah Sanbar, a student fellow, introduced Mac Donald, apologized for the almost empty room, and placed the talk in its proper context. She said that Black Lives Matter opposes systemic racism and that Mac Donald was there to deny it and to paint BLM as dangerous. And that turned out to be a fairly accurate introduction.

Although Heather MacDonald is ostensibly a conservative intellectual and a “fellow” of the Manhattan Institute, she spends a lot of time on the talk show and cable television circuit. Here is Mac Donald being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh. There she is with Dennis Prager. Here she is visiting Frontpage Magazine. Mac Donald is a regular on FOX News and in virtually every far right publication. Her book on Black crime is a recommended read of the John Birch Society and the white supremacist group VDARE.

Mac Donald, who studied English and law and who is not actually a social scientist or criminologist, frequently veers into white supremacy. She believes Black communities need to be aggressively policed (occupied) to keep them safe (the White Man’s burden), and Mac Donald calls affirmative action programs “racist.” On FOX News Mac Donald and host Laura Ingraham held a pity party for white student “victims,” with Mac Donald going so far as to claim that “underprepared” blacks don’t actually want to be on these college campuses “when in fact the only reason they’re there is because the campuses want so-called diversity so much that they lower their standards.”

Such rhetoric might have had more to do with the protest at Claremont McKenna than with the pseudoscience Mac Donald tossed into her book “The War on Cops,” which Newsweek dismissed as “flawed logic and fantasy.” The Libertarian magazine Reason found Mac Donald’s logic “deficient” and took her central thesis to task: “America does not have an incarceration problem; it has a [Black] crime problem.” Police reform, prison reform, legal reform, and social reform are therefore all unnecessary because – when Mac Donald drills right down to root causes – well, the root cause is Black people.

I found it ironic that Mac Donald claims to revere the Bill of Rights while finding nothing wrong with police depriving Black teenagers of Fourth Amendment rights. She richly deserves the monicker that Black Lives Matter has given her – racist and fascist. But interfering with someone’s First Amendment rights is a problem and it’s also become an unfortunate trend. And liberal publications from the Atlantic to the LA Times and the New York Times, as well as civil liberties groups like the ACLU, have condemned such liberal intolerance.

Yet if the American Right are the true friends of the First Amendment, as they claim to be, let us see a flurry of Conservative letters to the editor defending protections for whistleblowers, journalists, rights for those boycotting Israeli occupation, support for net neutrality, and ending press bans in the White House. Let us hear fevered calls to stop restricting the right of people to demonstrate except in “free speech zones.” Let the Great Right wing rise up and repeal their own laws permitting vehicular murder of protesters (google it!). Let there be a torrent of letters demanding an end to gag orders on physicians providing women’s health services.

And let us see the nation’s editorial pages flooded with defenses of Kashiya Nwanguma, a Black woman who protested at a Trump rally and was assaulted by a white supremacist at the behest of the white supremacist candidate.

For this is what it’s really about. There’s more here than Heather Mac Donald’s First Amendment right to heap insult and advocate repression on an entire race.

Now that the entire government is doing it.

Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to deport three million people. A mass expulsion of this scale would not only be a human catastrophe but also a civil liberties nightmare and a drain on local law enforcement agencies expected to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by the strangely appropriate acronym ICE.

As a result many cities have enacted “sanctuary” or “welcome” policies designed to keep immigrant populations safe. Most of these policies restrict cooperation with ICE in some way. However, on January 25th the Trump administration retaliated by issuing an Executive Order which cuts off federal funds to so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” a move yet to be tested in the courts.

In an ironic reversal, it now falls to Liberal states and cities to use the Constitution’s 10th Amendment (states rights) provisions to resist oppressive Executive Orders.

Closer to home, it seems only natural that New Bedford – a city known for Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a strong underground railroad during slavery, and a vibrant immigration population today – would be a Sanctuary City. But New Bedford is afraid of joining several other Massachusetts localities – Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Hampden County, Holyoke, Lawrence, Northhampton, Somerville, and Springfield – in resisting the president’s xenophobic decrees.

But momentum and resistance is growing. There are now hundreds of Sanctuary Cities throughout the United States. In addition, there are four Sanctuary states – California, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Colorado – with varying protections for immigrants.

A malignant group with a benign name, the Center for Immigration Studies, echoes Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are rapists and criminals. However, the facts are quite different. An article in the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s factcheck.org cites not only ICE data itself, but law enforcement officials and the results of a University of California study debunking claims like Trump’s. There is no spike in crime in cities with immigrants, and law enforcement would prefer to hear from those impacted by crime rather than drive them underground.

But Sanctuary is nothing new. In fact, it’s an ancient concept with roots in all the Abrahamic faiths.

During the Reagan years hundreds of Central Americans found refuge in Catholic churches offering protection from murderous regimes supported by Reagan Republicans. Though there was, and still is, no legal basis in the United States for a religious institution to offer asylum, the sight of armed federal agents storming a church would have been shocking. By 1987 over 440 American cities had become “sanctuary cities.”

The Catholic tradition of offering sanctuary to refugees, the persecuted, and even criminals stretches back to at least Medieval times. Even after the Catholic Church no longer ruled an empire it still offered sanctuary and it was recognized. For over a thousand years, for example, Britain recognized asylum granted by the Church.

In the Islamic tradition, Muhammad had to flee from Mecca to Medina, and the hijrah (migration) is regarded as an example of the Islamic obligation to provide protection from oppression, even to non-Muslims:

And if anyone of the disbelievers seeks your protection, then grant him protection […] and then escort him to where he will be secure. (Surah 9:6)

It might interest those who claim to be guided by scripture that the idea of Sanctuary is also found in the Old Testament.

According to one of the first stories in the Bible, after Cain murdered his brother Abel he fled to the land of Nod. There he built a city called Enoch, named after his son. Thus, according to tradition, the first human city was founded on both a crime and an act of redemption.

In another Bible passage, before the Israelites were permitted to cross the Jordan into Canaan, they were instructed to build cities of refuge (arei miklat) where those guilty of manslaughter could flee to avoid blood retribution. The cities were run by Levites who, everyone knew, would treat the new citizens and their fellow human beings fairly. Unlike the current presidency.

Today the New Sanctuary Movement is ecumenical and not even always Christian. In many communities Jewish, Quaker, Episcopal, and Unitarian congregations have joined Catholics in protecting their most vulnerable friends and neighbors – renewing not only the ancient traditions of their faiths but putting faith into practice.

Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are causing a lot of fear and insecurity in New Bedford’s immigrant community, resulting in a dramatic increase in demand for the Immigrants’ Assistance Center’s (IAC) services. Now more than ever the IAC needs your support.

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The IAC will be hosting another community forum on Saturday, February 25th, 10-12am, at 58 Crapo Street in New Bedford. The purpose will be to give the immigrant community an overview of the impact of the Trump presidency. Come and learn about rights and risks.

Download the community forum flyer here.

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Next month, on March 31, 2017 from 6pm-10pm, the IAC will be hosting a fundraiser at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Harbor View Room at 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford. Tickets are $50 per person.

Download the fundraising letter here.

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Don’t stop with that fundraising ticket. If you can spare the cash, support the IAC generously with a bigger donation. They are going to need more resources than any of us can imagine right now.

When Donald Trump began mixing right-wing populism with the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, and – well, just about everybody – it brought to mind an old, reptilian strain of fascism and it revived sales of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis’ book shows us that fascism damn well can happen here. And, yes, that photo above is of an all-too real Nazi rally in Madison Square garden in 1939.

People have been dreading this week, and for good reason.

When the New York Times reviewed Volker Ullrich’s book “Ascent,” it was obvious that the review was not merely about Hitler’s ascent to power but about someone closer to home. Now, with real neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the White House, no one can say “It Can’t Happen Here” was just a piece of fiction.

It’s happened already.

A while ago the New Yorker ran a cartoon with an amusing caption: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, while those who do study history are doomed to stand around helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

So recently I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Arendt begins with the rise of antisemitism and moves on to nationalism, then to how citizens are isolated, the weak are stripped of their humanity, the average guy loses his remaining power by being subsumed into a mob, and how myth and lies become the dominant narrative. The world of “fake news” articles in Facebook streams or denying science is hardly a new one. And the complete and blitzschnell capitulation by the Republican establishment is shocking, but one that Arendt would have predicted.

Totalitarianism depends on desperation and the suspension of critical thinking – in other words, a society gone mad. Arendt writes:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Last year Republicans managed to turn serious social and economic woes afflicting all Americans into End Times for a very specific constituency. During the presidential conventions last summer, for Democrats the glass was half full – and could topped off at leisure. Yes, they said, there were problems, but the nation had made progress and we were going to make even more. But for Republicans, the glass was totally empty. And shattered. And there were shards of glass in dead babies. White, Christian babies. And Democrats were gunning for the fathers.

By studying the rise of Nazism, Arendt figured out the importance of lies, doubt, insecurity and self-delusion. Her insights still hold today.

So when Trump and his Breitbart buddies make up their own “facts,” declare war on the “lying [mainstream] press” (some of them even use the Nazi word “Lügenpresse”):

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

And when Trump speaks to white crowds and promises to make “America great again,” whitewashing national crimes, institutional racism and promoting American Exceptionalism and Christian White identity:

“The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”

And when Trump promises: “I’m going to fix everything. Trust me.”

“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

We can feel the instability beginning this week as Trump begins dismantling all the agencies that protect citizens.

* * *

And, as if he had somehow been reading Arendt himself – perhaps as a cookbook – this week the new president, his press secretary, and his apologists went to war with the press and with facts. Trump ordered media blackouts on a number of federal agencies.

Last year’s election season, with the emergence of an authoritarian candidate, got at least a couple of scholars wondering how a coup might unfold in the United States. Taziz Huq and Tom Ginzburg of the University of Chicago Law School, write:

Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay? To many, the 2016 election campaign may be the immediate catalyst for these questions. But it is structural changes to the socio-economic environment and geopolitical shifts that make the question a truly pressing one. […] By drawing on comparative law and politics experience, we demonstrate that there are two modal paths of democratic decay, which we call authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion that happens simultaneously to three institutional predicates of democracy: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. Over the past quarter century, we show that the risk of reversion has declined, while the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is not exceptional. We evaluate the danger of retrogression as clear and present, whereas we think reversion is much less likely. We further demonstrate that the constitutional safeguards against retrogression are weak. The near-term prospects of constitutional liberal democracy hence depend less on our institutions than on the qualities of political leadership and popular resistance.

We’re at risk. We’re not immune. And our now-gutted Constitution can’t help us. But while a coup may not be in the immediate future, Ginsburg says:

“We’re at this moment where it’s very good to be considering these things.

Indeed it is.

I often spend the morning reading the local paper, going online to look at mainstream and international news and commentary. Much of what I read is liberal, progressive or libertarian, but I also like (perhaps too strong a word) to see what conservatives are up to. As I’ve mentioned before, many are moving quickly from right to far right.

Recently I took a journey into an even darker corner of the conservative world – that is, the White House corner office of the president-elect’s advisor, Steve Bannon. My travel ticket was something Bannon himself published in his Breitbart News. It was a piece by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”

Starting with this article, I used a little low-tech programming to follow the links of its “young, creative, and eager heretics” from page to page, bookmarking their journals, websites, blogs, blogrolls and followers. What I found was that many, if not most of the “Alt-Right,” are white supremacists, more than a few are antisemites, and their ranks are filled with young men who hate women.

Welcome to the Jugend of Trump’s new Republican Party.

Despite Yiannopoulos’ false characterization of Rush Limbaugh as hostile to these Young Bavarians, actually the reverse is true – mainstream conservatives are charmed. And if you’re not convinced how dangerous these lunatics can be, one of Trump and Bannon’s buddies is planning to terrorize the Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana about a week from now.

As the mainstream press begins the process of ingratiating itself with Trump gatekeepers and generally cozying up to extremism in general, we’re about to witness the process of normalization of the bizarre, the freakish, the obscene, and the unconstitutional. Last week my local newspaper all but endorsed prison slave labor for building Trump’s “Mexican wall.” And mainstream TV networks are hopping on board the crazy train.

So if you want the young “creative heretics” of Trump’s Great America to show you their true colors, you’ll find links to their websites here and in an annotated version here.

You’re about to encounter a lot of white sheets and brown shirts.

Mainstream-ish

We start with conservative publications often cited in other conservative publications. Although some promote fairly extreme views, it’s nothing you don’t hear in the halls of Congress (think of Rep. Steve King) or on Fox News (think – all of them). While a few publications have managed to remain realistically fiscally and moderately social conservative, most have become pretty extreme, even William F. Buckley’s National Review. This alone should scare the hell out of Americans who remember that not even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan would say such crazy.

• American Conservative
• American Enterprise Institute
• American Interest
• American Outlook (Sagamore Institute)
• American Spectator
• American Thinker
• Ann Coulter
• Anonymous Conservative
• Bloomberg View
• Breitbart News
• Brookings Institution
• Campus Reform
• Cato Institute
• Chronicles
• City Journal
• Commentary
• Daily Mail
• Dissident Right
• Drudge Report
• Federalist
• Foundation for Economic Education
• FOX News
• Frontpage
• Globalist
• Heritage Foundation
• Ideas in Action
• Imaginative Conservative
• Independent
• Kathy Shaidle
• Laura Ingraham
• Libertarian Party
• MacLeans
• Mark Levin Show
• National Affairs
• National Interest
• National Journal Daily
• National Review
• New Criterion
• New Republic
• New York Post
• NPQ
• ParaPundit
• Pat Buchanan
• Policy Review
• Reason
• RedState
• Republican Party
• Richard Fernandez
• Roger Scruton
• Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
• Russell Kirk Center
• San Francisco Bay News
• Sean Hannity
• Taki’s Magazine
• Townhall.com
• Traditional Right
• Traditionalist Conservatism
• Washington Examiner
• Washington Times
• Weekly Standard
• WORLD
• WSJ Opinion & Reviews

Alt-Right

They imagine themselves the Naughty Boys of the Right, and they have a catchy new name, but they are nothing more than white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The only difference between these guys and their skinheaded cousins is a hairdo and a college degree. Just like Goebbels and Speer. And they’ve found their Führer.

• Alternative Right
• Alternative Right Aggregator
• Brussels Journal
• Gatestone Institute
• Isegoria
• Jim’s Blog
• Malcolm Pollack
• Mitrailleuse
• National Policy Institute
• Radix Journal
• RamZPaul
• Richard B. Spencer
• RightOn
• Secular Right
• Trigger Warning

Anti-Democratic

It is disappointing to discover that many Americans are not big supporters of democracy. Of course fifteen years of the Patriot Act hasn’t helped either. All these “Anti-Democrats” want is a dictator who will make the trains run on time and will charm them with their masculine wiles. Trump seems to really get these guys going.

• Aimless Gromar
• Anarcho-Monarchism
• Devin Helton
• Fred on Everything
• Hestia Society
• Jim Kalb
• Kill To Party
• Neoreaction Aggregator
• Neoreaction.net
• New International Outlook
• Social Matter
• Steve Sailer
• Sydney Trads
• Theden
• Throne, Altar, Liberty
• Valkyrie Politics
• West Coast Reactionaries
• Xenophobe.net

Anti-Diversity

Keeping immigrants out is Step #1 in ensuring White purity. Some of these people try to wrap their white racist pork in scientific bacon (fake immigration “science”) for an extra helping of severely un-kosher baloney. But you can see through it pretty quickly.

• American Border Patrol
• American Family Association
• American Renaissance
• British National Party
• Christliches Forum
• Diversity Chronicle
• Diversity is Chaos
• Diversity Macht Frei
• Ed West
• Federation for American Immigration Reform
• Free Republic
• Gates of Vienna
• Generation Identitaire
• Human Stupidity
• Imaginative Conservative
• Jew Among You
• Jewish Defence League Canada
• Jihad Watch
• John Birch Society
• Liberty GB
• Luke Ford
• Middle East Forum
• New English Review
• NumbersUSA
• Truth Revolt
• Victory Girls
• Washington Free Beacon

Anti-Feminist

Conservatives have never liked women all that much, between all that legislation controlling women’s bodies, and revulsion at the possibility that women might be as independent as men. But now a newer generation of misogynists is on the loose. They’re guys with views so offensive it’s understandable they can’t get dates. Which probably just makes things worse.

• Athol Kay
• D.J. Aurini
• Danger and Play
• Jack Donovan
• Judgy Bitch
• Manosphere.com
• Other McCain
• Postmodern Jesus
• Red Pill Review
• Return of Kings
• Satoshi Kanazawa
• Seductivamente Atractivo
• Thumotic
• Dalrock

Anti-Semitic

Virtually all these next groups fit into other hater categories, but they seem to have it out especially for Jews. And, no, these are not critics of Israel’s occupation or BDS activists. These are people who really do think Jews are devious space aliens from Satan’s loins, or the Holocaust is a conspiracy like the moon landing – or they’re just pissed because we won’t convert.

• 28 Sherman
• Aletho News
• Audacious Epigone
• Blogocrity
• CODOH
• Culture Wars Magazine and Fidelity Press
• Darkmoon
• Dienekes
• Exposing the Holocaust
• Fanghorn Forest
• Froude Society
• Henry Makow
• Holocaust Handbooks
• Holy War!
• Incog Man
• Institute for Historical Review
• Jew Watch News
• Kevin MacDonald
• Leo Frank Lynch Party
• National Prayer Network
• Occidental Observer
• Propertarian Forum
• ProThink
• Robert Lindsay
• Shylock Holmes
• Solar General
• Thinking Housewife
• Ugly Truth
• Veterans News Now
• Vox Day
• What Really Happened

Anti-Work

This was an interesting surprise. Some of these basement dwellers abandoned Marx’s analysis that capitalism makes profits off worker’s labor and now think it’s all a plot to denigrate them as men and write off their Nietzschean qualities. Time to redecorate the man cave. Mom? Can I borrow $20?

• Abolish Work
• Why Work?

Survivalist-Collapse

A war is coming. The Jews, the Elites, asteroids, Altoids. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that life as we know it is about to change and only the strong will survive. Sometimes this isn’t quite so dramatic – instead there’s a nostalgia for the way things once were – like when the South had slavery. God, these people are messed up.

• Anonymous Cop
• John Robb
• Less Wrong
• Modern Survivalist
• Slate Star Codex
• Southern Agrarian

White-Supremacist

By far, this was the largest group that emerged as I began accumulating links. Yessir, give the “Alt-Right” boy a proper haircut – and it turns out he’s really a skinhead.

• Al Fin
• Alain de Benoist
• American Patriot Network
• Angry White Dude
• Anomaly
• Anti-Democracy
• Anti-Matter
• Arktos Media
• Aryan Street
• Atavisionary
• Atlantic Centurion
• Attack the System
• Avenging Red Hand
• BitTube
• Bloody Shovel
• Bonald
• Cambria Will Not Yield
• Captain Capitalism
• Christopher Cantwell
• Colin Flaherty
• Council of Conservative Citizens
• Council of European Canadians
• Counter Currents
• Creativity Alliance
• Daily Kenn
• Daily Stormer
• Darwinian Reactionary
• David Duke – KKK
• De Monarchia
• Death Metal Underground
• Deconstructing Leftism
• Education Realist
• Emil Kierkegaard
• Euro-Synergies
• Evo and Proud
• EvolutionistX
• Faith and Heritage
• Follow the White Rabbit
• Frank Salter
• Free Northerner
• Garrett Hardin Society
• Garvey’s Ghost
• Genocide Report
• Guillaume Faye
• Hail to You
• Henry Dampier
• Human Biodiversity
• Human Varieties
• Jacob Holdt: Ku Klux Klan
• Kevin Alfred Strom
• League of The South
• League of the South!
• Lone Wolf – Tom Metzger
• Majority Rights
• Matt Forney
• Metapedia
• Mindweapons in Ragnarok
• National Vanguard
• Nationalist Movement
• Neoreactionary Map
• New Observer
• Nobility
• Not Politically Correct
• Occidental Dissent
• Oriental Reactionary
• Outside In
• Pan-Criollismo
• Patriactionary
• Political Cesspool
• Poseidon Awoke
• praag.org
• Propertarianism
• race/history/evolution notes
• Radical Traditionalist
• Reactionary Future
• Reactionary Thought
• Reactivity Place
• Refugee Resettlement Watch
• Resistance
• Right Drama
• Right Stuff
• Social Pathologist
• Stormfront – White Nationalist
• The Unpopular Truth
• Tomislav Sunic
• Top Conservative News
• Total Fascism
• Traditionalist Youth Network
• Tribal Theocrat
• Unz Review
• Vanguard Network News Forum
• VDARE
• West Hunter
• West’s Darkest Hour
• Western Voices World News
• White Biocentrism
• White GeNOcide Project
• White Network
• White News Now
• White Resister
• Zippy
• Zundel Site
• Renew America

Uncategorized

After a while I just couldn’t care anymore about which category they belonged in. There are just too many sociopaths and psychopaths who voted for Trump and have opinions like this:

• A House with No Child
• A Man Apart
• A Silent Sky
• Admiral Cod
• AfroTraditionalist
• Alrenous
• Amerika
• Anti-Puritan
• Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany
• Citadel Foundations
• Count Nothingface
• Darwinian Conservatism
• Death Rides a Pozzed Horse
• Dividuals
• Edward Feser
• Esoteric Traditionalist
• Eurogenes
• Ex-Army
• Face To Face
• Forward Base B
• Foseti
• Habital Worlds
• Handle’s Haus
• Hawaiian Libertarian
• hbdchick
• Heartiste
• Hurlock
• Hurlock
• I am Legionnaire
• Improprietary Influence
• Inductivist
• Information Processing
• iParallax
• Irish Monarchism
• Jayman
• Kakistocracy
• Larval Subjects
• Lawrence Glarus
• Losing the Creek
• Mad Monarchist
• Magus Janus
• Mami’s Shit
• Me In Words
• Migration Period
• Millenial Review
• Monarchist
• Neo-Ciceronian Times
• Neocolonial
• Neovictorian
• No Quarter Asked, No Quarter Given
• Nydwracu
• Occam’s Razor
• One Irradiated Watson
• Orthodox Laissez-fairist
• Orthosphere
• Oz Conservative
• PA
• Paris Hairline
• Part 2
• Pax Dickinson
• Peter Frost
• Peter Grant
• Prax Americana
• Psychological comments
• Quick Reactions
• Radical Royalist
• Radio Free New Jersey
• Radish
• Raptros
• Right Vidya
• Shitlord Hub
• Social Pathology
• Stuart Schneiderman
• Those Who Can See
• Traditionalist Blog
• Uncertain Certainty of God
• Unorthodoxy
• Unqualified Reservations
• Vanishing American
• Was Enlightened
• Wildism
• Wilson Revolution Unplugged

It has not gone unnoticed that Donald Trump’s election day shocker was due largely to support from the so-called “Alt-Right” – a catchy new euphemism for white supremacy and Hitler salutes. But less conspicuously, even “mainstream” Republicans have been cozying up to white supremacy lately. And in general, the political landscape has shifted sharply to the far right in the last two years.

Mainstream conservatives are embracing the fringe.

The National Review

The National Review, which was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, has struggled with and repeatedly purged itself of white supremacists but seems to be losing the battle. The magazine has had to fire John Derbyshire, who had a little racist sideline on Taki’s Magazine, where Richard Spencer was once an editor; John O’Sullivan, another NR writer who was on the boards of both VDARE and the Lexington Research Institute; Peter Brimelow, NR writer and former editor at Forbes, and a writer for Barron’s, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.

William F. Buckley devoted much of his time to weeding segregationists, “Birchers,” anti-Semites, and the lunatic fringe from the pages of the National Review. After he died in 2008 the garden he planted was overrun with weeds.

This week’s National Review, for example, has long-time NRO editor George Will defending Jeff Sessions, a KKK apologist too racist to be appointed as a federal judge but who may now be the Attorney General. Alongside this is a piece by forrmer NR editor Charles C.W. Cooke, who penned “Teach Holocaust Denial and be Proud of It.” And right next to that is a piece by Andrew C. McCarthy blasting Obama’s refusal to veto a UN resolution on illegal Israeli settlements. McCarthy is also the author of a book promoting the conspiracy theory that Obama is trying to bring Shariah law to the United States.

The Heritage Foundation+

The Heritage Foundation, whose opinion-shapers appear regularly in newspapers, has also been afflicted with the virus. Jason Richwine is the most notorious of these, penning a number of articles on blacks and Hispanics on alternativeright.com. President-elect Trump’s White House advisor Steve Bannon praised Richwine on his Sirius XM radio show. The Heritage Foundation wraps its white supremacy in “scientific studies,” like the one Richwine wrote that blasted immigration reform, claiming illegal immigrants would suck $9.4 trillion of benefits from upstanding white Americans – which one writer joked “will bankrupt the solar system.”

Besides racism, the Heritage Foundation also promotes Islamophobia. A 2014 panel the Heritage Foundation organized to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy soon devolved into a mudslinging match accusing President Obama of funding jihadist violence and promoting Shariah law. The Heritage Foundation had invited Brigitte Gabriel from ACT, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations has identifed as part of a well-funded Islamophobia Network. The panel was led by Chris Plante, a rightwing talk show host, who turned the discussion into an “Islamophobic freak show,” as Salon described it, and included Frank Gaffney, one of the fringiest of the fringe. The panel featured the trio attacking a Muslim student who rose to speak and demanding to know her nationality (it was “United States citizen”).

The Heritage Foundation’s president is Jim DeMint, a former U.S. Senator from South Carolina turned Tea Party leader, and “the most hated man in Washington” by one account. Under DeMint’s leadership the Heritage Foundation has lost credibility and clout. As Senator, DeMint was a divisive politician who went out of his way to greet a racist rally, a move that fellow Republicans slammed, with one warning that “freaks fill the void and define the party.” Call it an “unguarded moment” or a Freudian slip, but DeMint admitted that the purpose of disenfranchising blacks through Voter ID laws was to elect “more conservatives.”

It is not surprising that the Heritage Foundation was founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, who died recently. An heir to the Mellon fortune, Scaife set up a network of rightwing foundations and Islamophobic organizations. In the good old days, billionaires dabbled in art. Now they support hate groups.

(Dear newspaper editors – if you’re reading this – stop publishing garbage from the Heritage Foundation!)

Other mentions

No one could have imagined Ann Coulter’s fulminations could get any worse but now she is attending VDARE’s white supremacy conferences. We always thought Ann was just a fact-challenged provocatuese but now we know better.

The American Conservative Union, which runs the CPAC conference all Republican candidates are expected to attend, is another nexus of white supremacists and Klan admirers.

The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps tabs on all these homegrown Nazis – and it’s not like they didn’t warn us. The NAACP as well reported six years ago on the Tea Party’s deep ties to white supremacist groups and extremist militias.

Paleoconservatism and Trump

Before the Alt-Right there were the Paleoconservatives – anti-Semites and isolationist Eurocentric nationalists. Pat Buchanan, who was an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan, has written for Holocaust denying publications and cited the American Nazi Party’s William Pierce in one of his books. Over time paleoconservatives fell out of favor for their isolationism and were banished to the fringes where they became a natural magnet for the extreme right.

Stephen Mihm writing in Bloomberg News makes a good argument for Trump’s paleoconservatism. And Dylan Matthews writing in Vox suggests that Donald Trump is not merely an opportunist manipulated by the Alt-Right but an “imperfect Paleoconservative” himself. Both articles should dispel the image of Trump as a mere showman. Trump (like his father before him) has been at home in his white, white world a long time.

Sixteen years ago, William F. Buckley had this to say about the next President of the United States:

What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.

Today the magazine Buckley founded is nothing but a mirror for Trump to gaze at himself adoringly.

The Trump presidency is shaping up to be a temporary win for white supremacy and intolerance. No groups in America are less secure now than Muslims and immigrants – and by “immigrants” I mean people here in the United States legally. Retroactive enforcement of the draconian 1996 Immigration Reform Act makes many relatively small crimes deportable offenses – even for those here for decades.

On Saturday I attended a community forum at the Immigrants Assistance Center hosted by Helena DaSilva Hughes. The meeting was intended to calm New Bedford’s frightened immigrant community and provide insights into changes the Trump administration might make and to review immigrant rights under the law.

There were three speakers: Schuyler Pisha, Legal Director at Catholic Social Services; Rita Resende, a lawyer at Watt & Sylvia; and Marcony Almeida-Barros, of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Attendees learned what sort of changes the Trump administration could make on Day One; about changes to existing immigration law that are unlikely; and about changes virtually impossible because of the Bill of Rights. If anyone is interested in the details, here are my meeting notes or (if you read Portuguese) there should be an article in “O Jornal” next Friday. The Attorney General’s representative gave a brief outline of services the AG’s office provided to anyone in Massachusetts. “You have rights,” he told everyone. “And you have a state agency to help you.”

The Immigrants Assistance Center (IAC) has a surprisingly tiny budget of $350K, 10% of which consists of donations through fundraising, while the remainder comes from foundations, grants, and small contracts with the City of New Bedford. Each year the IAC, which has a staff of 8, serves about 7,000 people. It could do a lot more with your financial help.

But besides financial support, the IAC could really use your skills: – grant-writing – one or two full time ESOL (English as a Secondary Language) teachers, or four part-timers (bonus points if you speak or read Portuguese and Spanish or both)

The IAC is small but mighty. Please help them help our community.

= = =

Much has been written about the reasons for Donald Trump’s election and how Democrats can get their act together. One of the best prescriptive pieces I’ve read appeared in the Sunday Standard Times and was written by Scott Lang, who has some unique insight into the party’s machinery. I’m not sure Democrats can wait until the middle of 2018 for a new platform but Lang’s essay should kick off an honest discussion of: What Next?

Donald Trump’s last-ditch campaign manager, Steve Bannon, head of Breitbart News which has become a lounge for racists and neo-Nazis, finally got the job done. But even before Bannon, Trump had surrounded himself with Islamophobes, racists and white supremacists and he has continuously promised a Muslim Registry.

With Trump’s meeting yesterday with Peter King to discuss a Muslim surveillance program, it is now even clearer that the incoming administration intends to proceed down this slippery slope.

And who knows what’s next?

A few tech companies have said they’ll refuse to lend a willing hand on such a project, but some have not.

There is a petition to urge other tech companies to follow the lead of Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook:

http://act.democracyforamerica.com/sign/stop_trump_registry/

And if you don’t like the idea of Bannon in the White House, sign this one too:

http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/tell-trump-fire-steve

Petitions may not accomplish much – and all it takes is for one tech company to build the registry. But it’s important to speak out against all the hate that is finding a home in the new administration.

* * *

If you find these emails annoying or they’re not your thing, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the letter and I’ll stop hounding you. I promise.

Blame for losing the Presidential election has been leveled at Democrats for something called “identity politics.” The charges? Preoccupation with gays, blacks and women. Coddling immigrants. Too much political correctness. White Lives Matter!

A piece in the New York Times by Libertarian Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigates liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla adds that liberals wrongly attribute their loss to “whitelash” – white economic suffering turned into racist rage. He accuses liberals of waiting impatiently for “demographic extinction” of white, rural, religious Americans. Lilla often writes of what he sees as an almost tidal pull of religion on society. He notes that white rural Christians think of themselves as victims – a potent and volatile concept of identity – and he warns that, while “identity politics” may have started with the Klu Klux Klan, “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”

Lilla advises liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”

But it’s not just bathrooms. As Lilla observes, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans. And not all of “America” shares LIlla’s religious views – or even his concept of what “America” is.

In “The Federalist,” a conservative journal, Rachel Lu writes that the GOP saw how successfully identity politics worked for liberals and is using it themselves. But she worries that it “has primarily been rooted in a nostalgic vision of an aging, mostly-white voting base.” She thus credits the demographic problem Lilla dismisses while agreeing with him that the GOP is playing with fire.

Kay Hymowitz, author of books on how feminism hurts men, writes in the conservative “National Review” that liberal politics exploits alliances between groups that have nothing in common except for “one source of solidarity: a common enemy known as ‘the white male.'” This is a common complaint from the White Right, and Hymowitz asks provocatively: “Now that a disaffected group of white men are claiming identity politics for themselves, will that change?”

Neoconservative Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times (“What the Alt-Right Really Means“), addresses some of these disaffected white men – some of them neo-Nazis and white supremacists. His thesis is that the “Alt-Right,” given plenty of column inches by Trump advisor Steven Bannon at Breitbart News, is simply “practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics.”

But do Democrats really demonize whites in order to advantage every other group? Is Hymowitz correct that gays, Blacks, Muslims, the poor, Hispanics, disenfranchised voters, prisoners, women, Native Americans, and others have absolutely nothing in common?

Hymowitz is wrong on both counts. The “common enemy” of each group is injustice, not white men. And minorities – and whites – have plenty in common, beginning with a desire for an inclusive, tolerant nation.

The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been the Democratic Party that defended a variety of civil rights – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.

Fighting for civil rights in itself is not identity politics. Neither is protecting disadvantaged constituencies or insisting that Constitutional rights apply to all – and not merely Premium Class citizens.

True, since at least Bill Clinton’s administration the Democratic Party has neglected blue collar workers – not that the GOP ever cared – but in the Trump narrative it’s only white folks whom Democrats have betrayed. This strange, even racist, GOP narrative completely Photoshops minorities out of the working class picture. In Trump’s reality show minorities are all cast as welfare queens, rioting thugs, terrorists, illegal aliens, subversives, or crybabies.

Besides maintaining their defense of civil rights, Democrats must do a better job of representing workers – which means spending less time at Davos and the Aspen Institute and more time in union halls. Go visit Wisconsin! – a state Clinton bypassed in 2016. Pay more attention to Main Street and show less breathless infatuation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Go back to your roots, Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign finally found the winning ticket with its third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis. The Great new America they’ve promised is founded on a cynical and dangerous form of identity politics we haven’t seen since 1925.

That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan.

When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign really started to take off, shocking everyone, pundits ascribed its success to White Anger. The consensus in the Liberal media was that Trump’s supporters were basically all “Abner Snopes” – William Faulkner’s angry white sharecropper, racist white trash. At the time pundits made more of Snopes’ racism than the fact that he burned down the barns of rich white men. In fact Snopes would have happily burned down both Trump Tower and the Clinton mansion in Chappaqua. Ultimately it wasn’t race that made Abner Snopes angry.

But now that Trump is the GOP candidate and shock and awe has truly set in, Liberals are still scratching their heads. The same distrust of globalization has popped up in Britain with the Brexit, and it’s only slowly dawning on Liberals that there’s much more to it than racism or xenophobia. But no matter – Democrats don’t need to address such issues head-on if Trump can be a new Hitler.

The Atlantic Monthly published a piece recently that takes another shot at understanding Donald Trump’s appeal among poor whites and their anger at the “Liberal elites” they say are largely responsible for their misery. And poor whites have a point, though the Republican Party has done nothing to help them either.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/

Liberals see the real racism of poor whites lashing out at demographic shifts and ascendant minorities. It’s not an illusion. But they also judge poor whites to be doing little to “better themselves” – a strange formulation which, if directed at people of color, would sound a lot like unvarnished racism. Yet this is a common view among many well-educated Liberals – people like you and me. In years past we told the lazy bum, “Go get a job.” Now we tell him to go get a master’s degree. This is the essence of the meritocracy: work hard and get ahead. We pat ourselves on the back that we’re not racists because both Mark Zuckerberg and Barak Obama merit our approval.

But just as Capitalists assume markets and resources are infinite, Liberals assume the capacity to replace manufacturing jobs with highly-skilled technology jobs is equally unbounded. Yet, for a multitude of reasons, not every unemployed factory worker is going to make a happy transition to web designer or CNC programmer, particularly if he’s been out of work a decade. And how do Liberal policy makers intend to deal with this fact of life? They have no solutions.

The authors of the Atlantic piece make the case that it is the neoliberalism which upper middle class whites uncritically support – people like you and me – that has created unemployment, trade imbalances, and economic disaster for the working class – and this obviously includes the white working class. Liberals – people like you and me – see ourselves, however fuzzy the image in the mirror, as part of the meritocracy – people who have gotten up early, gone to bed late, attended night school, lifted ourselves up by the boot-straps. Anyone who didn’t manage to replicate our feats of dedication, perserverance and daring is a loser. How very like Trump we really are.

Consider a recent Town Hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, at which President Obama patiently explained to an older Carrier air conditioning employee that there is little that we can do as a nation to help people like him when factories like his move to Mexico. Yes, people like you are affected, the President explained with characteristic eloquence, but America is moving forward with high-tech jobs in exciting new industries and training is the key. End of discussion. Go get some training.

But in what? No one in Free Market paradise has either a crystal ball or a Five Year Plan.

So there seems to be a somewhat magical view that sending people off to community college or paying for everyone to attend four year colleges will solve employment problems without any long-term economic planning or public-private training partnerships. As if there were not enough issues on its plate, Education has now become totally responsible for fixing the social problem of unemployment.

But back to Elkhart, Indiana. The older Carrier employee just stood in the aisle, a bit surprised at the President’s answer, and respectfully mute as the Chief Executive explained why the country was leaving him behind in its wake of progress. When I recounted this story to a friend of mine, she had little sympathy for the air conditioning worker. “I put myself through college. He could have done it too.”

The picture of Poor White America as lazy racist “white trash” – Abner Snopes again – is pervasive. It’s also not easy to reject completely if you’ve ever seen the Tea Party in action. But like everything in this country, the reality is always more complex. The authors of the Atlantic piece argue that we should have seen all this coming long, long ago, and they lay the blame squarely at the feet of people – like you and me – who identify as Democrats and progressives.

We created these policies. We hardened our hearts. We looked away from the misery right in our own backyards – all while saving endangered species and writing checks to truly worthy causes. We do this at a distance – like the far-off wars which Liberals regularly vote for – without once seeing the real human costs. And we do this from our perch of superiority and entitlement.

But here is how Trump’s supporters see it in the small towns where jobs are long gone:

“The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live cannot be underestimated. And the bitterness – the “primal scorn” – that Donald Trump has tapped into among white Americans in struggling areas is aimed not just at those of foreign extraction. It is directed toward fellow countrymen who have become foreigners of a different sort, looking down on the natives, if they bother to look at all.”

And we do this to everyone, not just Poor White America.

Earlier in the year the Atlantic ran another piece on the white working class. Again, the takeaway from this article was that it’s the upper middle class – shrinking by the second – that has transmuted into a meritocracy of college graduates for whom advanced degrees are almost a necessity, who receive the majority of high-paying jobs and leave the rest of America behind:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/

The idea of a meritocracy is hardly new, but those who merit have shrunk to a kernel consisting mainly of the white upper middle-class. Though meritocracy seems almost an article of American faith, both Conservatives and Progressives now increasingly see it as a sham, a cruel lie that masks the fact that the true predictor of success in America is your father’s wealth. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sees it:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/12/american-meritocracy-isnt-what-it-used-to-be-in-five-charts/

But don’t say that to a Liberal Democrat.

Democrats are no less rigid or doctrinaire than their Republican brethren. Few who regard themselves as straight-ticket Democrats want to confront the party’s neoliberalism – globalism, trade, the “meritocracy.” Liberals are shocked that a whole new generation of voters hasn’t accepted this article of faith and is holding out for a different kind of America. It was unthinkable that 46% of the Democratic Party membership in Philadelphia actually meant what they said about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And, anyway, they weren’t really Democrats.

But rather than examining what neoliberalsm has actually wrought, Democrats have taken a lazy, even dishonest tack – distracting voters with external threats. A piece in “Overland,” a progressive Australian journal, describes the shameful strategy of presenting Trump as little more than a fascist:

Trump, fascism, Putin and Wikileaks: the anatomy of a liberal nervous breakdown

The basic point of the article is that – without any firm identity or an understanding of who it actually serves – the Democratic party’s survival depends mainly on frightening the bejesus out of members and voters alike. The DNC stands for nothing this year – only against a manufactured threat of “fascism.”

The author of the Overland piece quotes Thomas Frank’s thesis, which is developed in his book “Listen, Liberal:”

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30325613-listen-liberal

Diane Ravich summarizes it this way:

In recent years, the Democrats have been consistently liberal on social issues, but indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic issues. They are as likely to be as hostile to unions as Republicans. Their unabashed support for free trade hurt the working class and exported the manufacturing sector. America used to be a country where a person without a college degree could get a good job, but now a college degree is priced beyond the reach of low-income and even middle-income students.

What happened to the Democrats? He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems. They were wrong. Meritocracy served to put them out of touch and to insulate them from different points of view.

Bill Moyers interivewed Franks as well:

http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/

Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the people. As Franks argues, we – people like you and me – have become neither fish nor fowl – neither “the people” nor the oligarchic 1% that owns and runs the country. Liberals have become almost a separate class, lost and confused about their true identity and unreliable in their allegiances. We are really nothing but the pampered accountants, fixers, and middle management for the 1%. And if you’ve ever listened to Phil Ochs’ “Love me, I’m a Liberal,” it’s been this way longer than any of us can remember.

There has been a lot of speculation and an enormous amount of nonsense written about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The main reason is that few people really know much about the agreement since it was negotiated in secret and the public (even our legislators) were not privy to its provisions.

This alone should be reason #1 for rejecting it, but it has its supporters.

Big Business loves it. Manufacturers love it. Wall Street loves it.

But environmentalists see red flags and the words “global warming” appear nowhere in the document. The Electronic Freedom Foundation finds privacy concerns and troubling intellectual propery language. Unions recognize its anti-worker and union-busting provisions.

Hillary Clinton loves it – though during the primaries she said otherwise. Now she and her running mate love it again. Bernie Sanders opposed it. The Green Party opposes it. The (former Republican) Libertarian candidates support it.

Donald Trump hates it, while the rest of the GOP loves it. But anything that issues from Donald Trump’s mouth must be motivated purely out of xenophobic hate-mongering – so the TPP must really be a good thing. Right?

Wrong. On this one thing Trump’s right. Read the leaked draft of the TPP yourself and click on the top links to display the annotations by environmental, privacy, and worker’s rights lawyers.

http://www.readthetpp.com/

Here is summary of some of the TPP’s more troubling provisions:

• Chapter 9 (corporate-appointed judges replace national law)

• Chapter 11 (corporations can block national regulations, including financial regulations)

• Chapter 12 (short-circuiting of immigration regulations)

• Chapter 13 (nations give up their rights to control and regulate telecommunications markets, voiding national control over data protection laws – for example, Germany with its strong data privacy laws)

• Chapter 14 (inadequate provisions for protecting personal information transmitted via electronic commerce)

• Chapter 15 (eliminates provisions allowing states to protect local jobs or address local environmental concerns)

• Chapter 17 (permits state-owned enterprises to maintain price-fixing and dumping, preventing the U.S. from challenging such market manipulations)

• Chapter 18 (overrides domestic laws protecting public health, nutrition, and socio-economic development)

• Chapter 19 (does nothing to address wage inequity or slave wages, blocks corporate exploitation of public-sector or unionized workers, blocks economic penalties for violations of human rights, anti-gay, or racist discrimination)

• Chapter 20 (“climate change” does not appear anywhere in this chapter on the environment, blocks environmental laws that create “restrictions on trade”)

• Chapter 24 (blocks small businesses from seeking certain types of “recourse to dispute settlement”)

• Chapter 27 (a commission can change the TPP agreement at will – without Congressional approval or public overview – i.e, just like the TPP was crafted in the first place)

Donald Trump’s habit of quoting Mussolini and praising Putin, Saddam, and even Kim Jong Un has been duly noted. The racist and xenophobic nature of the Tea Party faction, which has now consumed the Republican Party and anointed Trump as its mouthpiece, has been well-studied and documented. The F-word (fascism) has been mentioned many times when discussing the Trump phenomenon. Even members of his own party say he is a fascist.

But it wasn’t until Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night that I realized how much Trump seems to consciously emulate fascist rhetoric. Last night he was selling American nationalism, pride, and strength by demonizing others – and doing it in an eerily familiar way. His wife isn’t the only one in the family to lift themes from others’ speeches: Trump’s remarks could easily have been lifted from an Austrian fascist who delivered a pre-election appeal to das Volk on July 15, 1932.

The fascist’s speech began with a litany of complaints about the degradation of the German people and its fall from greatness. The Liberals, he said, had had “more than thirteen years to be tested and proven” and turn things around. But they had failed the nation, delivering only propaganda and lies. “The German peasant is impoverished; the middle class is ruined; the social hopes of many millions of people are destroyed.” There was not a single economic sector doing well in 1932, he claimed.

“The worst thing,” he continued, “is the distruction of the trust in our Volk, the elimination of all hope and confidence.” In thirteen years all the liberals had succeeded in doing was polarizing the country. “They have played people against each other; the city against the country; the service worker against the civil servant, the manual laborer against the office worker.”

“Now, thirteen years later, after they have destroyed everything in Germany, the time has finally come for their own removal,” he warned.

What the nation needed now was economic policy fused with nationalism.

Germany First.

“As long as Nationalism and Socialism march as separate ideas, they will be defeated by the united forces of their opponents.”

And who would save the nation?

He would. of course. He would be the great unifier, giving Germans their first hint of the man’s megalomania and narcissism. He went on to proudly cite the number of his supporters:

“With seven men I began this task of German unification thirteen years ago, and today over thirteen million are standing in our ranks. […] Thirteen million people of all professions and ranks – thirteen million workers, peasants, and intellectuals; thirteen million Catholics and Protestants…”

And he would have the last laugh at those who doubted him, opposed him.

“Thirteen years ago we […] were mocked and derided – today our opponents’ laughter has turned to tears!”

And now for The Close. He was selling himself – by promising honor and greatness.

“The Almighty, Who has allowed us in the past to rise from seven men to thirteen million in thirteen years, will further allow these thirteen million to become a German Volk. It is in this Volk that we believe, for this Volk that we fight; and if necessary, it is to this Volk that we are willing […] to commit ourselves body and soul.”

“If the nation does its duty, then the day will come which restores to us: one Reich in honor and freedom…”

And – well, you probably know the rest of the story.