10/28/2021

Critical Race Card

 

TheSouthernStrategyHasComeToVirginia 2021 10 28

 

10/28/2021   Podcast from the Charlottesville trial (Day 4), by Jonathan M. Katz, The Racket

As I launch The Racket I’m experimenting with different kinds of posts. Here are some of my raw thoughts, fresh from a wild day of opening arguments in Sines v. Kessler, the federal lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Nazi rampage. This kind of post will soon be for paid subscribers only. Which could be you, if it isn’t already!

10/27/2021   Some 'very fine people' walk into a courthouse, by Jonathan M. Katz, The Racket

Dispatch from the big federal lawsuit in Charlottesville, Sines v. Kessler.

 

One difference between the two alleged conspiracies is evidence. The plaintiffs have a great deal of it, much of it drawn from a trove of leaked Discord chats published by the media collective Unicorn Riot. Those logs show how the defendants planned for two days of intensive violence, as participants in their Discord forums swapped tips on which weapons to carry and how to pre-arrange their excuses of “self-defense.” Defendant Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer website promised: “Next stop: Charlottesville. Final stop: Auschwitz.”

10/25/2021   Roseville church vandalized with spray-painted swastikas, and what appears to be initials, by Frank Witsil, The Detroit Free Press

The symbolism of the swastikas is hard to ignore. They are associated with Nazism, white supremacy and antisemitism. The vandal, or vandals, also left the initials JDS, which Roseville Police Deputy Chief Mitch Berlin said, "no one knows what that means." 

9/30/2021   Fringe conspiracy theory has now become mainstream, by Sunlen Serfaty, CNN

Far right White supremacist groups, conservative media personalities and some Republicans in Congress are trying to inflame nativist feelings among conservative Whites by warning that liberals want immigrants to "replace" native-born Americans. CNN's Sunlen Serfaty reports elements of replacement theory appear to have motivated some of the most heinous recent mass murders.

 

4/23/2021   The racist 'replacement theory' has it all backward, Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

 

Racist "replacement theory" inverts the real consequence of immigration for its target audience of Whites uneasy about social and racial change: Many of the Whites most drawn to the far-right argument that new arrivals are displacing "real Americans" are among those with the most to lose if the nation reduces, much less eliminates, immigration in the decades ahead.

 

With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees. And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right's anti-immigrant arguments.

 

"The projections show we are going to be dealing with lower population growth and an aging population, and the only way we are going to be able to keep our labor force growing and vital is through immigration," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "It's a matter of math. I never understood why people who are anti-immigration can't understand the math of the whole thing, because it's quite simple."


Already, in nearly half the states, the number of working-age adults -- defined as those aged 18 to 64 -- declined from 2010 through 2019, according to a recent analysis by Frey. Without immigration, that squeeze will only tighten in the years ahead, forcing Washington to either cut benefits for retirees or to raise the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare to an unprecedented level on the shrinking number of workers.

 

If the nation severely restricts immigration, the fiscal impact would be to "double the load on working-age people of all these seniors," warns Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy.

 

Today, Whites make up about 60% of the population. At the immigration levels America experienced during the first half of the past decade -- a little over 1 million new entrants per year -- that would decline by 2060 to 44%. With immigration levels reduced to about half that, roughly as the Trump administration and most congressional Republicans proposed in 2018 legislation that ultimately failed, the number still shrinks to 46%. Even if the US shut off all immigration in the coming decades, Whites would still decline to just over 51% of the population, the census projections concluded. (At an accelerated level of immigration, the White share fell to 42%.)

11/23/2018    U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith Attended All-White ‘Segregation Academy’ to Avoid Integration, by Ashton Pittman, Jackson [Mississippi] Free Press

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in 1954 and again in 1955 to do so with “all deliberate speed,” Mississippi slow-walked the integration of its schools as long as possible, trying a variety of “school choice” schemes, state legislation and court cases to stop full integration, including arguing that white kids should not go to school with so-called "genetically inferior" black students.

9/8/2021   Former district attorney arrested after indictment in connection with Ahmaud Arbery murder investigation, by Martin Savidge and Angela Barajas, CNN

7/9/2021   White man sentenced in attack on Black teen at Michigan park, Associated Press

4/17/2021   Left-Behind Suburbs Are a Civil-Rights Battleground, by Will Stancil, The Atlantic

In some respects, segregation is even more harmful in the suburbs than in major cities, which typically have a larger industrial and commercial tax base that allows them to weather crises and sustain public services. On average, predominantly nonwhite suburbs have the lowest per capita tax base of any community type in a major metropolitan area—about 25 percent less than major cities, and about 40 percent less than predominantly white suburbs. In many segregated suburbs, the quality of public services erodes over time, forcing the communities to raise revenue through fees and traffic tickets.

 

U.S. Census Bureau data indicate that Brooklyn Center is typical of a rapidly segregating Minnesota community. In 1990, the city was 90 percent white; its poverty rate was low, at 5 percent. Three decades later, the city is 38 percent white and its poverty rate has tripled, to 15 percent. It is now the poorest major suburb in the Twin Cities region, and it has a higher percentage of residents of color than any other major municipality in the area. Ferguson underwent nearly identical changes in the years before a police officer shot Michael Brown to death in 2014; the city transitioned from 85 percent white in 1980 to 29 percent white in 2010. Over the same period, its poverty rate almost quadrupled.

 

Social-science researchers describe this process as resegregation: Communities that start out as almost exclusively white go through a brief and unstable period of racial integration, and before long, an overwhelming majority of residents are people of color.

 

Black Americans especially are migrating to the suburbs in record numbers. Just since 2000, the urban Black population in major metropolitan areas has fallen by about 5 percent, while the suburban Black population has grown by more than 40 percent.  

 

In wealthy new suburbs and exurbs, where McMansions line endless cul-de-sacs, housing that working-class families of color can afford is scarce. Inner-ring suburbs typically have an older housing stock, including small postwar houses, more rental units, and affordable high-density housing. Families migrating from the central cities of a metro area tend to cluster in these more affordable communities; so do immigrants.

 

Other, more nefarious forces also funnel nonwhite families toward the inner suburbs—such as the practice of discriminatory racial “steering,” wherein real-estate agents are more likely to show families of color homes in already-diverse neighborhoods.

 

1/19/2021   Lawsuit Alleges Racial Discrimination Against Livingston County Real Estate Agents, Jessica Matthews & Jon King, WHMI

"The complaint states that upon information and belief, currently there are no African American home owners on Zukey Lake and there never has been.

 

The complaint states that the agents set forth various conditions and provided false information to dissuade them from making an offer because of their race.

4/17.2021   The Trumpy Republican Who Won in Biden Country, by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

The less flattering origin story is this: Around 2002, Van Duyne and other homeowners in her subdivision organized to block a big new commercial development from coming to the area. Hackberry Creek is a “master-planned gated community” full of 3,000-square-foot houses with Jacuzzi tubs and plantation shutters, all set among “hillside vistas and winding creeks.” The residents were worried about trash and food odors drifting over from the proposed restaurants and stores, according to Herbert Gears, who was a city-council member at the time and favored the plan. Riled up by the dispute over the development with Gears, Van Duyne ran for city council in 2004 and won his seat.

 

Van Duyne opposed building apartments in Irving because, as she wrote in a 2008 Dallas Morning News op-ed, “in addition to the greater susceptibility to crime and increased traffic created by the high density of people in an apartment complex, many Irving residents are averse to apartments because of their long-term effects on the community … Will the apartments beautify the area or lower its aesthetic value?”

4/8/2021   Opinion: Republicans are learning that there’s more to capitalism than tax cuts, by Catherine Rampbell, The Washington Post

For a long time, the Republican Party had what it believed was a tacit deal with corporate America. Companies donated enormous sums to GOP campaigns and aligned groups, and in exchange, Republicans delivered tax cuts: on corporate profits, capital gains, estates. Whatever other agenda items Republicans pursued — on immigration, civil rights or anything else — corporate America would generally keep its mouth shut. So long as the tax cuts kept flowing, the only “speech” that corporations engaged in came from their wallets, which in turn were fattened by those tax cuts.

 

An un-virtuous cycle, if you will.

 

Last week, the Georgia House of Representatives voted to revoke a break on fuel taxes that benefits Atlanta-based Delta Airlines, which had criticized the state’s recent voting law. House Speaker David Ralston (R) explained: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You gotta keep that in mind sometimes.” Apparently — shockingly! — this tax break had not been based on some abstract notion of public welfare or good governance or economy-boosting policy but, rather, a perceived quid pro quo.

 

Textbook Fascism.

4/8/2021   Republicans’ list of enemies keeps growing, by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

The disgraced former president maintained an enormous list of people and institutions he insulted while in office. The Republican Party’s list of enemies seems to have expanded well beyond even that.

 

Republicans these days don’t like the National Football League, the National Basketball Association or Major League Baseball. They do not like corporations such as Coca-Cola and Delta that, however belatedly, support voting rights (though they are fine taking their money). They don’t like historians, climate scientists or statisticians. They do not like Anthony S. Fauci and other public health officials.

 

They do not like atheists or churches that practice the social gospel and advocate for civil rights. They do not like critics of the Confederacy. They do not like police reformers.

 

They don’t like judges — even ones they appointed. They do not like book publishers, social media platforms, the mainstream media or Hollywood. They also think universities and tech companies are bad.

4/6/2021   Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters’ Towns, Study Finds, by Alan Feuer, The New York Times

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

 

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

 

Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” 

4/6/2021   Opinion: What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us, by Robert A. Pape, The Washington Post

The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a violent mob at the behest of former president Donald Trump was an act of political violence intended to alter the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. That much was always evident.

 

What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States.

 

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.

 

Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.

 

When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.

 

3/16/2021  ???

TweetOfCotton reWokeChamberOfCommerce

3/16/2021   Tom Cotton slams Chamber of Commerce as "a front service for woke corporations", by ALEX GANGITANO, The Hill

 

1/14/2021   Four years ago, I set out in an RV to understand Trump’s appeal. Here’s what I found, Opinion by Donna F. Edwards, The Washington Post

8/31/2021   Five Republican Candidates Linked to Racist, Far-Right Conspiracy Facebook Group, Later Removed Themselves From Page, by Ramsey Touchberry, Newsweek

The five candidates were Daniel Crenshaw, a House candidate from Texas; Danny Tarkanian, a House candidate from Nevada; Corey Stewart, a Senate candidate from Virginia; Matt Rosendale, a Senate candidate from Montana; and Patrick Morrisey, a Senate candidate from West Virginia.

Crenshaw, who was a group administrator as of Friday morning, has shared two of his campaign videos to the group, on July 29 and August 13. Other group administrators have shared his campaign website. In a statement to Newsweek, Crenshaw claimed he has "never actively managed or interacted with that page," despite posting his videos.

"They contacted me once and said they'd sign me up as an admin, in case I ever wanted to post," said Crenshaw, who removed himself from the group after Newsweek contacted him. "I quickly forgot about the page and never saw it again. How exactly is this news?"

 

Trump Texas Tweet Bus TT

Trump's response

10/31/2020   Biden camp cancels multiple Texas events after a "Trump Train" surrounded a campaign bus, By Kate Mcgee, the Texas Tribune, Jeremy Schwartz, the Texas Tribune and Propublica, and Abby Livingston, the Texas Tribune