Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Black lives don't matter at FOX "News." That's something they have made clear time and time again, even before the Black Lives Matter phrase entered our lexicon. The idea that Black Lives Matter really sets them off. The fear of the very idea and their reaction to it is part of their sick religion of White Supremacy. I suppose we should give them credit for knowing their audience.

Right now, Tucker Tiki Torch has seized the title of FOX's High Priest Of White Supremacy. He's fought hard for that title and won. In the past, he's even publicly claimed, as cover, that White Supremacy is a hoax. Now, not even Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham can top the Tiki Torch dude, although I'm sure Ingraham is in front of a mirror right now practicing her Hitler salutes for the upcoming RNC convention (wherever they finally decide to hold it) and Hannity is taking his KKK robe out of his closet and having the hems let out.

On Monday, Tucker Tiki Torch really jumped into the White Supremacists Only pool. He couldn't stop himself. He did everything to make the Murdoch family proud other than light up a cross on stage. You know that's coming sooner or later but here's Tucker on Monday talking about the protests that came in the wake of the murder of George Floyd:

This may be about a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it's definitely not about black lives and remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will. Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling. It's like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly. And the temptation is to panic. But you can't panic. You've got to keep your head and tell the truth... If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you.

"This moment we're living through." "Remember that when they come for you." "They will." "Subjected to the rage." "Swarmed by hornets." "Cannot think clearly." "Temptation is to panic." "They will crush you." This is textbook paranoia and despite what Mr. Tiki Torch would have you believe, he is obviously panicking. Practically every fear-mongering phrase is grist for the master thesis of a budding shrink. Tiki Torch Tucker Carlson is screaming inside and it's coming out more and more. The next night, he even attacked Sesame Street because Elmo talked about racism. That's right. Tucker Tiki Torch and FOX are even afraid of Elmo, a furry red puppet. Well, Elmo's not white, so... The Murdoch family eggs its star on. FOX programming is the essence of Republicanism. You can just see the Murdochs high-fiving and saying "This is fabulous stuff, Tucker! Great! Tucker!" Meanwhile, CEOs of American corporations are throwing sponsorship dollars at Tiki Torch Tucker's feet.

There will be an update on Mr. Tiki Torch's antics, their insanity and their financial consequences tomorrow.

Who Is Provoking Violence And Looting In The Nationwide Racial Justice Protests?

I keep hearing every elected official who talks about the protests-- and especially the looting and vandalism-- claim that the "troublemakers" are agitators from out-of-state. Which state? Someone is coming into California to rampage down Rodeo Drive and then Hollywood Blvd? I don't believe it-- and neither should you. Unless they're talking about right-wing/Trumpist domestic terrorists (self-described "Boogaloo boys"). You won't hear about it-- at least not about the the right-wingers-- on Fox News of course, but proof has been mounting that white extremist groups have infiltrated basically peaceful protests to instigate looting, property destruction and violence against police, purposely stoking some kind of race-based civil war. In fact, there are plenty of "bad apples" in various police forces who are criminal characters as well and don't belong doing police work.

Writing for the Washington Post, Isaac Stanley-Becker looked at this infiltration by agents provocateurs who are inciting riots. For example, "Police identified Brian Jordan Bartels, 20, of Allison Park, Pa., as having 'kicked off' the escalation in Pittsburgh, one of several examples of peaceful assemblies against police violence creating opportunities for pandemonium. While at heart the gatherings have been an appeal for racial justice, they also have attracted a diverse array of people with other grievances and agendas who have co-opted the moment, accelerating what has been a national unraveling as the country reels from a pandemic that has put more than 40 million people out of work."

In most American cities, people of all races appear to be participating in the violence, vandalism and looting, particularly in Minneapolis, where a crowd burned the police department’s 3rd Precinct building last week and vandals were seen smashing windows and stealing items from stores. Multiracial coalitions also have marched peacefully. But in some cities, local officials have noted that black protesters have struggled to maintain peaceful protests in the face of young white men joining the fray, seemingly determined to commit mayhem.

In footage that spread widely online, a man identified as Bartels, who faces charges of vandalism and rioting, wore a bandanna emblazoned with the symbol of the Animal Liberation Front, a leaderless international resistance movement that pushes for animal rights. In the footage, he raised his middle fingers to black protesters who begged him to stop. At Bartels’s home in a Pittsburgh suburb, officers found spray paint and firearms, according to an arrest warrant reviewed by the Washington Post.

Attempts to reach Bartels, who turned himself in to police on Monday evening, were unsuccessful.

As authorities intensified their efforts to quell the uprisings-- deploying tear gas and rubber bullets in aggressive spasms in many cities-- police officers were joined by some elected officials and protest organizers in accusing white activists and extremists of exacerbating the chaos by blocking roadways, destroying police property and lobbing bricks into businesses.

“We came together as Pittsburghers and supported a First Amendment right to gather and say more must be done,” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) told reporters over the weekend. “And then it was hijacked.”

Some local officials were even more blunt. After reviewing footage of the weekend’s events, Jenny Durkan, the mayor of Seattle, said she feared the black community would shoulder the blame for havoc others caused.

“It is striking how many of the people who were doing the looting and stealing and the fires over the weekend were young white males,” Durkan (D) said in an interview.

President Trump on Monday evening said in a Rose Garden address that he stands with demonstrators who condemn Floyd’s death, as peaceful protesters were cleared with flash-bang explosives and tear gas so he could pose for a photograph in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

“These are not acts of peaceful protest; they are acts of domestic terror,” said Trump, who earlier Monday encouraged governors to “dominate” the streets with the militaristic tactics already in use in parts of the country.

Violence had erupted in some of the early demonstrations starting last week, with protesters in Minneapolis setting several businesses on fire along with the police precinct.

But from Baltimore to Sacramento, black protesters also were filmed protecting storefronts and placing their bodies before police barricades to preserve principles of nonviolence, and to prevent backlash disproportionately aimed at them. Videos emerged, too, of them confronting white demonstrators who had usurped the mantra of “black lives matter,” which gave birth to a movement for racial justice and police accountability, in seemingly random acts of defacement.

“Don’t spray stuff on here when they’re going to blame black people for this,” a black woman admonished two vandals outside of a Starbucks in Los Angeles.

In East Liberty, a gentrifying neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a young black protester delivered a case of bottled water to a phalanx of police officers standing guard at a demonstration on Sunday outside of a Target store.

“With all this stuff going on, I just wanted to spread the positivity,” said Alexander Cash, 23, who lost his job at a nearby Residence Inn because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. “It doesn’t matter if it’s one or 45 cops standing there. I can walk up to them and still be peaceful.”

That sort of caution was being undermined by intentionally destabilizing acts, warned Tim Stevens, a longtime civil rights activist in Pittsburgh.

“People who do not have the social justice commitment at heart, people who really don’t care about George Floyd-- they care only about an opportunity to cause disruption-- how many of those people were in Pittsburgh over the weekend?” he asked. “How many were out across America?”

Similar questions have become acute from Austin, where a racial justice group on Sunday canceled a planned assembly for fear of violent escalation by unaffiliated activists, to Fargo, N.D., where police questioned four men carrying assault rifles to a protest site in a bid to protect businesses. In Denver, police officers commandeered firearms from anti-government gun enthusiasts who self-identify as “Boogaloo boys,” part of a far-right militia movement.

“These are people who are agent provocateurs,” Chas Moore, the executive director of the Austin Justice Coalition, said of the extremists joining the protests. He canceled his group’s demonstration, originally planned for Sunday, after the chaos of Saturday night. “These are extremists and anarchists, not right or left. They want complete annihilation of the system, and they’re at the forefront of the fires and the breaking of vehicles.”

Others warned against tagging certain bad actors for responsibility, especially after Minnesota officials at first tried to lay blame for damage on out-of-state protesters, allegations that failed to find support in arrest records. Over the weekend, Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., walked back comments initially asserting that “every person” detained in protests came from other states. In fact, data showed nearly all of those arrested gave addresses in Minnesota.

Durkan said the age profile of those arrested in Seattle skewed young, and she pledged to examine the demographics more closely. Officials in Pittsburgh and Austin said they did not break arrest data down by race, making it difficult to discover whether claims of culpability were reflected in on-the-ground enforcement efforts.

“It’s very easy for the government to create this binary of good protesters and bad protesters, and it always fits their whim,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial justice group Color of Change. The dilemma, Robinson said, is how to welcome new faces to the fold without inviting chaos: “We are in a really complicated moment, and we have a lot more questions.”

The complexity was deepened when President Trump, with Attorney General William P. Barr’s backing, faulted anarchists and left-wing activists for the upheaval without furnishing any evidence.

On Monday, the president’s allies trumpeted news of the charges against Bartels, a day after the president said he would designate an anti-fascist collective known as antifa as a “terrorist organization,” though he has no apparent legal authority to do so.

A former friend of Bartels who corresponded with him for several years before they had a falling out in May said Bartels never once mentioned antifa, some of whose adherents favor aggressive tactics.

The friend, a 17-year-old who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared online harassment, said Bartels was militant about veganism but otherwise espouses views that do not fall neatly along ideological lines. Another teenager who moved in the city’s pop-punk scene with Bartels said the 20-year-old seemed to loath establishment forces, no matter their partisan makeup. But neither understood why Bartels would have smashed a police vehicle in broad daylight, as police accuse him of doing.

Similar scenes of destruction appeared in numerous cities.

In downtown Austin, a crowd of several hundred protesters massed outside Austin Police Department headquarters on Sunday evening. With their numbers increasing, protesters eventually streamed over a concrete embankment and onto Interstate 35, a thoroughfare that slices Austin along racial and economic lines.

The crowd was a diverse mix of black, white and Hispanic demonstrators, but it was the young white protesters who seemed to push the limits. As the crowd walked south to an exit, white protesters were spray-painting the asphalt and a concrete median.

One white woman was observed applying an adhesive to a traffic cone in an attempt to adhere it to the roadway while a black protester walked by, turning his head in apparent surprise. Later in the evening, white protesters threw plastic water bottles at police, drawing rebuke from some black members of the crowd.

“The police are targeting black protesters out here with rubber bullets,” said Maredith Drake, 43, who had been offering first aid to injured protesters all weekend. “We think they feel like they’ll be less accountable if they shoot a black person instead of a white one.”

You don't usually hear something about the political fray from former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But yesterday, writing for The Atlantic, former chief Mike Mullen wrote about his reaction to seeing Trump's ugly stunt at St. John's in a powerful essay, I Cannot Remain Silent-- Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so. I imagine there are a lot of military officers who feel the exact same way. "It sickened me, yesterday," he wrote, "to see security personnel-- including members of the National Guard-- forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump's goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces. There was little good in the stunt... We must ensure that African Americans-- indeed, all Americans-- are given the same rights under the Constitution, the same justice under the law, and the same consideration we give to members of our own family. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so. Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarized; too many military missions have become politicized. This is not the time for stunts. This is the time for leadership."

And just a few hours ago, Trump's own handpicked former Defense Secretary , James Mattis, finally weighed in: "Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-- much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside." Go get 'em, MAD DOG! Your country needs you now more than ever before!

This afternoon, the Washington Post reported that a growing number [of] far-right extremists who once organized mainly online have been inserting themselves into the real-world protests roiling much of the nation, sowing confusion about the nature of the protests and seeking attention for their causes. They’ve appeared, sometimes carrying assault rifles, at protests in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and dozens of other cities, often wearing Hawaiian shirts-- a seemingly goofy uniform that, within the ranks of their movement, signals adherence to a violent, divisive, anti-government ideology. This increasingly visible spillover from radical online forums has alarmed researchers, who for months have tracked surging support for groups advocating armed rebellion as their conversations have spread from fringe platforms such as 4chan and Gab to mainstream forums on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. The largest groups have hundreds of thousands of followers... Some far-right groups have purposefully sown confusion by impersonating left-wing activists, adding chaos to already turbulent days of protests in which local officials have blamed unnamed outsiders and left-wing groups for the mayhem."

Writing for RightWingWatch.org Monday, Kyle Mantyla noted that "MAGA 'life coach' and proudly amoral right-wing broadcaster Brenden Dilley said during his livestream program today that he and millions of other gun-loving Americans are just waiting until President Donald Trump 'gives us the green light' to take to the streets and start gunning down activists who have been protesting all over the country following the police killing of George Floyd."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

At this point, it's obvious that anyone who votes for a Republican is completely comfortable with, among other nasty things, the concept of white supremacy. The party's endorsement of it used to have a behind closed doors aspect about it but, now, with Trump as their leader and frontman, they proudly put it on display every day. They call it "winning."

Good North Carolinians can make whatever excuses they want, but the fact is you are who you vote for and North Carolina is a red hat=hatred state until the good North Carolinians turn out in numbers that can change that perception. Case in point: Early voting in Tuesday's NC-09 Special Election went well for Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate, especially in suburban areas. McCready might have done better if he was more than just a Republican with a D next to his name but, as it was, his percentages ran ahead of his party's percentages in in the district in recent elections but a heavy Republican Party/White Supremacy Party turn out on election day, particularly in rural sections of the district won the race for their guy, Dan Bishop.

Bishop won overall by 2%. Grand Wizard-in-Chief Donald Trump immediately took credit for the victory due to his pre-election rally in Fayetteville but Trump glosses over the fact that a Republican won the district by 6% in the last election and that both he and fellow racist Mittens "Free Stuff" Romney pulled 12% when their names were on the ballot in recent years. That down-turning trend is a presidential approval poll all by itself.

Let's be sure not to make excuses for Repug voters in NC-9 (or anywhere else). Trump went to Fayetteville and gave his bizarro scorched earth litany of lies and the KKK fans eagerly gobbled it up. "He speaks like me," they say. Yup, he speaks white supremacy, misogyny, and hate of the month. You could say they must have no self-respect to be so easily led by the lies and steaming bullcrap laid out in detail at the first of my included links but, when the lies are what amount to your favorite bedtime stories... The bottom line is, as I said, you are who you vote for.

Now all we need are candidates that can motivate the decency of non-Republicans and out-inspire what the Republican Party has to offer their kind. I wait and I wait and I wait. "Surely tomorrow. Not today. Surely tomorrow."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As the graphic I'm using for tonight's meme shows, the sales of video games have nothing to do with gun violence. It's a simple compare and contrast exercise. As one traitorous nutball $enate Majority Leader would say, "Case Closed." And, in this case, it actually is. Since Sunday, our Neo-Nazi President and his staff, his advisors at FOX "News," and the rest of the Republican Party loon and goon universe have been going overboard in their twisting themselves into the ground trying to redirect the blame for the El Paso shooting away from their years of advocating white supremacy. They have been pointing to other external causes that aren't even remotely possible causes. The Republican Looniverse has been doing this, not as denial to self (They are proud of what they are), but as a simple yet pathetic attempt at "Hey, look over there!" politics. One republican, Ohio legislator Candice Keller even blamed both the El Paso shooting and the Dayton shooting on marijuana, "homosexual marriage" and drag queens. Drag queens? She said this, of course, while accusing "the democrats" of (in her very words) "playing the blame game." I guess she felt she had to top Pat Robertson. Speaking of which, c'mon Pat, whaddya got to top that? A nation turns its lonely ears to you, Pat. And Candice, whatsamatter? Why are you blaming drag queens? Anger issues? Catch your hubby steppin' out in your wedding dress and heels the other night?

The El Paso and Dayton shootings have turned the Republican Party into even more of a freaky shitshow than normal! I know. Seems impossible to believe. Who would have thought it possible? One thing's for sure, the next horrific shooting will result in even more bizarre claims. It's who they are. It's what they do. Inbred Jesus goon Mike Huckabee even went so far as to blame the shootings on a lack of... get ready for it... a "lack of thoughts and prayers." Ladies and gentlemen, the dark comedy stylings of Mike Huckabee! Let's give him a big hand! God! Where do they get these imbecilic cretins? We not only need gun control, we need procreation control! Fast! I know it's too late for Huckabee, but someone needs to send the Vasectomy Truck to wherever his grandkids live. Don't worry, they do Tube-Ties too. What's next? Teletubbies pulled the triggers?

The biggest, most popular claim among the republikooks though is that video games are to blame for the shootings. How's that for an old reliable canard of misdirection? Sure, to republicans; drag queens, lack of "thoughts and prayers," Sponge Bob's chain of Secret Underwater Gay Instruction Camps and Hillary's emails all carry some blame, but not once do republicans mention their own people like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump pushing white supremacy and Neo-Nazi conspiracy theories such as their favorite made up nonsense about South African blacks being engaged in the genocide of South African white folks having anything to do with encouraging the Republican Party's base to get violent. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick rushed to the FOX "News" studios to implore the federal government to "do something about the video game industry." House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did the same. If you were stupid enough to follow what passes for that Republican logic, you would have to assume that people in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Germany never played a video game in their lives.

The blaming of video games is even beyond conservatives of the 1950s claiming that comic books were causing gang violence and then their calling for the burning of Beatles records in the 1960s. How long before the Trump Party starts burning play station gear, burning down movie theaters, and calling for a complete shutdown of Netflix "until we figure out what the hell is going on." But, the fact is that Trump's racist rallies and FOX "News" are to white supremacists as Inspire, the al Qaeda online magazine is to the Muslim terror network. Both exist to radicalize their audience. Tucker Carlson, himself an obvious white supremacist on an open mission of pushing white supremacy, went so far as to claim that white supremacy is a hoax. Really, Tucker? Is that supposed to mean that you yourself are a hoax? Poor Tucker. I guess he feels that if white supremacy is under threat, he might lose his job, or worse.

Another FOX single digit IQ knuckle-dragging Goon, Brian Kilmeade, echoed the El Paso shooter's Nazi manifesto, like all good white supremacy Republicans from the sewer of Trump are doing, as he fearfully lamented an "invasion" of Latinos, Republican code for "brown people," as if that justified a mass murderer driving 10 hours to El Paso to kill and kill and kill. Kilmeade also puked up the following proof of his idiocy-

I'm just wondering if, did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy hook?

Well Brian, no, he didn't. But, you see even George Bush had more smarts and class than your white supremacist idol, plus, President Obama never railed against the 1st graders and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School as an evil invasion of rapists and disease-carrying drug smugglers. President Obama also never smiled and laughed at the idea that someone might shoot them since no one at his rallies suggested that someone should. So, there's quite a difference even if your minuscule little FOX "News" brain can't grasp it.

Trump, of course, immediately tweeted Kilmeade's words to his rabid following of racists and went back to looking for new ways to damage the lives as many Americans as possible.

Maybe Fox Should Extend Tucker Carlson's Exile To... Forever

Fox News sent Tucker Carlson away on a little unannounced vacation until the heat dies down on his white nationalist TV show. Most normal people didn't know Fox was running a nightly KKK rally in prime time until the media exploded in a frenzy about Carlson's claim that White Supremacy is nothing but a hoax, immediately after the white supremacist mass murders in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton. At the end of his Wednesday show, Carlson announced: By the way, I am taking several days off-- headed to the wilderness to fish with my son. Politics is important, fishing with your son, sometimes more important. So I’m doing it, saying he'd be off on Thursday, back on Friday for something he called "a special investigation," and then off for all of next week. New York Daily News columnist Leonard Greene noted around the same time that Carlson had earned the backlash he's getting. in response to Carlson's flawed "reasoning"-- that "the combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium"-- he pointed out that "not every white supremacist is a member of a white supremacist organization. Only a fraction probably are, so we can quickly dispense with Carlson’s college football stadium theory. And to be in denial about the very philosophy that our country was founded and built on is not only racist-- it’s delusional... Never mind that Hispanics were in Texas long before there was a Texas... The real hoax is when people like Trump and Carlson pretend that what they say doesn’t have bigoted and violent consequences. So, if I’m out of line for suggesting Carlson might be a racist, then I’m sorry. I also apologize for saying that sugar is sweet."




Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan took issue with Carlson's premise, as though he were a normal pundit rather than a neo-Nazi propaganda agent. "In his ongoing and remarkably successful quest to be the worst of the Fox News nighttime hosts," she noted, "Tucker Carlson hit a new low on his Tuesday show. White supremacy, he claimed, isn’t a real problem in America: 'This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.' (Let’s set aside, for a moment, the truth that the Russian attacks on America’s voting integrity, to help Donald Trump become president, are anything but a hoax, as the Mueller report made abundantly clear.) And, Carlson insisted, he has empirical evidence: 'I’ve lived here 50 years and I’ve never met anybody, not one person who ascribes to white supremacy,' he said, adding, 'I don’t know a single person who thinks that’s a good idea.' Hmm. Maybe his sample size is a bit flawed." Or maybe he gave up looking in the mirror decades ago.

Anyway, Carlson’s wrong. Here’s the dictionary definition of white supremacy: the belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them.

It’s undeniably one of the core tenets of the opinion-mongers at Fox News-- and of some portion of its supposedly straight news coverage, too. (Remember the network’s feverish attention to “the caravan” of migrants moving northward toward the United States-- and how abruptly that coverage faded after it was no longer useful as a Republican talking point in the 2018 midterms?)

Understand: I’m not suggesting that Carlson or his Fox colleagues are stashing their Klan robes in the newsroom closet. They may not display the most obvious and virulent strain of white supremacy or belong to organizations dedicated to the cause or pick up assault weapons and destroy innocent lives, as the El Paso gunman did on Saturday. (Remember, the 2,300-word screed-- let’s not dignify it with the term “manifesto”-- that authorities linked to the suspect stated: “This attack is a response to Hispanic invasion of Texas.”)

Nevertheless, Carlson’s nightly show does a great deal to portray nonwhites as the dangerous “other,” a force to be beaten back to save America.

His denials and rhetoric must be called out for the lies that they are.

Consider his and his Fox colleagues’ insistence on using the word “invasion” to describe migrants coming to America-- generally people of color from countries south of the border.

Here’s what a recent Media Matters study found about the use of that term so far this year on Fox News: There have been more than 70 on-air references to an invasion of migrants; there have been at least 55 clips of President Trump calling migrants an invasion. And Carlson himself spoke of the United States being invaded nine times, including “This is an invasion, and it’s terrifying.”

Carlson’s colleague Brian Kilmeade argued: “If you use the term ‘an invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

No, it’s racist propaganda.

As Ben Zimmer wrote recently in The Atlantic, exploring the ugly history of the term: “The American brand of nativism has long relied on menacing images of immigrant invaders. The ‘invasion’ trope has gone hand in hand with similar metaphors of contamination and infestation.”

Or, as Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith put it: “By likening people to insects or vermin, even if he considers them criminals, [Trump] provides himself license to be an exterminator. We know that story.”

Recognizing the white supremacy at work here does not deny that there is a real need for sensible, humanitarian immigration reform, including aid to the countries from which immigrants are fleeing as they try desperately to find a better life. Nor does it translate to support for open borders.

I really don’t know what drives Carlson to be so hate-filled and divisive. Is it all about ginning up ratings by playing to audience prejudices, rage and fear of “replacement” by immigrants?

Does he really believe what he says? Is he an egalitarian, tolerant fellow in his heart of hearts?

The cause of this damaging rhetoric doesn’t matter. But the results certainly do.

The Fox-Trump feedback loop constantly reinforces the notion that black and brown people are to be feared and despised-- whether they are in “rat-infested” cities like Baltimore, as Trump would have it, or at the Mexico-Texas border.

Tucker Carlson has become one of the most high-profile perpetrators of this appalling and divisive message, one constantly amplified by the president.

So if Carlson thinks he hasn’t met a single white supremacist, he might want to take a searching look in the mirror.

One of Carlson's Fox colleagues-- the one Señor Trumpanzee was having a conniption over this week-- also took Carlson to task for claiming white supremacy isn't real and just a hoax. I don't think Fox anchors are allowed to attack each other so Shepard Smith said "White nationalism is without question a serious problem in America," without mentioning Carlson by name. Commenting on the speech one of Biden's aides wrote for him, Smith noted that Biden was "calling us to our better souls, to recognize that white nationalism is real, that white nationalism is on the rise, that white nationalism is without question a very serious problem in America and beating down those who would help facilitate it and encourage it."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Trump may not hate everything about what America has become. We know he loves unfettered corporate greed. He's not alone in that. We know he loves the KKK's "very fine people" and every other white supremacy group in the land, especially the ones who killed Heather Heyer and two Virginia state troopers in Charlottesville. Last week he again re-tweeted the words of a fellow white supremacist. This time it was Katie "Final Solution" Hopkins. To Trump, the white supremacists are his people, his core constituency. He also loves the opportunities for unchecked corruption of all kinds. But, most importantly of all, Trump despises the Ideals of America and he despises its constitution and its laws. He is a complete mental case who has dedicated his life to hurting as many Americans as he possibly can through, among other things, his pathological lying, his environmental policies, his economic policies, his views on education, his jihad against our national security apparatus, his tax scam, his weeding out of scientists from the USDA, his misogyny, his rabid dog racism, his homophobia, and, of course, his contempt for the very idea of affordable healthcare for American citizens.

The above cartoon suggests Trump should be banished to Germany but I think he'd be unhappy there, not that that would bother me. I mean, you know, as soon as he arrived, he'd be bitching that they took down all of the Hitler statues and telling any German who would listen that Germany's Nazis were very fine people too. Perhaps, Argentina would be a better choice. He could fix up Mengele's old farm house and put a nice big gold 'Trump' on the roof.

White Supremists Don't Fight Against Anti-Semitism-- White Supremicism IS Anti-Semitism

German Nazis in black and white; North Carolina Nazis in color

Watching Trump's ugly fascist supporters howling for Ilhan's blood in North Carolina this week, sent a shiver up my spine. By birth I'm a Jew. What would it take to turn that mob against me and American Jews? Ten words from Trump? Five? I was watching authoritarian and fascistic-oriented Americans in that audience. And to hear a neo-Nazi like Trump using some bullshit against AOC, Ilhan, Ayanna and Rashida as "anti-Semitic" was flat-out galling, sickening. I've been involved with an organization called Young Elected Officials (YEO) for many years, and long before either ran for Congress, I've seen the spectacular work Ilhan and Rashida have done as state legislators on behalf of their constituents and their communities in Minneapolis and Detroit. They were both elected to open seats last year because of how their constituents-- not Trump (detested in both cities)-- viewed their records and because of the quality of the their ideas and of their characters. Neither is remotely anti-Semitic, unless you define refusing to pledge allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu as the definition of anti-Semitism... which would make a majority of American Jews anti-semites.

Yesterday, in her NY Times column, Michelle Goldberg, seems to have noted the same stunning hypocrisy and the "increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken," not just among North Carolina rednecks but throughout the regime of a cunning and indisputably racist president.

She began by talking about Trump's actual in-house Nazi, Hungarian fascist Sebastian Gorka routinely accusing Jewish intellectuals and activists of anti-Semitism and Jew-hating. "If this were just Gorka," she wrote, "you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.

Republicans routinely defend Trump's racist taunts as having something to do with "protecting Jews." I'd feel a lot better if he were protecting Jews from Confederate racists than from The Squad. But, as Goldberg wrote, "This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel 'your country' and Benjamin Netanyahu 'your prime minister,' suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does."

Is far right Montana Senator Steve Daines a Nazi?

I don't know if Montana Senator Steve Daines is a neo-Nazi or not but he seems to be behaving like one, tweeting his solidarity with Trump by proclaiming that "Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals." That sounds like a Nazi to my Jewish ears. And it did to the Montana Association of Rabbis as well, who sent Daines an open letter stating that the rabbis in Billings,  Bozeman,  Missoula, and Whitefish are "unanimously appalled by the ongoing torrent of racist incitement and personal attacks that President Trump continues to direct against Democratic women of color in Congress" and by Daines' complicity. "Montana," they wrote, "deserves and expects more from its representatives. It is not the Montana way to personally attack others for their political viewpoints or positions. It is not the Montana way to promote bigotry or hatred, as the senator himself stated with his fellow representatives on December 27, 2016:  “We stand firmly together to send a clear message that ignorance, hatred and threats of violence are unacceptable and have no place…in Montana or across this nation. Collectively, as Montana’s rabbis, we are the experts on antisemitism in Montana; we have studied it, lived it, and know it when we see it. We refuse to allow the real threat of antisemitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and antisemitic violence in this country. Accusing these representatives of antisemitism is no justification for telling them 'to go back to where they came from' or inciting violence against them. In a direct affront to Montana’s Jewish communities and Jewish leaders, Senator Daines has decided to join in the president’s rhetoric of hate, a rhetoric which presents a serious threat to Jewish communities. We do not feel safer or supported by Senator Daines’ comments, rather we fear the legitimization the president and the senator are giving to racism, xenophobia, misogyny and hatred."

Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League-- the Anti-Defamation League!-- of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation-- “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue”-- at the Jewish civil rights organization.

Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

...It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.

The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots-- and those politically aligned with them-- feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.

“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.

ABC News interviewed Rabbi Avi Olitzky of Beth El Synagogue in the middle of Ilhan's Minneapolis district. He had the same feelings any sentient Jew hearing those chants of the North Carolina Trumpists. In an OpEd he wrote for the Times of Israel he warned that "We cannot fall victim to the political tricks that rely on racism, and the meme of antisemitism, to bolster both sides, while still doing immense communal harm... even if [Ilhan] disagrees with the policies of the current Israeli government, I cannot stay silent today. I stand fully beside her-- and her colleagues-- and support her in the face of the recent racist tweets of the president. This is not how we engage in civil dialogue. This is not how we do business and politics in this country. We are and have been better than this. We need to be better than this," And he told ABC's Briefing Room that "this is a very eerie wave of similar situations in history, be that Nazi Germany or elsewhere," noting that the Trumpists seem to have some kind of permission to be "publicly hateful and publicly loud.

"And from the pastors of my favorite evangelical group, Vote Common Good... a t-shirt all Americans should be proud to wear:

Another NY Times Republican columnist yesterday, David Brooks, seemed as disturbed as Goldberg about Trump's fascist rantings. "The real American idea," he wrote in a column titled Donald Trump Hates America, "is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one-- e pluribus unum. Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet-- a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear."


Tony Schwartz wrote The Art of The Deal. No one understands Trump and Trumpism better than he does.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Happy Fourth of July!

Back in the 18th century, the original 13 colonies beat the Brits and their lunatic King George III, winning the independence that we celebrate today. In the 19th century, the United States beat the die-hard Confederate traitors who still insist on fighting for the bigoted cause they call their "heritage." Then, in the 20th century, we beat the white supremacist NAZI's and their lunatic leader, too.

Now, in the early 21st century, we have horrifically come full circle: We have a lunatic white supremacist, neo-Nazi president who combines, embodies, and emboldens the sick traits of all of the above and more. He thinks he should be king and he counts Confederates, NAZIs, and Tea Party loons as the key elements of his Republican Party. All are pictured happily parading together in tonight's meme. My, what "very fine people" indeed!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

Bishop Talbert Swan's tweet (above) gives us yet another fine example of a disease called Republican Logic and how the typical Republican racist mind works. Swan's truth about their reasoning is as stark as it gets. I bet he got a ton of whining responses to his tweet from the Republican element in our society. They probably feel all abused. Many will hold up Swan's comment as evidence of a war on their brand of Christianity. The Republican god is, of course, a racist god. Republicans created their false god in order to justify their own racism and other foulness. Among other things, and we know that Republicans love to tell us what their god wants and expects from us, a goddamn us if we don't obey. They even claim to have conversations with their god. They hear voices. They might as well just come out and say that they are only following God's orders. None of this will change, though. We saw plenty of evidence of that when they welcomed white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys to their leader's 2020 campaign kickoff in Orlando just a few days ago. We know what's under those red hats. We see it and hear it every damn day.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Well, isn't this special. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, it just wasn't enough for the Republican Party to message the country that sexual assault is no big deal and that Dr. Ford was lying and that Kavanaugh should be confirmed no matter what. No, soon the White House had their White Nationalist friends over at FOX "News" going the anti-Semitic route with idiotic claims that the whole Kavanaugh hearing uproar was part of a George Soros-funded plot. Once Herr Trump's minions went there, it was only one small side step, if that, to fliers and posters blaming "The Jews" for the whole damn thing; fliers complete with depictions of Senators Feinstein and Schumer, among others. Admit it, would it shock you if the flier was drawn up by some White House luminary such as Gen. Kelly or, perhaps an eager to please intern who knew how to get ahead in today's Republican Party?

Maybe this whole Nazi flier thing is something Nazi-saluting Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson devoted their artistic talents to and faxed over to the Oval Office. Who knows? Trump's "very fine people" at The Dailey Stormer proudly take credit for it but, really, isn't it only a matter of time before Carlson's Daily Caller officially merges with them? They might as well since Carlson has made his personal ideology so clear, even going so far as to broadcast the propaganda of his fellow white supremacists.

With Trump in the White House, this kind of thing isn't 6 degrees of separation anymore. It isn't even 3 and it isn't even 2. We've had creeping fascism in this country for decades and now the Neo-Nazi crowd finally has a president they can call their own in control of the White House, while the party of their choice controls the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court, a court that has enabled a white Secretary of State in Georgia named Brian Kemp to purge the voting registrations of voters who he views as inclined to vote for his African-American opponent in the 2018 race for the governorship. And, as if that isn't horrific enough, also thanks to the Supreme Court (even pre-Kavanaugh) undermining Voting Rights laws, American citizens have been arrested and held or charged for assisting in voter registration, including one Texas campaign worker who was arrested only after he identified his candidate as a Democrat.

The Nazis are here. Some centrists and liberals say that telling that truth and calling Nazis exactly what they are isn't PC, that it's needlessly abrasive somehow. Fuck that. To ignore that the Nazis are here and that they are establishing a firmer and firmer grip around the neck of all that is good is to enable the worst humanity has to offer.

Pushing Back Against The Times' Understanding Of Normalizing Nazis 101

-by Valley Girl

I’ve been following the fall-out from the New York Times article A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland. (By the way, early versions have the title as "The Neo-Nazi Next Door." I’ve read everything I could find. Two articles particularly struck me, out of the many I’ve read.

One is from Damon Young titled A Line-by-Line Response to the New York Times’ Response to the Backlash It Received for Publishing a Nazi Puff Piece. In addition to writing for The Root, Damon Young is also a columnist for GQ. The response Damon Young gives is to this defense by the NY Times: Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond. In the following, I’ve added who said what, because the original formatting in the article challenged my copy and paste abilities. Damon:

On Nov. 25, the New York Times published “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland”-- a piece about the wedding registry, eating habits and eyebrow maintenance of an Ohio man who also happens to be a Nazi. This profile bothered quite a few people, who were somewhat annoyed that the country’s biggest and most important newspaper would give a white nationalist a Better Homes and Gardens cover spread.

The Times was kind enough to respond to that response. And I felt it was only right to top off the response lasagna by giving a response to that response, which is underneath the Times’ response to the response.

Response response response response response response response.

The Times explained:

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so.

This should be fun.

NYT: The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D. Heyer.

Damon: Those images were truly terrible, and the murder of Heather D. Heyer was horrifying. As was the response from the president of the United States of America about what happened in Charlottesville.

Fortunately, we have institutions like the New York Times that we can depend on to bring us the truth during these dark hours and to ensure that white supremacists and Nazis are thought of and treated the same way you might treat a roach scurrying across a kitchen counter.

NYT: Who were those people?

Damon: Um, wait. You literally just answered that question in your last paragraph. Those people are white supremacists. And just to reiterate that point, you refer to them as "young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting 'Jews will not replace us.'" What the hell is happening here? Did you have a stroke between the writing of these sentences?

NYT: We assigned Richard Fausset, one of our smartest thinkers and best writers, to profile one of the far-right foot soldiers at the rally. We ended up settling on Mr. Hovater, who, it turned out, was a few years older than another Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with murder after the authorities said he drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Ms. Heyer.

Damon: But why, though? You could have assigned an intern for this task. Shit, you could have assigned me. I would have just emailed Hovater.

"Yo, dude. You still on that Nazi shit?"

If he replied "Yes," I would have written the story on the spot. And it would have been called, "“Tony Hovater Is Still on That Nazi Shit and There’s Really Nothing Else to See Here." And the entire text of the story would have been "Nazis gonna Nazi."

NYT: Our reporter went to Ohio to spend time with Mr. Hovater and submitted several drafts and updates in between assignments that included Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama. The story finally ran online Saturday.

Damon: It’s great that Richard Fausset has other responsibilities at The Times other than existing as the Ohio-Nazi Whisperer. I’d imagine the Ohio-Nazi-whispering beat to be quite dry.

NYT: Whatever our goal, a lot of readers found the story offensive, with many seizing on the idea we were normalizing neo-Nazi views and behavior. "How to normalize Nazis 101!" one reader wrote on Twitter. "I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article," wrote another. "Attempting to 'normalize' white supremacist groups-- should Never have been printed!"

Damon: If the goal of devoting thousands of words to a fucking Nazi in Ohio wasn’t disgusting, then what was it? Seriously. What was the fucking point of this? We already know that Nazis exist in America. And we already know that some of them shop at Target. So, again, what was your goal?

NYT: Our reporter and his editors agonized over the tone and content of the article. The point of the story was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think.

Damon: I, for one, am sorry that your reporter and his editors agonized over doing the fucking jobs that they are paid to do. That reporters and editors would be expected to report and edit and vet is truly a travesty, and I’m sure the family of Heather Heyer would agree. I will organize a candlelight vigil for your newsroom this evening.

NYT: We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere. We understand that some readers wanted more pushback, and we hear that loud and clear.

Damon: Yes. It would have been nice, if the New York Times decided to run a profile on a Nazi, for said profile to have provided more pushback. Because if there’s one thing we know about Nazis, they can always use more pushback. There’s never a point, in regard to Nazis and pushback, where you might step back and say, "You know, I think this Nazi pushback is overkill now." Because there is no overkill with Nazi pushback. Just underkill. And by "underkill" I mean "a profile in the New York Times."

NYT: Some readers also criticized the article for including a link to a webpage that sells swastika armbands. This was intended to show the darker reality beyond the anodyne language of the website. But we saw the criticism, agreed and removed the link.

Damon: Wait, y’all did what? Y’all gave the Nazis a branding platform? What the fuck is wrong with y’all?

NYT: Some readers did see value in the piece. Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: "People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that."

Damon: Yeah, some people saw the value in the piece. And some people put lettuce in the microwave. What’s your point?

NYT: But far more were outraged by the article. "You know who had nice manners?" Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. "The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis."

Damon: Bess Kalb has a point.

NYT: Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. "Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?" asked Karen Attiah, an editor at the Washington Post. "Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC are coping?"

Damon: Of course, profiles on the people directly harmed by this hate speech and violence would be much more compelling. But that would require whiteness—white maleness, specifically—to be uncentered. And uncentering whiteness is harder than eating just one Lay’s potato chip, apparently.

NYT: We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Damon: There’s a difference between shedding light and handing someone the spotlight. I agree that light is necessary to expose and, if required, shame. But y’all basically gave him and the thousands like him the light and the mic. Instead of truly depicting him for who he is, you let him take a selfie. And it’s not wrong to believe that "No country for Nazi selfies" should be an editorial edict at the New York Times.

NYT: As always, we want to continue hearing from our readers. Please share your thoughts in the comments. We will be reading them.

Damon: Wait, you’re going to do more work? Shit. Do I have to organize another vigil?

The second article that particularly struck me was What the New York Times’ Nazi Story Left Out-- The history of America has been written by normal white racists living in normal towns, by Jamelle Bouie.

The conceit of "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland," the New York Times’ profile of Tony Hovater-- a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group-- is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. "Why did this man-- intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases-- gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?" asks the writer, Richard Fausset, in a subsequent piece explaining the editorial decisions behind the story and reflecting on his conversations with Hovater.

Hovater’s extremism may demand some additional explanation, but there’s nothing novel about virulent white racism existing in banal environments. That, in fact, is what it means to live in a society structured by racism and racist attitudes. The sensational nature of Hovater’s identification with Nazi Germany obscures the ordinariness of his racism. White supremacy is a hegemonic ideology in the United States. It exists everywhere, in varying forms, ranging from passive beliefs in black racial inferiority to the extremist ideology we see in groups like the League of the South.

A look back to the past is instructive. In 1921, one of the deadliest anti-black riots in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A mob of white men, eager for retribution after the alleged assault of a young white woman, descended on the city’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, dubbed the "Black Wall Street" by admirers. Armed with pistols, rifles, and a machine gun-- as well as a plane equipped with rudimentary bombs--this makeshift army burned Greenwood to the ground, killing hundreds in the process. We don't know who gave order to the mob, organizing and amplifying its lethality, but we can identify the men who participated.

Virulent racism doesn’t just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence. [sidebar]

They weren’t, as white Tulsans would later learn, the working-class men drawn to the city’s oil wealth and frontier atmosphere. No, they were Tulsa’s white elite--its respectable middle class. "Photographs of the tragedy also showed that many in the white mob drove the most expensive cars and dressed in clothes beyond the means of the average roughneck," notes Tim Madigan in The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. They were recognizable. Ordinary.

The same was true of the anti-black mob that destroyed parts of Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1919. It was true of the one that lynched Rob Edwards in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1911, and later drove the blacks of Forsyth out of the county. From the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction South to the White Citizens Councils of the Jim Crow South, ordinary men and women have always been enforcers for the racial order.

Likewise, those seemingly ordinary environments are themselves part of the story of American racism. As James Loewen describes in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, the human landscape of the Midwest was shaped by rigid segregation. "Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule." Hovater's home, Huber Heights, Ohio, was one of those places. Virulent racism doesn't just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence.

If the focus on Hovater's mundane life paints an inaccurate picture of racist ideology as abnormal, then the larger decision to profile a neo-Nazi further obscures the forces driving our politics at this moment. Even with their greater visibility in public life, extremist racists like Hovater remain fringe figures who can make a splash in the media—and provoke violence—but do little else.

By contrast, more "moderate" forms of white racism-- the everyday, ordinary varieties that rarely elicit protest outside of public forums-- are politically powerful. They are what had a profound influence on the 2016 election, what President Trump stokes and feeds on when he tweets against black athletes and celebrities, and what shape some of the limits of the possible in our politics. Someone like Hovater might have a relatively high profile, but what's fueling the return of explicit racism to our politics is something appropriately banal and, yes, ordinary.

And, if anyone is interested in what has happened to Tony Hovater... well, he, his wife, and his brother-law have lost their jobs at the 451 Grill. One writer says that a reference to the "Haystack hamburger" in the original article allowed people to figure out that he worked at the 451 Grill. Well I couldn’t find that reference in the article. But, however it was discovered, the 451 Grill responded in part:

A November 25th New York Times article featured one of our employees. In the article, the employee shared his political views, specifically those of being a white nationalist. The article went on, illustrating some very disturbing images and thoughts from this individual. The 571 Grill and Draft House does not share any of these views with this person, nor was the owner aware of them prior to the publishing of this article.

Since the release of this article, we have been swamped with phone calls and social media messages that are threatening and intimidating to both us and our employees. These hateful and disturbing messages are truly saddening to those of us who just want to serve delicious food and cold beers.

Due to these very disturbing threats, the employee who was featured in the article suggested that we release him from employment. We have done so and have also released his wife and her brother who also worked for us. We felt it necessary to fully sever the relationship with them in hopes to protect our 20 other employees from the verbal and social media threats being made from individuals all over the country, and as far as Australia. We neither encourage nor support any forms of hate within our establishment.

Oh, yeah, and someone published Hovater’s home address, and as a result he’s been forced (decided) to leave the rental house, to move to an undisclosed location.

"Hovater tells The Post he's moving because he can no longer afford the rent and because of safety concerns. 'It's not for the best to stay in a place that is now public information,' he said. 'We live alone. No one else is there to watch the house while I'm away.'"

Two more points-- the first: Richard Fausset kinda sorta defended himself (poor me) in an article at the NY Times titled I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With? You can read the whole thing it you want. But below, I’ll give some choice parts, along with my responses.

Fausset: There is a hole at the heart of my story about Tony Hovater, the white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer.

VG: No shit.

Fausset: And yet what, of any of this, explained Mr. Hovater’s radical turn? What prompted him to take his ideas beyond his living room, beyond the chat rooms, and on to Charlottesville, where he marched in August alongside allies like the neo-Confederate League of the South and the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, which bills itself as "America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization?" Where was his Rosebud?

VG: Where was his Rosebud? WTF. Rosebud? That ends a paragraph, and no further reference to Rosebud is given. I assume he was referring to the movie Citizen Kane, in a hoity toity way. Unless, and my thoughts did go there, he was asking if Hovater had failed to sexually satisfy his wife, by failing to find her rosebud?

Fausett: On the phone, Mr. Hovater responded to my question by rattling off names of libertarian academics, making references to sci-fi movies and describing, yet again, his frustration with what he described as the plodding and unjust nature of American democracy. As he did so, I was thinking about an album I grew up with by the Minutemen, the Southern California punk group, and its brilliantly koanic title: What Makes a Man Start Fires?



VG: WOW! How cool Fausset claims to be (or so he thinks) by mentioning the influence a Southern California [virulently anti-fascist] punk band had on him. The Minutemen or aka the Missingmen, as I learned when I went to Youtube to listen to this band’s music. I could barely understand a word of the album he references. Green Day they are not [Ed- D. Boon and Mike Watt were a major influence on early Green Day].

VG: And Fausset closes his agonizing "mea culpa" by asking again "What Makes a Man Start Fires?" Gosh, it’s a toss-up as to whether he was taking about Hovater, or referring to himself, given all the fall out from his horrible NY Times article.

Now, on to the second point: how does a reporter report on and interview neo-Nazi white supremacists? Here’s how it’s done: From a Vice broadcast-- Charlottesville: Race and Terror-- VICE News Tonight (HBO).