Latent Criminals—Here They Come Again

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, The Making of
Mass Incarceration in America, (Harvard University Press)

What do you call three black men walking down the street?

Neighborhood destroyers, latent criminals. They're loud, black, brown, (some of them are really black). They're spoiling for a fight, disordering the peaceful citizens of white America.

Surly, the time has come to get behind Donald Trump who will take our country back. Republicans are amped-up. And the brown shirts are wearing blue and can be found in your local police departments, adjunct Republican Party units.

The paranoid escalation in the war on latent criminals means 'get them before they get us.'

This imbecilic posture toward people by racists is caught in the iconic shot of the 28-year-old nurse, Ieshia Evans, who was rushed by Louisiana riot police for walking in July 2016, (captured by Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman).

Black man killed by American police in 2013

White America, under an openly racist banner, is off and running on a crash project in a few short weeks.

What do they want? To the extent one can discern coherency, Trumpians' views are "irrational, unscientific and demonstrably nonsensical," as Norman Cohn writes in Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (1967).

Not so much desired policy, just reenactments of myths, some tangible way for pathological racists to feel good about themselves. The warrants are out. Time to wake up.

From Elizabeth Hinton and her From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, (Harvard University Press), 2016:

Johnson’s War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.

By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.

Lock them up, it's open season and happy hunting.

Ieshia Evans faces lunatics in Louisiana in July 2016. Get her, she's coming!

Breitbart News Says It Will Sue Media Org for Reporting White Supremacist Bent

The white supremacist website, Breitbart News, is upset major media have reported the white supremacist editorial commitment of Breitbart, the flagship journal and central platform of the racist Alt Right.

Reports Joe Concha of The Hill:

Breitbart News is preparing a lawsuit against a 'major media company' over claims that it is a white nationalist website, it said in an exclusive statement to The Hill.

The [Breitbart] website has been under intense scrutiny since President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen Bannon as a senior White House counselor and strategist. Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, and the site has become associated with the 'alt-right' movement that helped propel Trump’s candidacy."

The Trump transition team chimed in on the controversy, taking the side of the white supremacist Breitbart News and its racist former exec chair, Bannon. Reports The Hill's Concha:

A spokesman for the Trump transition defended Bannon on Monday, calling the media coverage of his appointment 'irresponsible

Breitbart News execs and Trump apparently know as much about libel law and journalistic responsibility as they do about human biology and anthropology.

Military Civil Rights Advocate Hits Appt of White Supremacist to White House

Can always county on Mikey Weinstein to clobber the bigots.

From the Military Religious Freedom Foundation:

Friends and Allies,

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation's battle for civil liberties just became even more critical and the situation of our non-white and non-Christian troops far more dire. The President Elect is assembling his cabinet and senior White House advisors, and reports are coming in that the Chief Executive of Trump's campaign, Steve Bannon, has been tapped as Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor.

For those unfamiliar with Bannon, he's the deplorable white nationalist behind Breitbart News – a staunch bastion of the worst the alt-right has to offer and a savage opponent of every one of the civil rights we, as Americans, hold so dear.

Breitbart "News" is no more and no less than a front for the anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white supremacist, alt-right Dominionist movement. Breitbart has attacked myself, MRFF, and the service members we represent repeatedly, sneering at those who reach out to us and insisting on the right of fundamentalist Christian leaders in the military to proselytize to troops under their command.

Bannon himself is the darling of white nationalists, alt-right leaders, and racists across the country. Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right" and who is rabidly anti-Semitic, is thrilled. So is Andrew Anglin, Neo-Nazi and owner of the self-proclaimed "#1 alt-right website" Daily Stormer, although he would have liked to have seen Bannon installed as Chief of Staff.

Ken Reed, the national director of the Neo-Nazi group Aryan Renaissance Society, gleefully posted the news accompanied by hashtags reading #WhiteLivesMatter and #AltRight, while Stormfront, the oldest Neo-Nazi message board on the web, was full of messages like this one:

"Stephen Bannon: racist, anti-homo, anti-immigrant, anti-jewish, anti-establishment... Sounds perfect. Muhahahaha. The man who will have Trump's ear more than anyone else. Being anti-jewish is not illegal. Nothing you dirty stinking jews can do to keep him out."

We can expect Bannon to work in tandem with VP Elect Pence, another Dominionist, to push the white nationalist, Christian supremacy agenda on every front. These hateful, divisive "patriots" feed on fear and fury, and deliberately seek to turn one American against another, even among their own ranks. They glory in setting Christian against Muslim, white against black, and gay against straight – using their twisted definition of religious freedom as an excuse to cram their hate down the throats of those who disagree.

I ask you all to come together, to stand strong against this horrific battalion of shame being assembled in Washington, and to continue to support MRFF and our fight for equality and freedom from religious oppression. We will not back down, we will not EVER give up.


Mikey Weinstein

Neo-Nazis Praise Trump and White House Appts

From The Independent:

Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, one of the leading far-right websites and popular with neo-Nazis, declared of Mr Trump: "Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this."

Trump Boosts Alt-Right with Top-Level WH Picks

Trump fortifies Alt Right alliance in White House

"Time to see how good Mossad really is," writes a veteran Wisconsin politico after the announcement two leading white supremacists have been appointed to two powerful White House posts

Updated - A good start for white supremacists as president-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of white supremacists to top-level posts, "signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Mr. [Stephen K.] Bannon," an open white supremacist, (NYT).

White House appointees, RNC chair Reince Priebus and Bannon, differ only on style and the Alt-Right and the Republican Party have both long made clear their hostility to America as a pluralistic country with expansive Constitutional liberty guarantees.

Talk of national unification with white supremacists persists in some American political circles

The announcement of the Bannon and Priebus follows by two days the Trump transition team's notice that the Trump White House will enact a "new deal" for African-Americans with a "plan for urban renewal," (CBS News).

News releases and advisories can be found at the Making America Great Again.gov site.

The "Time to see how good Mossad really is" quote on Facebook making the rounds represents musing and genuine concern that the United States may be entering a period that spells the end of the American democratic experiment.

2016 Debate: Relentless Invective, Ill Will and Bad Faith

Can any red-blooded, civil liberties-loving American see Donald Trump as president?

I know the mass base for fascism still loves Trump, but this idiot is history.

There's an unwarranted tendency to note pathology in those holding to different conclusions, lurid reasoning and insensitivity, but Donald Trump is not a developed human being. And this characteristic more than any other defect shone through last night.

Missed most of the Packer game for this piece of shit.

Donald Trump Equals Racism

The presidential debate on Sunday brings a politically wounded and fatally flawed Trump.

The debate should also be noted in the context of who Trump is: The candidate who mainstreamed Alt-Right.

Peace and Justice over Fascism

Happy Thanksgiving:

Voters Are Pot of Incoherent, Resentful Ignoramuses

A series of pieces out offer some facts of the American political culture.

The Marquette University Law School, Democratic Strategist, ProPublica and The New York Times’ Sunday Review, 538.com and Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior all confirm what is clear: America is a depoliticized state where policy and socio-political knowledge and sentiment are mostly confined to racism, social resentments, fear and a vague idea that a few special interests are looking out for themselves.

Low turn-out, midterm elections show the results.

Republican Party efforts to obstruct voting and gerrymander state and Congressional districts show why shifting demographics minimizing the electoral power of white, rural, Evangelical voters are imperative to Republican Party success, even post-Citizens United.

The large swath of voters who have given up on electoral politics need reasons (spelled out and repeated) and a dynamic candidate to drag them out to vote next November 2106.

First things first, get past the Republican gauntlet obstructing voting.

"Anybody who suppresses the vote, who intentionally tries to keep people from voting, is a political coward. They are undermining democracy," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

Republicans are political cowards, but indecency and undermining democracy are no deterrent to what Republicans do. They are after power and their base is fascistic.

These are facts you won't read in the above analyses and corporate political reporting: Republicans do not believe in Democracy.