White Supremacists Open Fire on Black Lives Matter# Citizens

White Supremacists Open Fire on Black Lives Matter# Citizens
Photo from Raw Story, via Lorena de la Cuesta

Updated - "Five protesters were shot late Monday night near the Black Lives Matter encampment at the Fourth Precinct police station in north Minneapolis, according to police."

Those who were shot sustained non-life-threatening injuries, said police spokesman John Elder in a statement,"(Minneapolis Star Tribune) (Southhall, NYT) (U.S. Uncut).

Black Lives Matter# have been staging peaceful vigils over the Minneapolis police killing of Jamar Clark on Nov. 15.

Fascism has come to America, and it has come with guns and white supremacists opening fire on black people in the streets of Minneapolis.

White people beating black people at political rallies, and the racial taunts of Republican Party politicians running for the presidency.

Hate and American Domestic Terrorism

Today's Republican Party is so intimately tied to white supremacy as to be seamless, and there are plenty of bystanders.

African American church in South Carolina, Previously Burned Down by The KKK, Is on Fire, reads a headline (Legum, ThinkProgress). After Charleston, Black Churches Targeted by Arsonists Across the South (Covert, ThinkProgress) reads another. Police Investigating Fire at S.C. Black Church Once Burned Down by KKK (MacNeal, Talking Points Memo)

This is 2015 not 1958, but that's just chronology.

Hate lives on, the legacy of racial slavery lives on. "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe," writes Ralph McGill 56 years ago.

"Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown," observes McGill castigating the cowardly preachers and politicians of his day after temple, schools and churches were bombed and burned.

From the Fitchburg, Wisconsin Common Council to Scott Walker to the Republican Party presidential candidates: Stop preaching hate now; and to the bystanders [that would be Fitchburg]: Get off your ass.

A Church, A School
Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958

By Ralph McGill

Dynamite in great quantity ripped a beautiful temple of worship in Atlanta. It followed hard on the heels of a like destruction of a handsome high school at Clinton, Tenn. The same rabid, mad-dog minds were, without question, behind both. They are also the source of previous bombings in Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. The schoolhouse and the church were the targets of diseased, hate-filled minds.

Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown.

It is the harvest of defiance of courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many Southern politicians. It will be the acme of irony, for example, if any one of four or five Southern governors deplore this bombing. It will be grimly humorous if certain attorneys general issue statements of regret. And it will be quite a job for some editors, columnists, and commentators, who have been saying that our courts have no jurisdiction and that the people should refuse to accept their authority, now to deplore.

It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it.

To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school. But let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands.

There will be, to be sure, the customary act of the careful drawing aside of skirts on the part of those in high places. "How awful!" they will exclaim. "How terrible. Something must be done."

But the record stands. The extremists of the citizens' councils, the political leaders who in terms violent and inflammatory have repudiated their oaths and stood against due process of law, have helped unloose this flood of hate and bombing.

This too is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion. Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue.

You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.

Hate and lawlessness by those who lead release the yellow rats and encourage the crazed and neurotic who print and distribute the hate pamphlets - who shrieked that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew - who denounce the Supreme Court as being Communist and controlled by Jewish influences.

This series of bombings is the harvest, too, of something else.

One of those connected with the bombing telephoned a news service early Sunday morning to say the job would be done. It was to be committed, he said, by the Confederate Underground.

The Confederacy and the men who led it are revered by millions. Its leaders returned to the Union and urged that the future be committed to building a stronger America. This was particularly true of General Robert E. Lee. Time after time he urged his students at Washington University to forget the War Between the States and to help build a greater and stronger union.

For too many years now we have seen the Confederate flag and the emotions of that great war become the property of men not fit to tie the shoes of those who fought it. Some of these have been merely childish and immature. Others have perverted and commercialized the flag by making the Stars and Bars, and the Confederacy itself, a symbol of hate and bombings.

For a long time now it has been needful for all Americans to stand up and be counted on the side of law and the due process of law - even when to do so goes against personal beliefs and emotions. It is late. But there is yet time.

Scott Walker in 1992: David Duke's Issues Are Not Extreme

Update: "Not the first time a prominent Republican has been outed for flirting with overt racism. See Pauls, Ron and Rand, or even Reagan, Ron. Back then Republicans thought they could play footsie with racists and anti-Semites under the radar. Those days are over and Scalise should have had the smarts to get a clue by 2002." (The Democratic Strategist)
---
Scott Walker is exposed again as legitimatizing David Duke's crazed view of the world.

Jud Lounsbury of Uppity Wisconsin has a post from 2011 drawing attention as Scott Walker works to be taken seriously as a candidate for president of the United States.

Lounsbury quotes Scott Walker on Louisiana ex-KKK man, David Duke: "The distinction we're making is not one of saying his issues are extreme, they certainly are not."

Lounsbury then offers David Duke's deranged on-the-record views of the world:

• "We (Whites) desire to live in our own neighborhoods, go to our own schools, work in our own cities and towns, and ultimately live as one extended family in our own nation."
• You can't find one written order to one commander at any of these camps which says 'Exterminate the Jews.'

I believe a full airing of Scott Walker's defense of David Duke as not being extreme on the "issues" will serve him well with Iowa's GOP, just not with the more decent people of the United States.

The spectacle of Scott Walker appearing on a live segment with David Duke is crazy, and Walker's weak condemnation that veers into agreement with Duke on the "issues" is just as off-the-charts crazy.

GOP Heads into New Year—Racist and Corrupt

National Democrats rightfully mock GOP claims that GOP
leader didn't know David Duke is a white supremacist
(Huffington Post)

Update: See David Duke: I've Met With Steve Scalise Several Times, So What? (Garcia, TPM)

The GOP House leadership is rallying around its third-in-command for speaking at a David Duke-white supremacist rally sponsored by the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO).

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) has the support of the Republican Party that now treats its seamless political affiliation with the likes of Stormfront and other white supremacist organizations as an occasional PR problem, not a moral disgrace.

This is because white racists are the base of the Republican Party and have been since Nixon's Southern Strategy through Reagan's infamous address on August 3, 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi at the Neshoba County Fair, miles from the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and up to the collection of racial taunts comprising Mitt Romney's campaign.

With this radicalized racist Party now openly affiliated with the new billionaire party created by the Roberts Court, young racists see a future with even the know-nothing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker thinking one day he could become the presidential nominee of the White Party.

The problem for Walker is that Walker is both corrupt and callow—qualifications sufficient for one in four of the Wisconsin electorate in non-presidential elections and perhaps even the Iowa presidential primary dominated by rural whites—but Scott Walker cannot hide much beyond Iowa no matter how badly he destroys public schools in Wisconsin, and leaves Wisconsin waters polluted and poisoned.

The White Party looking for more power: To borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "They were careless people, — they smashed up things … then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

The Democratic response: Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Virginia): "Race still is, sadly, an ugly aspect of our politics. No politician should ever find himself/herself addressing a white supremacist organization except to tell them to go to hell." (Robert Costa and Ed O'Keefe, Washington Post)

Well, maybe Scott Walker will weigh in on racism and social justice. I'm sure he's well-read on the topic.

Why Obama Matters in History

They took your lives; they could not take your pride

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

- RFK
Day of Affirmation Address, 6/6/66,
University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa

City of Blinding Lights
(Paul Hewson; Dave Evans; Adam Clayton; Larry Mullen)


.

Hate in America

Update II: See the big hate.
- Paul Krugman

Update: Can right-wing hate talk lead to murder? Two terror events in two weeks makes me wonder if media extremists might turn down the ugly rhetoric for a bit. - Joan Walsh

Another hate crime. This act a white supremacist murdering a man at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This is why we need the Southern Poverty Law Center. Why we need to become vigilant against racial profiling and all acts of racism and hate.

Why we need to constantly confront the ignorant among us.

The appeal to racism, bigotry and hate is a staple of the Republican Party, and not just isolated American whacks. You can bet this murderer is not a big fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the civil rights movement, and likely not a voice against racial profiling.

Since the inception of Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968, continuing through Reagan’s 1980 campaign kick-off in Philadelphia, Mississippi [the site of the murder of civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, 16 years earlier], right on up to Bush and McCain, playing on the bigotries in America has been standard GOP fare.

Instead of the ignorant and hateful being politically marginalized, the GOP sees a political opportunity that they have never stopped using. The results are plain and ugly.

Here in Wisconsin, for most Wisconsin GOP writers, Milwaukee talk radio, and the Republican Party, the Civil Rights movement never happened.

So it's no stretch for them to obstruct black voters, disenfranchise gays, and play on the fears and prejudices of the ignorant who comprise the base of today's Republican Party.

As always the civil rights movement will stand tall against the ignorant masses of the GOP; it's just too bad that these haters find so much comfort in a major American political party.