Of course they have. During the '08 election the GOP state rules committee in my state went so far as to make a rule that only a single delegate could be on the ballot for each county and that the central state party leadership would pick those candidates. The elected representatives at the state convention were literally given a ballot with a single name on it and told that write ins were not allowed. Any ballot altered beyond voting for the single candidate provided would be discarded.
The GOP doesn’t actually value democratic principles. It’s authoritarianism all the way down.
WTF? There has been an endless trail of victims from Trump’s actions his entire life. This is a weird title that completely ignores the millions of people who have been injured by trump throughout his life, and yes, it is millions. Just a few of the crimes he has committed that leave victims are stealing tax payer money, refusing to pay contractors and employees, sexually assaulting or raping women, scamming everyone from students to cancer patients, and discouraging people from preventing the spread of a deadly virus during a pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of his actions or lack of action during the pandemic. That’s millions of people hurt by him. “This time there are victims” psshaw! There have always been victims!
He is NOT a master liar. He’s not even good at it in the slightest. The differenc eis that his base doesn’t care. They knows a lie and what isn’t. It’s a big game of “what can we get away with” becuase they need validation so fucking bad at this point.
“Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.”
not unless the Ds suddenly decide they want to fight back and pack the court or something. barring that, the right has a majority on the court for the next generation.
Yup this is a racist tantrum, “anti woke” is just the new coat of paint. It isn’t “anti woke” that’s getting more common, it’s racism, xenophobia, and hate in general.
If you’d read the article, you’d know that it is not all it is.
If you have, in fact, read the article, read it again. To the end. Maybe take in some of its links too.
This is not ‘just’ a racist tantrum. It is a billionaire-funded fascist takeover. Lazily dismissing them won’t work. People need to start turning up to school board meetings to outnumber these fucking psychopaths. Even if no one is paying them to do it.
I didn’t mean “that’s it” as if it’s merely a racist tantrum. In fact, calling it a tantrum like the article does infantilizes the problem - as if they’re harmless babies and we can ignore their crying. I didn’t mean to imply it’s “just” a racist tantrum. Rather, what I meant is that we need to call racism racism and be precise with language, not lazily dismiss them as “anti-woke” as if that means anything.
I take your point about language. It is important to say “racist” when you mean “racist”.
But they’re also targeting LGBTQ+ people and women, and any other group they can use to distract attention from the fact that billionaires are robbing us blind lest they lose one tiny drop of power.
So, in this case, “anti-woke” is a perfectly reasonable term to use. Not least because if we want to destroy these fuckers, it will take every single one of us making common cause, not fighting about who gets top billing.
This is about racism but it is about racism because it is about power. Power protecting itself by throwing everyone else under the bus. “Look! Over there! The poor people have all your money!”
We cannot defeat them by retreating into identity siloes. Obviously, we all have different specific battles to fight but they’re all the same war. Against fascism. We do need a language that acknowledges that.
Fair. Connecting this specific spate of racism to the broader fascist trend of smearing everyone who isn’t an affluent straight white male christian (i.e. part of the in-group) is good politics, but there’s already a word for that: reactionary
Yes, that is a fair point and one I’d missed a bit from your original post. I appreciated the scare quotes in the article but you’re not wrong.
That said, I don’t know if you’re exactly right either. “Woke” was co-opted by the fash. I don’t think we should just let them have it. A good starting point is for every interlocutor to stop them and ask them to define the word every time they use it. The word is not the problem.
You’re only letting them have it if you also let them define it. They are anti-woke. Woke (aware of structural injustice) is not a bad thing to be. 90% of the population has every reason to be woke because 90% of the population is subject to structural injustice. But far too many have been distracted by the idea that some other fucked-over group has it better than them, or gains consolation from not being quite at the bottom of the pile.
It’s a neat trick but so easy to expose. And one of the simplest ways to expose it is to make them spell out what they think it means.
White-passing Americans (white or white-mixed) make up 71% of the country. 35% are white men. Based on the most common numbers I’m seeing, 30% are straight and cis. 80% of America is Christian (fug it’s that high???), so that gives us roughly 22% straight white cis christian males.
That huge mass of people is predisposed to being anti-woke because they stand to lose the most from anti-racism and anti-sexism and queer acceptance and religious tolerance etc. Structural injustice isn’t just a historical accident, it was a deliberate creation by the ruling class through the usage of genocide and slavery and apartheid to ensure that a huge minority of the population would be too comfortable and to loyal to their rulers to ever revolt and would stand up for their privileges against the mobs of the havenots.
Call them anti-woke if you want. They’re also settlers, reactionaries, and Amerikkkan Nazis
90% of the population are either too poor not to be suffering structural injustice, or are relatively well off but still too Black, too queer, too female,. Class and race cannot be separated. If we ignore the people who are struggling just because they’re blaming the wrong people for their struggles, fascism will win.
Do you think a working class Israeli faces the same injustices as a working class Palestinian? A working class Jew in 1935 Germany the same as a working class Christian?
You’re the one trying to separate class and race. Don’t think of America like a country, think of it like an occupation or a regime.
We gotta destroy whiteness. You can’t win by just making whitey woke.
Do you think a working class Israeli faces the same injustices as a working class Palestinian? A working class Jew in 1935 Germany the same as a working class Christian?
No, of course I don’t. But a working class Israeli has a hell of a lot more in common with a working class Palestinian than they do with the Israeli ruling class. And they may not get much publicity (and a lot of jail time) but quite a lot of Israelis recognise that; I know because I have worked with some of them.
Oppression Olympics is a dismal fucking sport. Divide and fucking rule from the bottom up. Completely self-defeating. It is structural and if you refuse to expose the structures, you’ll never change a thing.
This isn’t oppression olympics, it’s anti-imperialist struggle! Divide and conquer already happened when the ruling class elevated a portion of the working class to use as a bludgeon to oppress the rest of the working class. It’s too late to coddle the white mob and beg them to join us in the struggle for liberation - we have to take away their whiteness, render them as workers just like the rest of us.
The woke philosophers have only interpreted structural oppression in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
The concept of whiteness needs to go. But white people are no more a homogeneous blob of identity than Black people, or LGBT people, or Jewish people (some of whom are white). I’ll oppose those who turn to racism and bigotry as a solution to their problems. As I do Louis Farrakhan for his anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny and general cunty conservatism. Being oppressed is not an excuse to do some oppressing of your own. But it’s really fucking easy to see how people fall into that trap. And really fucking racist to believe that Black people can’t be authoritarian fuckwits, or that Jewish people can’t oppose Israel, or that white people can’t be oppressed by poverty.
Steven Avery and Brendan Darcy were fucked over because they are poor, not protected because they are white. Black people are fucked over with impunity because the colour of their skin is a marker of powerlessness. Women and LGBT people are fucked over because that which is feminine is despised.
She later woke in a hospital bed with no memory of what had happened and minus her clothes. Now 26, the woman said she believed the officers had treated her in the way they did because she was black. According to the woman, when she came round in hospital she spoke to the police officer at her bedside, who said she was very well spoken and asked where she was born. When the woman replied: “Hampstead”, the officer radioed a colleague and was overheard saying: “I think we made a mistake…”
As soon as she opened her mouth … “I think we made a mistake.”
The concept of whiteness needs to go. But white people are no more a homogeneous blob of identity than Black people, or LGBT people, or Jewish people (some of whom are white).
I completely agree, and in fact, abhor whiteness because it seeks to turn all so-called “white” people who accept it into such a homogeneous blob of identity. That’s why it was invented!
What I’m trying to say is that the white identity, itself, has to be abolished. As long as whiteness exists it will be used by the US/NATO empire to enforce its own hegemonic rule over its imperial subjects in the Global South and on subjects in its internal colonies.
It’s important to note that whiteness is a lot more complicated than just skin color. Did you know white women that married Japanese men were sent to internment camps? Their fair skin did not protect them, because by race mixing they lost the privilege of being “white”.
… I have no idea where I’m going with this. I just think white people being woke isn’t enough. White people need reject whiteness, not just be made aware of it.
Per the article, this is part of an organized effort on the part of formerly respected institutions on the right to actively push a racist agenda. Our star villain in this case is the Claremont Institute:
Last week, the New Republic published a lengthy and terrifying investigative article by Katherine Stewart about the Claremont Institute, once a vaguely respectable conservative think tank and now among the leading right-wing organizations pushing the anti-education and anti-democratic agenda below the surface of the Conroe incident. One of the many Claremont alumni Stewart profiles is Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the recent hysteria over "critical race theory" in education. In reality, critical race theory was an approach used in law schools and other graduate-level academic spaces, and had basically nothing to do with public schools. Rufo's ingenious idea was to turn it into a catch-all scare term that could be used to demonize any and all forms of anti-racist education, even something as previously noncontroversial as a poster depicting interracial friendship.
The saga of the Claremont Institute in the Trump years is readily told as one of moral collapse. Once upon a time, the men of the Claremont Institute (they are almost all men; more on that in a moment) idolized George Washington for his “prudence” and “civility.” From its founding up through the Obama years, the institute was certainly situated on the right, but it was not, or did not seem to be, conspicuous for its extremism. It was probably best known for publishing the Claremont Review of Books, which was sized and laid out to resemble The New York Review of Books, as if to suggest that it was in direct competition with its more established and exalted Manhattan counterpart.
But in 2015–16, the Claremont men threw their support behind the man who descended that golden escalator with a mouthful of hateful rhetoric. In an earlier time, they defended intellectual rigor against the alleged relativism of contemporary academic culture. But now they provide a platform for white nationalists, racist “replacement” theorists, and the Pizzagate man. Nate Hochman, the erstwhile DeSantis staffer who was fired after he reportedly created and distributed a campaign video featuring Nazi imagery in July, is a former Claremont Institute Publius Fellow (2021). ”Most haunting of all—they once hailed the United States as “the best regime in Western civilization.” But in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Claremont board member John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and overturn the election—and the men of Claremont rose to his defense. Eastman currently faces potential disbarment in California and appears to be a person of interest in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. Yet Claremont board member and founder Christopher Flannery has called John Eastman a “hero” and has asked us instead to condemn “the Stalinist machine” (meaning U.S. federal law enforcement) for persecuting him. Eastman was the unidentified (and uncharged) co-conspirator 2 in the August 1 indictment of Trump over his January 6 actions. (Claremont did not respond to emails from The New Republic asking if the institution endorsed Eastman’s behavior on this matter, in addition to some other issues addressed in this piece.)
The Claremont Institute’s seeming embrace of political violence against the government of the United States is not limited to Eastman’s efforts to whip up the mob that gathered at the Ellipse in preparation for the assault on the Capitol, nor can it be excused as mere metaphorical excess in the war of ideas. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
My mom’s anti-racism was very liberal white savior but I will always thank her for the fact that she actively encouraged me to make friends with our black neighbors when I was like 4. I unfortunately still lived mostly in white dominated areas growing up and had very few black acquittances and no close black friends. Though I did have a few close asain friends in highschool I guess. But still, I went to a highschool with like a grand total of two black people, and the one I was friendly with had been adopted by a white family. So while my mom did instill that racism is wrong, i still lacked necessary perspective for a long time. Pretty much didnt really get interested and involved in race issues until I was on tumblr when Mike Brown happened. And I still haven’t really had as many one on one conversations and friendships with black people as I would like.
Idk, maybe I’m being weird about race even with this post. I just kind of regret the fact that being in white dominated areas meant I didnt get to have the kind of experiences that would help me have been better on race earlier. I did at least have no open racists in my family growing up, which was good. And in addition to my mom my paternal grandma has always been proactively anti-racist. Both in a liberal way, but better than the upbringing a lot of white Americans have.
Sorry for the info dump lol.
ETA: OH I should mention that one positive experience with racial diversity in my life has been working with POC children in my past jobs with kids. Thats been beneficial I think. For example I specifically remember viscerally feeling the anxiety my latine students had during the rise of Trump.
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