#SPECIAL! False Racism Edition!

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American Chronicles: The Devastating New History of the January 6th Insurrection! The House Report Describes Both a Catastrophe and a Way Forward.

The New Yorker is publishing the full report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, in partnership with Celadon Books. The edition contains a foreword by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, which you’ll find below, and an epilogue by Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee.

— By David Remnick | December 22, 2022

People gather in front of a building in Washington D.C. on January 6 2021. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

In the weeks while the House select committee to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol was finishing its report, Donald Trump, the focus of its inquiry, betrayed no sense of alarm or self-awareness. At his country-club exile in Palm Beach, Trump ignored the failures of his favored candidates in the midterm elections and announced that he was running again for President. He dined cheerfully and unapologetically with a spiralling Kanye West and a young neo-fascist named Nick Fuentes. He mocked the government’s insistence that he turn over all the classified documents that he’d hoarded as personal property. Finally, he declared that he had a “major announcement,” only to unveil the latest in a lifetime of grifts. In the old days, it was Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Ice. This time, he was hawking “limited edition” digital trading cards at ninety-nine dollars apiece, illustrated portraits of himself as an astronaut, a sheriff, a superhero. The pitch began with the usual hokum: “Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite President of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington.”

In his career as a New York real-estate shyster and tabloid denizen, then as the forty-fifth President of the United States, Trump has been the most transparent of public figures. He does little to conceal his most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless. That is the never-apologize-never-explain core of him. Trump is hardly the first dishonest President, the first incurious President, the first liar. But he is the most shameless. His contrition is impossible to conceive. He is insensible to disgrace.

Book cover of The January 6th Report

On December 19, 2022, the committee spelled out a devastating set of accusations against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the nation; conspiracy to make false statements; and, most grave of all, inciting, assisting, aiding, or comforting an insurrection. For the first time in the history of the United States, Congress referred a former President to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. The criminal referrals have no formal authority, though they could play some role in pushing Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to issue indictments. The report certainly adds immeasurably to the wealth of evidence describing Trump’s actions and intentions. One telling example: The committee learned that Hope Hicks, the epitome of a loyal adviser, told Trump more than once in the days leading up to the protest to urge the demonstrators to keep things peaceful. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused,” she wrote in a text to another adviser. When Hicks questioned Trump’s behavior concerning the insurrection and the consequences for his legacy, he made his priorities clear: “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.”

Trump has been similarly dismissive of the committee’s work, going on the radio to tell Dan Bongino, the host of “The Dan Bongino Show,” that he had been the victim of a “kangaroo court.” On Truth Social, his social-media platform, he appealed to the loyalty of his supporters: “Republicans and Patriots all over the land must stand strong and united against the Thugs and Scoundrels of the Unselect Committee…. These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, the people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Experience makes it plain that Trump will just keep going on like this, deflecting, denying, lashing out at his accusers, even if it means that he will end his days howling in a bare and echoing room. It matters little that the report shows that even members of his innermost circle, from his Attorney General to his daughter, know the depths of his vainglorious delusions. He will not repent. He will not change. But the importance of the committee’s report has far less to do with the spectacle of Trump’s unravelling. Its importance resides in the establishment of a historical record, the depth of its evidence, the story it tells of a deliberate, coördinated assault on American democracy that could easily have ended with the kidnapping or assassination of senior elected officials, the emboldenment of extremist groups and militias, and, above all, a stolen election, a coup.

The committee was not alone in its investigation. Many journalists contributed to the steady accretion of facts. But, with the power of subpoena, the committee was able to uncover countless new illuminating details. One example: In mid-December, 2020, the Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas that would have challenged the counting of millions of ballots. Trump, of course, supported the suit. He was furious when it, like dozens of similar suits, was dismissed. According to Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked directly for Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, Trump was “raging” about the decision: “He had said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.’”

In large measure, this report is the story of how Trump, humiliated by his loss to Joe Biden, conspired to obstruct Congress, defraud the country he was pledged to serve, and incite an insurrection to keep himself in power.

The origins of the committee and its work are plain: On January 6, 2021, thousands marched on the Capitol in support of Trump and his conspiratorial and wholly fabricated charge that the Presidential election the previous November had been stolen from him. Demonstrators breached police barricades, broke through windows and doors, and ran through the halls of Congress threatening to exact vengeance on the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and other officeholders. Seven people died as a result of the insurrection. About a hundred and fourteen law-enforcement officers were injured.

Half a year later, the House of Representatives voted to establish a panel charged with investigating every aspect of the insurrection—including the role of the former President. An earlier attempt in the Senate to convene an investigative panel had met with firm resistance from the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who called it an “extraneous” project; despite support from six Republican senators, it failed to get the sixty votes required. It was left to the Democratic leadership in the House to form a committee. The vote, held on June 30, 2021, was largely along party lines, but the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol officially came into existence.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi then asked the Republicans to name G.O.P. members to join the panel. The House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, responded by proposing some of the most prominent election deniers in his caucus, including Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who had attended “Stop the Steal” demonstrations and was sure to behave as an ardent obstructionist. Pelosi, who had named Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, to the panel, rejected two of McCarthy’s five recommendations, saying, “The unprecedented nature of January 6th demands this unprecedented decision.” After conferring with Trump, McCarthy refused to provide alternatives, and abruptly withdrew all of his proposals, gambling that doing so would derail or discredit the initiative. Pelosi, in turn, asked a second Republican who had, with Cheney, voted to impeach the President on a vote held on January 13th—Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois—to serve on the committee. Both Cheney and Kinzinger accepted.

Cheney, a firm conservative and the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, had made her judgment of Trump well known. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said not long after the insurrection. “Everything that followed was his doing.” She knew that by opposing Trump and joining Kinzinger and the Democrats on the committee she was almost sure to lose her seat in Congress. She didn’t care, she said later, declaring her work on the panel, on which she served as vice-chair, the “most important” of her career. The G.O.P. leadership was unimpressed with this declaration of principle. In February, 2022, the Republican National Committee censured both Cheney and Kinzinger.

In deciding how to proceed with its investigation, the committee’s chairman, Bennie G. Thompson, of Mississippi, along with Liz Cheney and the seven other members, looked to a range of similarly high-profile investigative panels of the past, including the so-called Kefauver Committee, which investigated organized crime, in 1950-51; the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, in 1963-64; the Senate Watergate hearings, in 1973; the Iran-Contra hearings, in 1987; and, particularly, the 9/11 Commission, in 2002-04. The committee hired staff investigators who had worked in the Department of Justice and in law enforcement, and they conducted more than a thousand interviews. Teams were color-coded and tasked with making “deep dives” into various aspects of January 6th. The division of labor included a “blue team,” which examined the preparation for and the reaction to events by law enforcement; a “green team,” which examined the financial backing for the plot; a “purple team,” which conducted an analysis of the extremist groups involved in the storming of the Capitol; a “red team,” which studied the rally on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal movement; and a “gold team,” which looked specifically at Trump’s role in the insurrection.

Committee members also insisted on inquiring into whether Trump planned to use emergency powers to overturn the vote, call out the National Guard, and invoke the Insurrection Act. Was Trump’s inaction during the rioting on Capitol Hill merely a matter of miserable leadership, or was it a deliberate strategy of fomenting chaos in order to stay in the White House? “That dereliction of duty causes us real concern,” Thompson said. In this way, an inquiry into a specific episode broadened to encompass a topic of still greater significance: Had the President sought to undermine and circumvent the American system of electoral democracy?

The political urgency of the committee’s work was geared to the calendar. Members had initially hoped to complete and publish a report before the 2022 midterm elections. But that proved impossible, such was the volume of evidence. Still, the committee members knew they could not go on indefinitely. The Republicans were likely to win back a majority in the House, in November, and McCarthy, who was the most likely to succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, would almost certainly choose not to reauthorize the committee, effectively shutting it down; it was also quite possible, they knew, that McCarthy and the Republicans might generate “counter” hearings as an act of retribution.

As the committee began its work, it was soon clear that the Republican leadership in the House had made a tactical error in refusing to appoint any members to the panel. Even Republicans less vociferous than Jordan would have had the power to slow down the investigations, debate points with Democratic members, and appoint less aggressive staff members. Instead, the committee, with its seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans, worked in relative harmony, taking full advantage of a sense of common purpose and the capacities of a congressional committee.

Still, they faced predictable obstacles. Not only did many Trump loyalists refuse to testify; much of the American public was, after so many previous investigations, impeachments, scandals, and news alerts, weary of hearing about the unending saga of Donald Trump. Who would pay attention? What more was there to learn? In a polarized America, who was left to be persuaded? Committee members such as Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, insisted that the real purpose of the investigation was to establish the truth. What prosecutors and the electorate make of those facts is beyond the committee’s authority.

The committee members determined that they could not go about the hearings in the old way, with day after day of interminable questioning of witnesses. Instead, they needed to produce discrete, well-produced, briskly paced multimedia “episodes” designed to highlight various aspects of the insurrection: its origins, its funding, the behavior of the President, the level of involvement by white nationalists, militias, and other menacing groups. The members agreed that, in an age of peak TV, they needed to present a kind of series, one that was dramatic, accessible, accurate, evidence-rich, and convincing. Ideally, they would provide a narrative that did not merely preach to the converted but reached the millions of Americans who were indifferent to or confused by the unending stream of noise, indirection, hysteria, lying, and chaos that had characterized the hyperpolarized era. The committee also recognized that only a minority would watch the full hearings, much less read every word of a long narrative report months later. They needed to produce the hearings in a way that could also be transmitted effectively in bits on social media and go viral. They needed memorable moments and characters. In the words of one staffer, “We needed to bring things to life.”

To help with that effort, the committee hired an adviser, the British-born television producer James Goldston, who had been a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Northern Ireland and Kosovo. Goldston had also covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton. In 2004, he moved to New York and went to work at ABC, where he ran “Good Morning America” and “Nightline”; between 2014 and 2021, he served as president of ABC News. The committee decided to videotape its depositions, and Goldston was among those who helped to select brief and particularly vivid moments from those long interviews, the way a journalist uses quotations or scenes to enliven a piece of narrative prose. The committee’s presentations also employed everything from surveillance video to police radio traffic to the e-mails and tweets of government officials, right-wing media personalities, militia leaders, and the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill.

“We live in an era where, no matter how important the subject, it’s competing for attention,” Goldston told a reporter for TheWrap. “People are distracted, people have got a lot going on. And so, the hope was, by bringing these new techniques to this format, that we could engage people in a way that perhaps they wouldn’t otherwise have been.” The second prime-time hearing brought in nearly eighteen million viewers, an audience comparable to NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” The Republican House leadership was predictably unimpressed with the committee’s commitment to narrative, prompting Kevin McCarthy to say that the Democrats had hired Goldston to “choreograph their Jan. 6 political theater.”

The committee’s published report does not have a single authorial voice. Rather, it is a collaborative effort written mainly by a team of investigators and staffers, with input from members of the committee. And, while it lacks a mediating, consistent voice, it is a startlingly rich narrative, thick with details of malevolent intent, political conspiracy, sickening violence, and human folly. There is no question that historians will feast on these pages; what the Department of Justice does with this evidence remains to be seen.

At times, there’s comedy embedded in this tragic narrative. A figure such as Eric Herschmann, a Trump adviser, holds the stage long enough to recount telling the Trump lawyer John Eastman that his plan to overturn the election is “completely crazy”: “Are you out of your effing mind?” And: “Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.” Viewers of Herschmann’s deliciously profane taped testimony were transfixed by at least two artifacts on the wall behind him: a baseball bat with the word “Justice” written on it and a print of “Wild Thing,” Rob Pruitt’s image of a panda, which also makes an appearance in the erotic thriller “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Anyone who watched the hearings and who now reads this report will dwell at times on the outsized figures who emerge, either in their own testimony or as described by others: the neo-fascistic campaign strategist and onetime White House aide Steve Bannon; the blandly ambitious Mark Meadows, the chief of staff in the final year of the Trump Administration; and, of course, the oft-inebriated Rudy Giuliani, the onetime New York City mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer.

Time and again, senior figures in the drama refused to testify, hiding behind claims of executive privilege. The report includes many comical instances of would-be witnesses claiming their Fifth Amendment rights and refusing to answer questions as benign as where they went to college. And so it was often the junior staffers in the Administration, with far less to spend on legal fees and with their futures at risk, who stepped forward to describe what they had seen and heard. The most memorable such episode came on June 28th, when Cassidy Hutchinson, the earnest young aide to Meadows, testified live before the committee. Hutchinson had already been deposed four times, for a total of more than twenty hours. Liz Cheney, as the vice-chair, began the session by announcing that Hutchinson had received an ominous phone call from someone in Trump’s circle saying, “He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.” Cheney bluntly referred to this as tantamount to witness tampering. When the report and its accompanying materials were finally released, we learned that Hutchinson told the committee that a former Trump White House lawyer named Stefan Passantino, who represented her early in the process, had instructed her to feign a faulty memory and “focus on protecting the President.” She said Passantino made it plain that he would help find her “a really good job in Trump world” so long as she protected “the family.” Hutchinson also testified that an aide to Meadows, Ben Williamson, had passed along a message from Meadows that he “knows that you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

But Hutchinson, who had been a loyal staffer in the Trump White House, privy to countless conversations in and around the offices of the President and the chief of staff, would not be intimidated. She found new counsel and thwarted the thuggish attempts to gain her silence, delivering some of the most damning testimony of the investigation. She described conversations, some secondhand, that made it plain that Trump knew full well that he had lost the election but would stop at nothing to keep power. Because of her preternatural calm before the microphone, the uninflected, more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone of her delivery, Hutchinson was often compared to John Dean, the White House counsel under Richard Nixon, who emerged from the Watergate hearings as the most memorable and decisive witness.

But the nature of Hutchinson’s testimony, in keeping with the era, was distinctly more lurid than Dean’s. She recalled how Trump hurled his lunch against the wall, splattering ketchup everywhere, when he learned that Attorney General William Barr had publicly declared that there was, in fact, no evidence of election fraud. On other occasions, she said, the President pulled out “the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.” She recounted the names of the many Trumpists—including Meadows, Giuliani, Matt Gaetz, and Louie Gohmert—who had requested that Trump grant them pardons in connection with the Capitol attack. She said that, three days before the insurrection, the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told Trump that, if he carried out his plan to march to the Capitol with the crowds, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” Hutchinson testified that on January 6th Cipollone told Meadows, “They’re literally calling for the Vice President to be effing hung.” As she recalled, “Mark had responded something to the effect of ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’ ”

Finally, Hutchinson made it clear just how much Trump had wanted to join the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill. Trump was so incensed with his Secret Service detail for refusing to take him there, she testified, that he lunged at the agent driving his car and struggled for the wheel. The report corroborates Hutchinson’s testimony, saying that the “vast majority” of its law-enforcement sources described a “furious interaction” between the President and his security contingent in his S.U.V. The sources said that Trump was “furious,” “insistent,” “profane,” and “heated.” The committee concluded that Trump had hoped to lead the effort to overturn the election either from inside the House chamber or from a stage outside the building.

Hutchinson was equally forthright about Trump’s disregard for public safety. Despite being told that many of the supporters who came out to see him speak on January 6th were armed, she said, Trump insisted that the Secret Service remove the “mags”—the metal detectors. He was not terribly concerned that someone might be killed or injured, so long as it wasn’t him. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” he said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me.”

The insurrection at the Capitol was of such grave consequence for liberal democracy and the rule of law that commentators have struggled ever since to find some historical precedent to provide context and understanding to a nation in a state of continuing crisis. Some thought immediately of the sack of the Capitol, in 1814, though the perpetrators then were foreign, soldiers of the British crown. Others have pointed to contested Presidential elections of the past—1824, 1876, 1960, 2000—but those ballots were certified, peacefully and lawfully, by Congress. None of the losers sought to foment an uprising or create a national insurgency. Compare Trump’s self-absorption and rage with Al Gore’s graceful acceptance of the Supreme Court’s decision handing the election to George W. Bush: “Tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

Still, there have been efforts to overturn the constitutional order, notably in the “secession winter” of 1860-61, when seven slaveholding states, having warned that they would never accept the election of Abraham Lincoln, declared themselves in opposition to the United States itself. As Lincoln prepared for his inauguration, to be held in March, he received a series of warnings that an army raised in Virginia might invade Washington, D.C. So prevalent were the rumors of a Confederate conspiracy that Congress assembled a committee to “inquire whether a secret organization hostile to the government of the United States exists in the District of Columbia.” Lincoln was particularly concerned about a potential plot to undermine the counting of electors, an event scheduled for February. In the end, John Breckinridge, James Buchanan’s Vice-President and a loser in the 1860 Presidential race, obeyed the law. Although Breckinridge was sympathetic to the secessionist cause, he presided with “Roman fidelity” at the certification vote, according to Representative Henry Dawes, of Massachusetts, “and the nation was saved.” But only temporarily. On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter and the Civil War began.

A civil war, in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, is not at hand. But what makes the events of January 6, 2021, so alarming is that they were inspired and incited by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who remains popular among so many Republicans and a contender to return to the White House.

The events of January 6th were the culmination of a long campaign that Trump and members of his circle have led against the legitimacy of American elections. The campaign’s most powerful weapon was the undermining of truth itself, the insidious deployment of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts.”

Trump first announced his emergence from the worlds of New York real estate and reality-show television by declaring that Barack Obama, the first Black President, had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and was, therefore, ineligible to hold office. After joining the 2016 Presidential race, Trump continued to traffic in casual accusations and unfounded conspiracy theories: Ted Cruz’s father was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. Antonin Scalia might have been murdered. Obama and Joe Biden might have staged the killing of Osama bin Laden with a body double. Trump welcomed the endorsement of the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had earlier claimed that Hillary Clinton had “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” children, and that the mass murder at Sandy Hook had been “staged.” The most consequential conspiracy theory of Trump’s political career, however, charged that American elections were rigged.

In 2016, Trump, once he had a hold on the Republican Party nomination, began the process of undermining confidence in the entire electoral system. The reporter Jonathan Lemire, in his book, “The Big Lie,” recalls attending a rally, in Columbus, Ohio, at which Trump told his followers, weeks before the nominating Convention, “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest.” On Fox News, talking with Sean Hannity, Trump again expressed his doubts: “I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” Trump began to warn that he was not necessarily prepared to accede to the election results. At one of the Presidential debates, the moderator, Chris Wallace, asked Trump if he would make a commitment to accept the outcome, no matter what. Trump refused: “I will look at it at the time. What I’ve seen is so bad.”

Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of more than two per cent, but, because she fell well short in the Electoral College, there was no compulsion on Trump’s part to consider extralegal action. But four years later, as Trump lagged behind Joe Biden in the polls, he revived the theme. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” he tweeted. “IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Once more, Trump refused to promise a peaceful transfer of power. A month and a half before the election, he said, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

This kind of rhetoric was of grave concern to Democrats, including Speaker Pelosi, who privately told confidants, “He’s going to try to steal it.” And, not long after the voting ended, the tweets from Trump began:

Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the pollsters got it completely & historically wrong!

They are finding Biden votes all over the place—in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!

On November 7th, the Associated Press, Fox News, and, soon, all the other major news outlets called Pennsylvania, and the election, for Biden. The battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—all went Biden’s way, and, in the end, he won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In his victory speech, the President-elect said, “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature.”

This was a vain hope. As the Trump White House emptied, a motley assemblage of satraps and third-raters—Giuliani; a former federal prosecutor, Sidney Powell; the MyPillow C.E.O., Mike Lindell; the former law professor and Federalist Society leader John Eastman—stayed behind to encourage Trump in his most conspiratorial fantasies and schemes. In their effort to challenge election results in various states, Trump’s lawyers filed sixty-two federal and state lawsuits. They lost sixty-one of those suits, winning only on an inconsequential technical matter in Pennsylvania. By mid-December, even Mitch McConnell began referring to “President-elect Joe Biden.” When Trump called to berate him for conceding the ballot, McConnell, for once, stood up to him. “The Electoral College has spoken,” he said. “You lost the election.”

The only option Trump had left was to challenge the certification of the vote. With Eastman in the lead, his team concocted a plan that called on Vice-President Pence to declare that voting in seven states was still in dispute and to eliminate those electors. If the remaining forty-three states put forward their electors, Trump would win the election, 232–222. As part of that plan—what Chairman Thompson called, from the first day of the hearings, “an attempted coup”—Trump pressured government and election officials to coöperate. Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified that Trump did not conceal his intent, telling Donoghue, “What I’m asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” Once Trump unleashed his campaign of intimidation against local election officials, the death threats against those officials came from all directions. Ruby Freeman, an election worker in Georgia, testified, “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you?”

Another version of the plan had Pence calling for a ten-day-long recess and sending the slates back to the so-called “disputed” states. Eastman himself conceded that this plan would be rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court. Even so, the White House could surely be retained if Trump could convince Pence to “do the right thing.”

On the night of January 5th, the President met with Pence at the White House and tried to pressure him into adopting the scheme that Eastman had devised. For years, Pence had been the most loyal of deputies, never daring to challenge the falsehoods or the cruelties of his master. Trump, after all, had rescued him from political oblivion. But Pence would not go along with the plot. His job on January 6th, he told the President, was ceremonial. He was only there “to open envelopes.”

Trump was outraged. “You’ve betrayed us,” he told Pence. “I made you. You were nothing.”

The committee’s report is not a work of scholarship removed from its era. It was compiled by politicians and staff members and published at a moment of continuing peril and uncertainty. And the committee was formed in the contrails of the terrifying episode it was charged with investigating.

Although an abundance of new details has surfaced, the contours of what happened have never been in doubt. The events on January 6, 2021, began with a well-planned rally on the Ellipse, the fifty-two-acre park south of the White House. Trump had tweeted in advance, “Be there, will be wild!” Katrina Pierson, a spokeswoman for Trump’s 2016 campaign and one of the organizers of the rally, had texted another organizer saying that Trump “likes the crazies,” and wanted Alex Jones to be among the speakers. Jones did not speak, but Trump himself supplied the inflammatory rhetoric. In the seventy-minute-long speech he gave on the Ellipse, he told his followers they would “save our democracy” by rejecting “a fake election,” and warned them that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He taunted his Vice-President: “Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.” He set a tone of combativeness, defiance, and eternal resistance. And he put the life of his own Vice-President in jeopardy. As Chairman Thompson put it at one hearing, “Donald Trump turned the mob on him.”

Even though senior officials around Trump had told him that it was long past time to step aside—William Barr informed congressional investigators that he told Trump that reports of voting fraud were “bullshit”—Trump refused to listen. (“I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, he’s become detached from reality,” Barr recalled.) Trump was unrelenting. “We will never give up,” he told the crowd on the Ellipse. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.” After listening to the President’s repeated calls to fight, and to march to the Capitol building—“you’ll never take back our country with weakness”—thousands of his followers, some of them armed, some of them carrying Confederate symbols, some deploying flagpoles as spears, headed toward Capitol Hill.

As the march began, at around 1 p.m., Representative Paul Gosar, of Arizona, and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, both conservative Republicans, rose in Congress to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona. But Pence had already told Trump he would not go along with his plot, and there was no sign that Gosar, Cruz, and Trump’s loyalists in Congress had the numbers to succeed. McConnell, at that time the Senate Majority Leader, said, “Voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken—they’ve all spoken. If we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever.”

By 2 p.m., demonstrators began to overrun the Capitol Police, sometimes using improvised weapons. Caroline Edwards, of the Capitol Police, testified to the committee that there was “carnage” in the halls: “I was slipping in people’s blood.” The insurrectionists kept coming, breaking through windows and doors, assaulting police officers, and, once inside, they went hunting for the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and other officials who refused to participate in the President’s scheme to overturn the election. At around 2:20 p.m., the Senate, and then the House, went into emergency recess, as Capitol Police officers rushed members of both chambers to safety. The two Democratic congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, fearing for their lives and the lives of their colleagues, were reduced to sequestering in a safe location. In the final session of the committee’s investigation, we saw footage of Pelosi, enraged yet composed, deploying her cell phone to get someone to come to the aid of the legislative branch.

Trump watched these events on television at the White House with scant sense of alarm. He refused to send additional police or troops to quell the violence. At 2:24 p.m., he tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” By 3 p.m., insurrectionists, some of them in cosplay battle gear, had swarmed into the Senate chamber. Trump’s passivity was not passivity at all. As Adam Kinzinger put it, “President Trump did not fail to act. He chose not to act.” Liz Cheney was no less blunt. “He refused to defend our nation and our Constitution,” she said during the hearings. “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible, there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”

For Trump, the choice was simple. The insurrectionists were his people, his shock troops, there to do his bidding. Nothing about the spectacle seemed to disturb him: not the gallows erected outside the building, not the savage beatings, not threats to Pence and Pelosi, not graffiti like “Murder the Media,” not the chants of “1776! 1776!” And so he ignored calls to action even from his own party. At 3:11 p.m., Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, tweeted, “We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now. @realdonaldtrump you need to call this off.” Trump would not tell his supporters to go home until the early evening, when the damage had been done.

And though Trump and the insurrectionists failed to halt the certification of the ballot, they did get substantial support: a hundred and forty-seven Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the election results. At 3:42 a.m. on January 7th, Vice-President Pence, speaking to a joint session of Congress, certified the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth President of the United States. When, however, the midterms were held, two years later, dozens of Republican candidates continued to claim that his election was fraudulent. Those few Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who took a stand against Trump were swept out of office.

January 6th was a phenomenon rooted both in the degraded era of Trump and in the radicalization of a major political party during the past generation. The very power of these developments explains why many people may approach this congressional report with a sense of fatigue, even denial. Part of Trump’s dark achievement has been to bludgeon the political attention of the country into submission.

When a nation has been subjected to that degree of cynicism—what is politely called “divisiveness”—it can lose its ability to experience outrage. As a result, the prospect of engaging with this congressional inquiry into Trump’s attempt to delegitimatize the machinery of electoral democracy is sometimes a challenge to the spirit. That is both understandable and a public danger. And yet a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even farther toward a disturbing “new normal”: a post-truth, post-democratic America.

A republic is predicated on faith—not religious faith but a faith in the fundamental legitimacy of its political institutions and the decisions they issue. To concede the legitimacy of statutes, rulings, and election returns is not necessarily to favor them. It’s simply to participate in the basic system that gives them form and force; citizens can, through democratic machinery, seek to defeat or contest candidates they deplore, initiatives that offend them, court opinions they consider misguided. By contrast, the campaign that culminated in the Capitol attack of January 6th was, fatefully, against democracy itself. It sought to instill profound mistrust in the process of voting—the mechanism through which, even in highly imperfect democracies, accountability is ultimately secured.

The committee and its work were far from apolitical, and yet to dismiss the report as merely political would be a perilous act of resignation and defeatism. The questions that hovered over the inquiry from the start—what more is there to learn? who is really listening?—persisted and loomed over the midterm elections. When the hearings began, the polling outfit FiveThirtyEight reported that Trump’s approval rating was 41.9 per cent; when the hearings ended, it was 40.4 per cent, a minuscule dip. As Susan B. Glasser, of The New Yorker, wrote, “All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything.” And yet the Republicans failed in their promise to produce a “red wave” in the midterms. The Democrats maintained their slender hold on the Senate and lost far fewer seats in the House than was expected. And while the reasons behind the Republican failure were many, ranging from the imperilment of abortion rights to the dismal quality of so many of the Party’s candidates, it was clear that one of the principal reasons was a deep concern about the future of democracy.

The most urgent thing to learn is whether a two-and-a-half-century-old republic will resist future efforts to undercut its foundations—to steal, through concerted deception, the essential legitimacy of its constitutional order. The contents of the report insist that complacency is not an option. The report also insists on accountability, though that will ultimately be the responsibility of the Department of Justice and the American public. The report has provided the evidence, the truth. Now it remains to be seen if it will be acted upon.

The violation of January 6th was ultimately so brazen that many of Trump’s own loyalists could not, in the end, bring themselves to defend him. Even some on the radical right have come to recognize the insurrection’s implications for the future. Jason van Tatenhove was once the media spokesman for the militia group known as the Oath Keepers, which played a crucial role in the uprising. He left the group well before January 6th, but he remained well connected enough to know that the Oath Keepers were eager to take part in an “armed revolution.” Testifying before the committee, he expressed his sense of betrayal by Donald Trump, and a growing sense of alarm: “If a President that’s willing to try to instill and encourage, to whip up, a civil war among his followers uses lies and deceit and snake oil, regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do?”

Trump is running again for President. Perhaps his decline is irreversible. But it would be foolish to count on that. Should he win back the White House, he will come to office with no sense of restraint. He will inevitably be an even more radical, more resentful, more chaotic, more authoritarian version of his earlier self. And he would hardly be an isolated figure in the capital. Following the results of the midterm elections, Congress is now populated with dozens of election deniers and many more who still dare not defy Trump. The stakes could not be higher. If you are reaching for optimism—and despair is not an option—the existence and the depth of the committee’s project represents a kind of hope. It represents an insistence on truth and democratic principle. In the words of the man who tried and failed to overturn a Presidential election, you don’t concede when there’s theft involved. ♦

[isoboto]

will you please fuck off back to wherever pit of hell you came from. it was nice around here for a little without having to worry about your ignorant racist ass. newsflash asshole! you're an idiot who can't stop talking out of her ass because you have nothing meaningful to say. need i remind to your precious followers that you've said multiple racial slurs, and now you're going as far as to make fun of a 16 year old girl who was murdered. fucking cunt kys and go to hell

- oh boy look at who is crawling back from hell to yell at a tiny insignificant blog lol. didn’t come on Tumblr for like 4 months and immediately got sent a welcome party when I got back. I am truly flattered. way to make me feel very important, girl

now, before we proceed, here is a visual representation of me at all times, in case you have trouble understanding who and what I am

okay. ready? let’s go through your claims:

1) pretty sure none of my followers care or pay attention to tumblr drama -- neither do I.

you seem pretty new to this social media stuff, so let me explain: on social media, there is this thing called ✨Unfollow✨ if followers don’t like the content the poster is posting anymore, or ✨Block✨ if followers would like to never see the poster again. if you run into issues while unfollowing or blocking me, google is your friend.

i had always thought nobody cares about me, but it truly warmed my heart to know sjw anons care about me a lot.

2) I actually put a lot of thought into stuff I curated and wrote about. anything and everything you said/posted online is recorded, thus I wouldn’t put it on my dash unless I know for sure i could defend it.

but it’s okay if you don’t know that. it’s easy to miss when you only come to my blog to act all high and mighty.

here are the long posts I’ve written or shared. These, in my humble opinion, are an interesting read. Perhaps you should read them with some open-mindedness i’m sure you have.

- (Not) Taking A Knee, In Sports

- National Horny League Podcast

- Post-“Logan Couture Got Sucker-Punched”

- Bust the BLM Myth: Does the Majority of Black People Want To Defund the Police?

- Letitia Wright Should Not Have Apologized For Doing Nothing Wrong

- Hunter Biden & The Biden Inc. 

For interesting things I’ve shared, see this tag collection: Little Interesting Things. It’s a mix of hockey funny tidbits, wacky knowledge and political opinions.

3) ah, so we’re back to "Eva said slurs!!!" claim. are you the slurs anon then? (she gave herself the nickname, not me)

unless you have new evidence on me saying "multiple racial slurs", your false allegations have been debunked here and here. You’ve earned your honourable Get A Load Of This Dumb Idiot badge for your top-tier fact-checking skill.

The entire saga is tagged under Once Upon An Anon: SPECIAL! False Racism Edition! in case you want to refresh your memory

4) in references to this post: i mean, i don’t specifically make fun of the girl, i am making fun of how public opinion reacted to it.

here is a story that you might not have know or heard of because the media didn’t cry like a banshee about it: Ohio girl, 13, stabbed to death, and another 13-year-old girl is charged with her murder

and then the stupid blue checkmark twitter defending knife fights. oh oops i mean the Brilliant Intelligence, Big Brain CRT Defender

Twitter thread

If the cops didn’t intervene, you have that a girl being stabbed to death by her friend. If the cops intervened (ie. yelling everybody to Get Down multiple times and had to fire his gun to protect the girl in pink), the media faked outrage.

take your pick. whichever way the cops did, the media and the sjw would insert CRT racial justice bullshit in.

moreover, i’ll address this before you claim this and that: people claiming cops shouldn’t have pulled a gun, they hadn’t do their research into police work because police are trained to pull an equal or higher force on the suspect. Donut Operator and Officer 401 did very good job giving insights to how police work.

i am of the opinion police should be abolished and people should be allowed to freely armed themselves, like how Cheran works. but i will and can play devil’s advocate -- frankly because sjws can’t make up their mind. people shouldn’t own guns, and only police can. then when police deploy their guns -- regardless of context, it is automatically an unjustified shooting.

[dmbakura]

I would like to see your Vergil rant actually

I guess I'll just bullet point this thing. Some characterizations of him I've seen (either in fic or art or whatever) that I'm not a fan of, and why:

-Vergil still considers his humanity his 'weakness' post 5/is spiteful of V. You genuinely have to be playing the game with your eyes closed to not see that this is a complete regression of all of his character development. Further compounded by the special edition and also visions of V. Vergil learns that his strength comes from his humanity and that he has to accept himself as a whole (a contrast to Dante who goes through a similar arc reconciling with his demon half).

-Dante being Vergil's validation machine (I guess this one is a Dante characterization too?) Idk it's like people forget Dante was completely prepared to kill Vergil at the end of 5 again, so in post 5 fics where Vergil continues to act like a huge piece of shit and Dante, or Nero for that matter, doesn't hold him accountable it makes me very 🤨

-Vergil "hates" humans (like in the prejudiced fantasy racism way) and this one I think is a vast oversimplification of what Vergil's issue with humanity is. It's very internalized due to what he feels is his own incapability (he's also part human) and doesn't ever manifest as spite towards humans as a collective. He doesn't hate Eva either. The resentment he fosters towards her is built on the fact he wasn't able to save her and again, tied with his own feelings of inadequacy and false ideas of strength that had been imposed on him from a very young age. I say this because I once saw someone say him sleeping with Fortuna girl was out of character because he "would never lower himself to be with a human" 🙄 as if her being a human had anything to do with it at all. Like make no mistake he doesn't care for people in general, but he's not allergic to them like they have some sort of human cooties lmao

[anjalis-ennui]

emeralds and steel. (pt. 1)

                                       ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

a/n: hi! this is my bucky barnes x reader series! reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns in this! she is also born indian as i myself am indian and i don’t see enough indian representation, especially in fics. however, she knows many languages, so feel free to interpret her ethnicity as you see fit. i’m sorry for not posting anything over the past couple of days, as i was working on this! i hope you enjoy!

warnings: canon-typical violence, sexism, racism, implied racial slurs

tags: none so far, but if you would like to join the taglist, please fill out the taglist form!

summary: reader is a sorceress who was prophesized to be the host of the time stone. she has been alive since ancient greece and has been wandering the earth since. she cannot age nor die since she is now the body of an infinity stone. she was in the british royal military during the second world war, but didn’t see her strengths used well, so she signs up for the ssr: being shipped out to project rebirth with peggy carter.

                                      ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

“Rejected.”

“With all due respect, sir, I have been part of the British Royal Military far longer than you have had a job. I wish to join the Strategic Scientific Reserve, for which my resume is--to be honest--overqualified.”

“What would an Indian woman have to do with the British Royal Military? I find your story ineffably false.” The snooty man pushed his glasses up his nose and narrowed his eyes at her. Her tie was askew, her hair was all over the place, and her papers were in a bunch: only held together by her hands.

Just then, another woman walked by the desk, raising her eyebrows at the pair. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize Lieutenant (l/n), Mr. Lowe. She’s got not one, but two doctorates in the sciences. I’d think she’s rather qualified for the SSR, regardless of her gender or race.” The man huffed and got up, storming off to who knows where. The woman smiled and held her hand out. “Agent Peggy Carter from the SSR. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Lieutenant.” 

(Y/n) smiled, furrowing her brows, and shook Peggy’s hand. “I’m surprised you know who I am.”

“Nonsense, I’ve followed your career since I joined the military. You’re somewhat of a legend around these parts. Now, the head of the SSR heard of your application and is assigning you to Project Rebirth as a supervisor alongside myself. Your doctorates in chemistry and neuroscience will help us quite a lot.” She started walking towards a side door, motioning for (y/n) to follow. “There’s a plane waiting to take us to Camp Lehigh. Do you have luggage with you?”

She shook her head as she followed the woman. “I’m a light traveler. When you’re a lieutenant with no family you tend to have no roots in society.” (Y/n) gave Peggy a half-smile, waving away her concerned look. “I’m fine, Agent Carter. I’ve survived this long, haven’t I?”

“Indeed you have,” she said pensively. How could someone so strong have no one to rely on? The lieutenant was the first woman to hold such a high rank in the military and have so many degrees for her age. She was young, beautiful, and smart: everything a man could want. She would be expected to have a husband and kids, and yet she had no family. The woman had seemed to hold a sense of sadness as she said this, but she seemed empathetic and lively. Peggy intended to be her friend, whether (y/n) wanted her to or not. Maybe then she could find out what made her tick...

                                               ∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

(Y/n) stepped into place beside Peggy as they observed the candidates. The men looked buff and ready to charge into battle, that is, all but one. The scrawny man, sorry, boy that trailed after the others seemed like he belonged in a toy wagon playing with the other children rather than Camp Lehigh. “Ready to scare them, Agent Carter?”

“Always, Lieutenant.” Peggy walked forward, revealing herself to the men. “Recruits, attention! Gentlemen, I’m Agent Carter. I supervise all operations for this division.” (Y/n) smiled serenely at them as she walked forward and stood next to the agent. “For those of you who may not know me, I am Lieutenant (l/n), the assistant supervisor for this division.”

“What’s with the accent, Queen Victoria? Thought I was signing up for the U.S. Army.” The soldier internally rolled her eyes at the remark. Men, the bane of her existence. “And what’s with this...lieutenant? Didn’t know we were letting ni-”

(Y/n) shot forward and put him into a chokehold. “I dare you to finish that sentence, soldier. I am not to be discriminated against just because my skin is darker than yours, and if such foul words are going to come from your mouth, I daresay that we should wash it out and string it up on a clothesline.” She let him go and turned to Peggy, giving her a closed-eyed smile. “Would you like to do the honors, Agent Carter?”

“Certainly, though I think you’ve scared him enough.” The agent punched him, sending him straight to the ground. “That’ll teach you to respect women and especially women of color.”

                                             ∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

"Faster, ladies! Come on. My grandmother has more life in her, God rest her soul. Move it!”

“You’re not really thinking about picking Rogers, are you?” Colonel Phillips walked beside Dr. Erskine and the lieutenant, frowning at them. They couldn’t possibly be thinking of picking the runt of the group for the experiment of the decade, could they?

“I am more than just thinking about it. He is the clear choice.”

“When you brought a ninety-pound asthmatic onto my army base, I let it slide. I thought, what the hell? Maybe he’ll be useful to you, like a gerbil. I never thought you’d pick him.”

“Steven has character, Colonel, something that most of our recruits don’t,” (Y/n) cut in. “Dr. Erskine is right. He is the clear choice.”

The colonel sighed as he watched Steve fail to catch up with the rest. “Look at that. He’s making me cry.”

Erskine’s thick German accent was tinged with fatigue, as if he had run a marathon. “We are looking for qualities beyond the physical.”

“Do you know how long it took to set up this project?”

“Yes, we know, Colonel--”

“All the groveling I had to do in front of Senator What’s-His-Name’s committees?”

“Brandt. And yes, we know.”

“Then throw me a bone. Hodge passed every test we gave him. He’s big, he’s fast, he obeys orders. He’s a soldier.”

“Let me stop you there,” the lieutenant held out a hand, effectively stopping him in his tracks. “Not only is Hodge racist and sexist, he is also arrogant and rude. He is a bully.”

“You don’t win wars with niceness.” He fished a grenade out of a box, holding it out so they could see. “You win them with guts.” Phillips threw the grenade at the recruits, yelling, “Grenade!” and standing by to watch.

To the trio’s amazement, Steve jumped onto the grenade, willing to sacrifice himself to save others. The two doctors looked at the colonel, each hiding a smile. “It was a dummy grenade,” he informed. “All clear. Back in formation.”

“Is this a test?”

Colonel Phillips ignored the soldier, and grumbled, “He’s still skinny.” To his chagrin, the two doctors were proven right. Steve would become the new super soldier, even though he was far too weak.

                                      ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

a/n: this was a lot of fun to write! expect a part 2 come up in a couple days to a week! oh, and if you’d like me to create a playlist for this series, i’d love to! in the meantime, i have another special surprise~

© jades-tea-shop 2021. please do not modify, edit, copy or reproduce any of the works published.

[theculturedmarxist]

Published below is the introduction by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North to the forthcoming book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. It is available for pre-order at Mehring Books for delivery in late January 2021.

The volume is a comprehensive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a racialist falsification of the history of the American Revolution and Civil War. In addition to historical essays, it includes interviews from eminent historians of the United States, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Richard Carwardine, Victoria Bynum, and Clayborne Carson.

***

I should respectfully suggest that although the oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making catastrophic errors of political judgment.—Eugene Genovese [1]

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. … These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of actual facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin [2]

On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about “weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The “financialization” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times’ fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

Ms. Hannah-Jones had asserted:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade … [S]ome might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy. [4]

This claim—that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery—is freighted with enormous implications for American and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimizes the rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding document of this event—the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of man—merits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.

How, then, can one explain the explosive global impact of the American Revolution upon the thought and politics of its immediate contemporaries and of the generations that followed?

The philosopher Diderot—among the greatest of all Enlightenment thinkers—responded ecstatically to the American Revolution:

After centuries of general oppression, may the revolution which has just occurred across the seas, by offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, instruct those who govern men on the legitimate use of their authority! May these brave Americans, who would rather see their wives raped, their children murdered, their dwellings destroyed, their fields ravaged, their villages burned, and rather shed their blood and die than lose the slightest portion of their freedom, prevent the enormous accumulation and unequal distribution of wealth, luxury, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, and may they provide for the maintenance of their freedom and the survival of their government! [5] 

Voltaire, in February 1778, only months before his death, arranged a public meeting with Benjamin Franklin, the much-celebrated envoy of the American Revolution. The aged philosophe related in a letter that his embrace of Franklin was witnessed by twenty spectators who were moved to “tender tears.” [6]

Marx was correct when he wrote, in his 1867 preface to the first edition of Das Kapital that “the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class,” inspiring the uprisings that were to sweep away the feudal rubbish, accumulated over centuries, of the Ancien Régime. [7]

As the historian Peter Gay noted in his celebrated study of Enlightenment culture and politics, “The liberty that the Americans had won and were guarding was not merely an exhilarating performance that delighted European spectators and gave them grounds for optimism about man; it was also proving a realistic ideal worthy of imitation.” [8]

R.R. Palmer, among the most erudite of mid-twentieth century historians, defined the American Revolution as a critical moment in the evolution of Western Civilization, the beginning of a forty-year era of democratic revolutions. Palmer wrote:

[T]he American and the French Revolutions, the two chief actual revolutions of the period, with all due allowance for the great differences between them, nevertheless shared a great deal in common, and that what they shared was shared also at the same time by various people and movements in other countries, notably in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and by scattered individuals in places like Spain and Russia. [9] 

More recently, Jonathan Israel, the historian of Radical Enlightenment, argues that the American Revolution 

formed part of a wider transatlantic revolutionary sequence, a series of revolutions in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Haiti, Poland, Spain, Greece, and Spanish America. … The endeavors of the Founding Fathers and their followings abroad prove the deep interaction of the American Revolution and its principles with the other revolutions, substantiating the Revolution’s global role less as a directly intervening force than inspirational motor, the primary model, for universal change. [10] 

Marxists have never viewed either the American or French Revolutions through rose-tinted glasses. In examining world historical events, Friedrich Engels rejected simplistic pragmatic interpretations that explain and judge “everything according to the motives of the action,” which divides “men in their historical activity into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.” Personal motives, Engels insisted, are only of a “secondary significance.” The critical questions that historians must ask are: “What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?” [11]

Whatever the personal motives and individual limitations of those who led the struggle for independence, the revolution waged by the American colonies against the British Crown was rooted in objective socioeconomic processes associated with the rise of capitalism as a world system. Slavery had existed for several thousand years, but the specific form that it assumed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was bound up with the development and expansion of capitalism. As Marx explained:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of the era of capitalist accumulation. [12]

Marx and Engels insisted upon the historically progressive character of the American Revolution, an appraisal that was validated by the Civil War. Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1865 that it was in the American Revolution that “the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century...” [13]

Nothing in Ms. Hannah-Jones’ essay indicates that she has thought through, or is even aware of the implications, from the standpoint of world history, of the 1619 Project’s denunciation of the American Revolution. In fact, the 1619 Project was concocted without consulting the works of the preeminent historians of the Revolution and Civil War. This was not an oversight, but rather, the outcome of a deliberate decision by the New York Times to bar, to the greatest extent possible, the participation of “white” scholars in the development and writing of the essays. In an article titled “How the 1619 Project Came Together,” published on August 18, 2019, the Times informed its readers: “Almost every contributor in the magazine and special section—writers, photographers and artists—is black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis...” [14]

This “nonnegotiable” and racist insistence that the 1619 Project be produced exclusively by blacks was justified with the false claim that white historians had largely ignored the subject of American slavery. And on the rare occasions when white historians acknowledged slavery’s existence, they either downplayed its significance or lied about it. Therefore, only black writers could “tell our story truthfully.” The 1619 Project’s race-based narrative would place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” [15]

The 1619 Project was a falsification not only of history, but of historiography. It ignored the work of two generations of American historians, dating back to the 1950s. The authors and editors of the 1619 Project had consulted no serious scholarship on slavery, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, or Jim Crow segregation. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones’ study of American history extended beyond the reading of a single book, written in the early 1960s, by the late black nationalist writer, Lerone Bennett, Jr. Her “reframing” of American history, to be sent out to the schools as the foundation of a new curriculum, did not even bother with a bibliography.

Hannah-Jones and Silverstein argued that they were creating “a new narrative,” to replace the supposedly “white narrative” that had existed before. In one of her countless Twitter tirades, Hannah-Jones declared that “the 1619 Project is not a history.” It is, rather, “about who gets to control the national narrative, and, therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself.” In this remark, Hannah-Jones explicitly extols the separation of historical research from the effort to truthfully reconstruct the past. The purpose of history is declared to be nothing more than the creation of a serviceable narrative for the realization of one or another political agenda. The truth or untruth of the narrative is not a matter of concern.

Nationalist mythmaking has, for a long period, played a significant political role in promoting the interests of aggrieved middle-class strata that are striving to secure a more privileged place in the existing power structures. As Eric Hobsbawm laconically observed, “The socialists … who rarely used the word ‘nationalism’ without the prefix ‘petty-bourgeois,’ knew what they were talking about.” [16]

Despite the claims that Hannah-Jones was forging a new path for the study and understanding of American history, the 1619 Project’s insistence on a race-centered history of America, authored by African-American historians, revived the racial arguments promoted by black nationalists in the 1960s. For all the militant posturing, the underlying agenda, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, was to carve out special career niches for the benefit of a segment of the African-American middle class. In the academic world, this agenda advanced the demand that subject matter that pertained to the historical experience of the black population should be allocated exclusively to African Americans. Thus, in the ensuing fight for the distribution of privilege and status, leading historians who had made major contributions to the study of slavery were denounced for intruding, as whites, into a subject that could be understood and explained only by black historians. Peter Novick, in his book That Noble Dream, recalled the impact of black nationalist racism on the writing of American history:

Kenneth Stampp was told by militants that, as a white man, he had no right to write The Peculiar Institution. Herbert Gutman, presenting a paper to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was shouted down. A white colleague who was present (and had the same experience), reported that Gutman was “shattered.” Gutman pleaded to no avail that he was “extremely supportive of the black liberation movement—if people would just forget that I am white and hear what I am saying … [it] would lend support to the movement.” Among the most dramatic incidents of this sort was the treatment accorded Robert Starobin, a young leftist supporter of the Black Panthers, who delivered a paper on slavery at a Wayne State University conference in 1969, an incident which devastated Starobin at the time, and was rendered the more poignant by his suicide the following year. [17] 

Despite these attacks, white historians continued to write major studies on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rude attempts to introduce a racial qualification in judging a historian’s “right” to deal with slavery met with vigorous opposition. The historian Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), the author of such notable works as The Political Economy of Slavery and The World the Slaveholders Made, wrote: 

Every historian of the United States and especially the South cannot avoid making estimates of the black experience, for without them he cannot make estimates of anything else. When, therefore, I am asked, in the fashion of our inane times, what right I, as a white man, have to write about black people, I am forced to reply in four-letter words. [18]

This passage was written more than a half century ago. Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.” Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

“Whiteness” theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung, which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

History is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.” [24]

The assumption of objectivity is, she claims, a major problem. Scientists, Prescod-Weinstein complains, are “typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science … This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix. Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth century physics: General Relativity.” (Emphasis added) [25]

Prescod-Weinstein’s attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge is buttressed with a distortion of Einstein’s theory.

Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principal of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. (Emphasis added) [26]

In fact, general relativity’s statement about covariance posits a fundamental symmetry in the universe, so that the laws of nature are the same for all observers. Einstein’s great (though hardly “simple”) initial insight, studying Maxwell’s equations on electromagnetism involving the speed of light in a vacuum, was that these equations were true in all reference frames. The fact that two observers measure a third light particle in space as traveling at the same speed, even if they are in motion relative to each other, led Einstein to a profound theoretical redefinition of how matter exists in space and time. These theories were confirmed by experiment, a result that will not be refuted by changing the race or gender of those conducting the experiment.

Mass, space, time and other quantities turned out to be varying and relative, depending on one’s reference frame. But this variation is lawful, not subjective—let alone racially determined. It bears out the monist conception. There are no such things as distinct, “racially superior,” “black female,” or “white empiricist” statements or reference frames on physical reality. There is an ascertainable objective truth, genuinely independent of consciousness, about the material world.

Furthermore, “all observers,” regardless of their education and expertise, are not “equally competent and capable” of observing, let alone discovering, the universal laws that govern the universe. Physicists, whatever their personal identities, must be properly educated, and this education, hopefully, will not be marred by the type of ideological rubbish propagated by race and gender theorists.

There is, of course, an audience for the anti-scientific nonsense propounded by Prescod-Weinstein. Underlying much of contemporary racial and gender theorizing is frustration and anger over the allocation of positions within the academy. Prescod-Weinstein’s essay is a brief on behalf of all those who believe that their professional careers have been hindered by “white empiricism.” She attempts to cover over her falsification of science with broad and unsubstantiated claims that racism is ubiquitous among white physicists, who, she alleges, simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of research conducted by black female scientists.

It is possible that a very small number of physicists are racists. But that possibility does not lend legitimacy to her efforts to ascribe to racial identity an epistemological significance that affects the outcome of research. Along these lines, Prescod-Weinstein asserts that the claims to objective truth made by “white empiricism” rest on force. This is a variant of the postmodernist dogma that what is termed “objective truth” is nothing more than a manifestation of the power relations between conflicting social forces. She writes:

White empiricism is the practice of allowing social discourse to insert itself into empirical reasoning about physics, and it actively harms the development of comprehensive understandings of the natural world by precluding putting provincial European ideas about science—which have become dominant through colonial force—into conversation with ideas that are more strongly associated with “indigeneity,” whether it is African indigeneity or another. (Emphasis added) [27] 

The prevalence and legitimization of racialist theorizing is a manifestation of a deep intellectual, social, and cultural crisis of contemporary capitalist society. As in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race theory is acquiring an audience among disoriented sections of middle-class intellectuals. While most, if not all, of the academics who promote a racial agenda may sincerely believe that they are combating race-based prejudice, they are, nevertheless, propagating anti-scientific and irrationalist ideas which, whatever their personal intentions, serve reactionary ends.

The interaction of racialist ideology as it has developed over several decades in the academy and the political agenda of the Democratic Party is the motivating force behind the 1619 Project. Particularly under conditions of extreme social polarization, in which there is growing interest in and support for socialism, the Democratic Party—as a political instrument of the capitalist class—is anxious to shift the focus of political discussion away from issues that raise the specter of social inequality and class conflict. This is the function of a reinterpretation of history that places race at the center of its narrative.

The 1619 Project did not emerge overnight. For several years, corresponding to the growing role played by various forms of identity politics in the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, the Times has become fixated, to an extent that can be legitimately described as obsessive, on race. It often appears that the main purpose of the news coverage and commentary of the Times is to reveal the racial essence of any given event or issue.

A search of the archive of the New York Times shows that the term “white privilege” appeared in only four articles in 2010. In 2013, the term appeared in twenty-two articles. By 2015, the Times published fifty-two articles in which the term is referenced. In 2020, as of December 1, the Times had published 257 articles in which there is a reference to “white privilege.”

The word “whiteness” appeared in only fifteen Times articles in 2000. By 2018, the number of articles in which the word appeared had grown to 222. By December 1, 2020, “whiteness” was referenced in 280 articles.

The Times’ unrelenting focus on race during the past year, even in its obituary section, has been clearly related to the 2020 electoral strategy of the Democratic Party. The 1619 Project was conceived of as a critical element of this strategy. This was explicitly stated by the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, in a meeting on August 12, 2019 with the newspaper’s staff:

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. [28]

The New York Times’ effort to “teach” its readers “to think a little bit more” about race assumed the form of a falsification of American history, aimed at discrediting the revolutionary struggles that gave rise to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the ultimate destruction of slavery during the Civil War. This falsification could only contribute to the erosion of democratic consciousness, legitimize a racialized view of American history and society, and undermine the unity of the broad mass of Americans in their common struggle against conditions of social inequality and exploitation.

The racialist campaign of the New York Times has unfolded against the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging working-class communities, regardless of race and ethnicity, throughout the United States and the world. The global death toll has already surpassed 1.5 million. Within the United States, the number of COVID-19 deaths will surpass 300,000 before the end of the year. The pandemic has also brought economic devastation to millions of Americans. The unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels. Countless millions of people are without any source of income and depend upon food banks for their daily sustenance.

[glenngaylord]

ONE FOR THE RECORDS - My Review of MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM ★★★★1/2

The term “Race Records” describes a time from the 1920s to the 1940s in which black artists recorded songs for black audiences. Despite selling well and launching such stars as Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, most musicians fell victim to exploitation by white record company management. The late August Wilson wrote about this conflict in his 1982 play about a single day in a recording studio. Ma Rainey, the Mother Of The Blues, and her band come to Chicago in 1927 to lay down some tracks, facing off against the white powers that be and, more searingly, against each other.  Now brought to the screen by director George C. Wolfe (Angels In America) and screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at a swift 94 minutes, feels current, relevant, and powerful, and features two great performances from its stars, Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman.

Opening on a pair of young men racing through the woods, one might think they had stumbled upon a horror film, but their destination, one of Ma Rainey’s celebrated tent shows, immediately changes the tone and reveals Davis commanding the crowd as the titular character. We also notice her band made up of its leader and trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman) bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), and trumpeter Levee (Boseman), the latter who ogles Ma’s girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) at the edge of the stage. So much story gets crammed into this gorgeously shot sequence with its adoring crowds, lived-in, hard worn blues singing, newspaper clippings and photos from the era depicting the Great Migration, a transition to a big city venue complete with sexy dancing women, and the central conflict between a jealous singer and her rogue horn player.

The band, minus Levee, arrives first at the recording studio, greeted by Ma’s manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) and studio owner Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), both of whom plot how to deal with their star’s eminent demands. When Levee shows up, he has a new pair of shoes and a hotshot attitude hellbent on doing things his way.  The band wants to rehearse the title song, but Levee insists on reworking the arrangement, which Cutler makes clear won’t sit well with Ma.

Running an hour late, Ma defiantly exits her hotel lobby locking arms with Dussie Mae and her young nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) beside her, enduring the disapproving looks of the other guests.  The memorable way Ma slips on her hat and glares back at them tells you so much about this queer black woman who asserted herself at a time when such things could get you jailed or worse.

Her commanding behavior continues upon arrival at the studio with her demands for a fan, a bottle of Coke, and more. Although we remain in this setting for the remainder of the film, Wolfe and his cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, along with richly detailed costuming by Ann Roth, propulsive editing by Andrew Mondshein, and lived-in production design by Mark Ricker, prevent this drama from feeling stagebound.  With precise camera movement and interesting framing, it’s a film rich with memorable visuals. Witness the scene in which Cutler tells a story of racial violence with him framed left in the background and Levee framed right in the foreground as he listens. This film, along with Regina King’s terrific One Night In Miami, are two films in 2020 which beautifully demonstrate the art of making confined spaces feel cinematic.

Wilson gives us the temperamental diva but smartly delves deep into her motivations. Ma wisely knows her worth and comes on strong to protect her dignity and her art. Moments of her giving affection to Dussie Mae, gifting her stuttering nephew with a special role in the recording, and discussing her love of the Blues with Cutler in a magnificent scene, go a long way toward making us truly understand this brave pioneer.  Look no further than the way this great actor delivers her line, “This would be an empty world without the blues,” to convince you of her love of music.

If only she had a similar conversation with Levee, so much pain could have been avoided. But the film, while covering such issues as systemic racism, cultural appropriation, and music as a savior also explores ego and hubris, something both Ma and Levee have in abundance. With neither character willing to bow down to the other, conflict seems inevitable. Levee aspires to call his own shots and relies on Sturdyvant’s promise to record some of his songs. With bigger fish to fry, Levee has no time for being put in a corner by Ma and her band.

Levee, like Ma, however, has good reasons for much of his behavior, which comes out in a powerful monologue detailing a traumatic incident involving his father. It informs his entire nihilistic world view of not trusting God. Knowing that Boseman passed shortly after completing this film adds more pathos to line readings like, “Now, death?  Death got some style. Death will kick your ass and make you wish you never been born. That’s how bad death is. But you can rule over life. Life ain’t nothing.”  It’s a dazzling moment in a performance of such charisma and rage. It’s impossible not to mourn Boseman’s loss while simultaneously sitting in awe of his bottomless talent.

Everyone in this cast has a chance to shine, with Domingo and Turman expertly navigating the tense relationships. Potts lends some much-needed humor to the proceedings and Paige shines as a perhaps bisexual woman who hasn’t quite figured out her place. Shamos and Coyne both find interesting ways to appear blind to their privilege and subtle racism. A pat on the shoulder, an attempted kiss, or sticking some bills in a man’s shirt pocket go a long way towards showing their implied superiority over their artists.  

In adapting the play to the screen, Santiago-Hudson improves upon a stuck studio door by adding a rich pay-off.  Same goes for the final scene, which may borrow from Dreamgirls, but has a soul-crushing impact nonetheless. Additionally, Davis gives you so much history in a glance, by the way she sucks her teeth with disdain, or nonverbally says “fuck you” by the way she gulps down a soda. Incapable of giving a bad performance, Davis makes Ma one of her most legendary.

For many, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom may feel like a play, but Wolfe embraces it instead of falsely opening it up, and gives Wilson’s fantastic words the power and punch they deserve. A final word about one of the film’s producers. Never mind his two Oscar wins, if there’s one lasting legacy to Denzel Washington’s career, it will be his commitment to bringing August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to the screen, with this being the second after Fences.  Washington also deserves praise for giving us Viola Davis in peak power and for providing a vehicle for the late Chadwick Boseman’s greatest and, sadly, last performance.

[doctorstrangeaskblog]

One thing I’ve noticed about haters is that they basically dedicate a lot of time just to spread hate, making their target’s fans sad, they often want to impose their opinion, they often misinterpret the facts, make up facts or even exaggerate on interpretation of facts, and that’s not the problem, the problem is that they want to IMPOSE their thought on people, prevent them from having fun with what they like, as if the whole world had to hate what they hate, and this is wrong, because it attacks the other’s right to like something. People have the right to hate stuff, but they cannot harm anyone else’s right with their actions (and arguments), because that way we fall into intolerance, and not just racism, sexism or homophobia, but also social exclusion against personal tastes and opinions. They also sort of invade spaces that were supposed to be fun, such as tags on Tumblr and other social media with hateful, negative and even fake posts. A good example was people blaming Benedict for Doctor Strange whitewashing, while the character in question was the Ancient One and not Stephen per se, and then they start the “Doctor Strange should be Asian” movement, with so much superficiality, because we know we can’t just change the characters’ nationality and be like “see? We’re inclusive”, because that’s just so lame. People who suffer with exclusion feel every day the problem can’t be solved with simple replacement, but with the development of good, well built characters, good stories, with cultural inclusion and all the focus the character deserves, etc. Anyway, it’s not a simple matter, and suddenly haters were blaming the entire racism of the cinema on Benedict (?) while the guy has a big importance when it comes to inclusion, donations, charity, pacifism and a lot of relevant points I won’t list here because just google it.

Anyway, haters end up carrying misinformed people into hating people who actually are doing good things out there, with great projects and charity initiatives etc. (Keanu, Capaldi, Benedict, Hiddleston...). Also, whenever a hater comes to discuss about why the person or character you admire is the worst being in the world, they often get aggressive when you start pointing out logical arguments, they end up getting emotional and coming for the personal side and forcing some interpretations (example, a lot of doctors, actors, psychologists etc. study objects, animals and people so they can work and improve their profession, like, doctors study people with disabilities, from incapacitating ones to very light ones so they can understand the matter and work more efficiently, etc, I’ve seen people turn Benedict into a monster for observing people with autism, because he more than once had to play a role in which the character had autism. If we think about it and keep acting with such hateful attitude, we’ll end up agreeing with censorship, and autistic people wouldn’t either be characters in movies or we wouldn’t get actors working on such roles, meaning the characterization would be way more limited etc. anyway, it would be bad for culture and critique in general, there would be less representation, because even if autistic authors were called, it would make it harder in occasions where that wouldn’t be possible, movies would end up exploring that subject less, etc.), this was an example, but project this into wider areas of cinema and society in general, using your personal opinion to judge people and consider them the ultimate evil, to want to make the whole world hate that person and harming anyone who disagrees with the haters, that’s really bad!

I used some haters speech about Benedict as examples here because that’s what I’ve seen (and been attacked with) the most, because my blog is a Doctor Strange blog, anyway, but I’m talking about all the kind of haters. But understand a thing, being a hater is not the same as disliking something! Everyone has the right to dislike stuff, and people normally just stop there. People dislike something, people avoid that thing, if asked, they say they don’t like it and that’s it! People normally don’t spend hours making toxic posts about what they hate or spend hours arguing with strangers about how they should hate something! People tend to spend their time with things they like (or things they have to do), so if a hater comes to you and keeps babbling, just say you’re not interested or ignore or end the conversation, because normally these people aren’t well intentioned! Haters normally can’t be convinced, there will ALWAYS be a reason to justify their hating, while the truth probably is that they identified with a group and feel important there. Also, haters tend to spread high expectations about people, and that’s just toxic, we can’t judge someone’s entire life by something they said or did, people commit mistakes and that’s why LAW exists, if someone commits a crime, it’s up to the system to judge them, not people! When people assume that role and start writing stuff, a lot of fake news come out, and a lot of people actually believe it, and everything becomes a big hate toxic ball that hurts tons of people who had nothing to do with anything.

We do have to criticize actions we consider evil or wrong, as well as we have to think about  society and about cinema and racism etc. but we can do that with logical conversation, checking the facts in sources we can trust, we don’t have to become haters and hurt others to defend what we believe and trust every tabloid website in order to sustain our arguments, and I’m not even talking about extreme things such as racism and homophobia, I’m talking about something way more “silly” and superficial such as fandom hating, celebrity hating, ship hating etc.

To point out how it’s not normal to be a hater, let’s imagine a situation: there’s an actress or singer (etc) you like who said something really bad on TV, live, everyone saw and it’s impossible to claim it’s fake. You kind of used to like that person’s content before, but what she said really let you down, you don’t like her anymore and you’re sad. What’s your natural reaction? The reaction most people would have? Well, unfollow that person, stop reading their posts, stop listening to their music, stop recommending that person to friends, stop buying their stuff and little by little, that person would have a smaller and smaller space in your life, until you simply forget about that celebrity (they become irrelevant to you), you just avoid their stuff, you don’t even notice them anymore, you have other interests now and that’s it, things barely changed for you, you’re just indifferent. Now, what does a hater does? They create a page (or fill their social page) of stuff with hate against their target, they spend hours reading about how terrible that person is, they talk to that person’s fans to tell them they have to stop liking that celebrity, they invade all the tags of series, songs, movies (anything) the celebrity is in and spam it with negative things, such as “it’s a terrible singer” or “they should have  cast another actor”, anyway, anything really negative that would induce the fans to either quit having fun or start hating the celebrity as well, and that’s just soooo sad and toxic, because spamming a safe, fun environment like that can be considered imposing and even aggressive depending of the content they’re posting, that’s why social media websites often ban accounts that spam tags or other users.

Anyway, haters who spread fake news or aggressive thoughts or accusations often forget they actually could be sued by the celebrity/singer/actor/writer they’re hating on, that’s where personal opinion differs from being a little authoritarian offensive aggressive person. I can totally say “I don’t like that singer because they did X” or because “their song is bad” or “I don’t like their style”, however, we cannot accuse people of stuff they didn’t do, things they didn’t say or even write they thought something or said something they didn’t, because then we’re invading their space, and they have the legal argument to sue you. Normally celebrities don’t lose their time suing small silly haters on social media, however, if a hater writes something offensive about them, including false accusations, they totally CAN sue the hater, or report them so their account gets closed anyway. Haters often forget that some of their actions are criminal, cyber bullying is crime, false accusations and humiliations can be interpreted as injury, and that can be serious, specially if the person being offended is going a hard phase or suffers from psychiatric disorders, the consequences could be way worse for who’s suffering the stalking.

Something that’s very common is Benedict haters taking pics of him and making photoshops making fun of his appearance (they FIND) and making fun of his name. Benedict kind of seems to be okay with that during interviews, considering a lot of his fans also do that, but still, imagine people taking pics of you, making an offensive edit and spreading it in the tags about you or tags about the things you do and like, HOLY CRAP THAT WOULD BE HELL, I WOULD HATE THAT! I WOULD SUE! And not only the celebrity has to endure that as well as all the fans have to scroll past the sooo many hateful posts which are contributing to NOTHING at all. The only ones happy with all that are the little noisy hater communities, who keep spreading all the offensive things, being rude to people and satisfying their ego, because they often feel way superior to the people they hate (and the fans, and anyone else because they feel they have the right to impose their thoughts). Hate tags do exist, and fans normally won’t visit them because they don’t want to read hate, but even so, haters get expansive and spread all their hate to healthy tags as well, and that becomes toxic. That’s why hate posts and spams are really close in many Guidelines of social media, and such posts CAN BE REPORTED, because they kind of break the “behave online, respect people and don’t harm other people” guideline.

In conclusion, if you’re a victim of a hater(s), don’t quit what you like, just report and block the haters. If it turns into stalking, keep reporting, call the police if you feel threatened, cyber bullying is CRIME, and spamming people is considered a bad attitude on most social media. Preserve your well being! Don’t lose your time discussing with fanatic haters, they won’t listen to you. (If someone hates an actor/singer etc. because they are misinformed, they tend to be like “really? I didn’t know it was a lie. I’ll check it out” when you first tell them /or comment on how the information they’re sharing is fake. Misinformed people normally don’t want to impose their thought, normally they’re just confused or lost, and most of them won’t attack you).

If you’re a hater, please, stop that and if you feel you need, go search psychiatric help, because what you’re doing probably is hurting someone, and hate doesn’t make good at all, not to you, not to anyone. You’re free to have your personal group where you hate on stuff together, of course, but try to be careful to not hurt people or to be toxic to others. Some stuff you hate mean the world to other people, so respect their view just like they respect yours.

Just reminding this text isn’t about extreme things such as racism, homophobia, sexism etc. this text isn’t about that. (Wanting to kill someone because of their gender or color isn’t accepted in our society, it’s crime, and I’m not talking about this here.).

That’s it. Stay away from haters, they will try to make you feel bad for not listening to them , they will accuse you of being authoritarian for blocking them, but no, you don’t have to listen to them, you don’t have to spend you time listening to their hate, you have the right to preserve yourself and ignore them, that’s why the function “block and report” exist and you have the right to use them.

[religioused]

Blessed are the Shunned

by Gary Simpson

Luke 6:17-27 (Moffatt Bible) With them he came down the hill and stood on a level spot.  There was a great company of his disciples with him, and a large multitude of people from all Judaea, from Jerusalem, and from the cost of Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and to get cured of their diseases.  18Those who were annoyed with unclean spirits also were healed.  Indeed the whole of the crowd made efforts to touch him, for power issued from him and cured everybody.  Then, raising his eyes, he looked at his disciples and said: "Blessed are you poor! The Realm of God is yours. Blessed are you who hunger today! You shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep today! You shall laugh.

22 Blessed are you when men will hate you, when they will excommunicate you and denounce you and defame you as wicked, on account of the Son of man; rejoice on that day and leap for joy! Rich is your reward in heaven - for their fathers did the very same thing to the prophets.

24 But woe to you rich folk! You get all the comforts you will ever get. Woe to you have have your fill today! You will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh today! You will wail and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you!  That is just what their fathers did to the false prophets.  I tell you, my hearers, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.

This week, like last week, I am weaving some material related to Black History Month, into my sermon.  I believe that we are better off to reflect some about Black History and racism each week for the month than we are to be overwhelmed in one week and then never think about Black History for another year.

I ran across an illustration, containing a photograph of what looks like a number of protestors.  The photo appears on the Bixby Knolls Christian Church Facebook account.  The words on the photo are provided with a short statement indicating the congregation is an “Open and Affirming congregation, because of the Bible, not in spite of it.”

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR:  Moabites are bad.  They were not allowed to dwell among God’s people (Dt. 23). BUT THEN comes the story of “Ruth the Moabite,” which challenges the prejudice against Moabites.

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR:  People from Uz are evil (Jer. 25).  AND YET, in the story of Job, a man from Uz is “the most blameless man on earth.” THE BIBLE IS CLEAR:  No foreigners or eunuchs allowed (Dt 23).  BUT THEN comes the story of an African eunuch welcomed to the church (Acts 8).

THE BIBLE IS CLEAR:  God’s people hated Samaritans.  AND YET Jesus tells a story that shows that not all Samaritans were bad.

THE STORY MAY BEGIN with prejudice, discrimination and animosity, but the Spirit moves God’s people toward openness, welcome, inclusion, acceptance, and affirmation.[1]

My prayer is that the Spirit will move me toward openness, welcome, inclusion, acceptance, and affirmation.  And openness, welcome, inclusion, acceptance, and affirmation are the heart of Family Day and are the heart of Black History Month.

The context of Biblical stories is important. Chapter 6 of Luke's Gospel includes Jesus' demonstrating how the Sabbath can be celebrated, the choosing of the apostles, and the beatitudes. The reading for this week contains beatitudes and woes.

While I am not a Biblical linguist, I disagree with how some people translate the beattitudes. Young's Literal Translation uses the word happy instead of blessed. Young's Literal Translation, "Happy are those hungering now," might be literal, but it does not pass the test of common sense to me. Those of us who have had to go to bed the odd time hungry do not really find that to be a happy situation. If you are happy when you are hungry, I am not sure I want you cooking anything for me. There is a serious contradiction in the thought that those who cry are happy. I know many people who've experienced church discipline. Deeply hurt and bitter better describes their emotions than the word happy. The New Living Translation is much better. "God blesses you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied."

The word translated blessed means "possessing the favor of God." To be blessed ". . . is equivalent to having God's kingdom within one's heart." [2]  Those who are poor, hungry, sad, or have been excommunicated have the "favor of God."  The Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter has a special blessing for those who are poor, hungry, discouraged, and excommunicated.

The first people Jesus says receive God's special favor are the poor - those who are poor and hungry.  Another group Jesus states get a special favor from God are those who are despised by the religious.  I think Jesus knew how deeply the hearts of those who have faced rejection from their communities of faith ache.  He spent more time talking about those who have been rejected by their spiritual families than the poor and the hungry combined.  The contributors to the Christian Community Bible comment, "God shows his mercy especially by his generosity towards the poor and the despised.  He also entrusts his Gospel to them and makes them the first to participate in his work in the world."[3]

The Greek has meaning that speaks to the experience of marginalized people in society and in some churches.  The word translated wicked means a "malignant," corrupting evil”.[4]  Recent concerns about refugees and immigrants to the United States and Canada have been stated in such a way as to make people living in the United States and Canada feel fear, because these immigrants might be thieves, drug dealers, rapists, murderers and terrorists.  As a result, immigrants and refugees are viewed as a malignant, corrupting evil on society.  Immigrants and refugees with brown or black skin or with Muslim sounding names become suspect in the minds of some people.

Jesus says that those who are seen in society as being like a malignant sinful cancer, those who are believed to be corrupting society because of their faith in God receive a special blessing.  To God's indigenous children, to God’s Asian children, to God’s black and brown skinned children, the message is very strong, very clear.  While people may defame you, accuse you of wickedness, hate you, and excommunicate you, God's favor, God's blessing is there for you.

The level of fear of outsiders is so high that I have been attacked a number of times for daring to point out either the evil of Islamophobia, an evil that seems to help some people justify entering a mosque to kill worshippers, or for pointing out the positive things Muslims are doing for our community.  Recently, I had people angry with me for indicating a mosque in Edmonton opened its doors for homeless people during an intensely cold spell.

A message is in this text for churches and church institutions that reject people for the color of the skin, for their gender or for their sexual orientation. The very people you reject are receiving a special blessing, because they have God's favor!

The Christian Community Bible notes that the contribution of the poor ". . . is most necessary to the building of the Kingdom," and "when the Church forgets this, she" does what Jesus criticized.[5]  I will go beyond what the Christian Community Bible commentators say.  Those who are discriminated against by society are the very people who are necessary to build the church.  When the church of Jesus Christ excludes people, the church is guilty of the same mistake, the same sin, as the religious people of Jesus' time.  We have a serious problem when the church rejects people the people God chooses to be among the first to take part in God’s work in this world.

The text contains blessings and woes. The word woe sounds very strong, almost angry. These are words of a caring warning. The woes are not curses. The woes are expressions of grief.[6]  A woe is a "cry of pain that results from misfortune."[7]  God, the Son, is in grief over the potential plight of some people who are wealthy, happy, and highly respected in religious circles.  Jesus' message to those who are rich, who have lives filled with laughter, and who are spoken highly of in religious circles is, "Watch out. In time, you may find yourself crying in pain, because of your misfortunes."

Many people are praising church denominations, church-run schools and colleges, church institutions, and church leaders who reject or marginalize God's children due either to their color or their identity. To them, Jesus is saying, "I am mourning for you. People are praising you just like they praised the false prophets of the past."

Because there is a tendency for groups to feel a bit superior when a different group is taken to task, I invite everybody to pick up a mirror, to look in the mirror and to reflect for a moment.  The best place to end this sermon is with the last verse I read today.  I tell you, my hearers, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  God is asking us to love the bigots - somehow - to love those who discriminate and exclude people. And God is saying, “For God’s sake love yourself.”

Notes

[1] “Bixby Knolls Christian Church” (Long Beach, California)  Facebook.  29 January 2019, 16 Feb 2019.  <https://www.facebook.com/bixbyknollschurch/>. [2] Spiros Zodhiates.  The Complete Word Study Dictionary:  New Testament.  (Chattanooga, TN:  AMB Pub., 1992), 937. [3] Christian Community Bible:  Catholic Pastoral Edition.  (Quezon City, Philippines:  Claretian Pub., 1999), NT, 139. [4] Christian Community Bible, NT, 139. [5] Zodhiates, 1198. [6]Christian Community Bible, NT, 139. [7] Earl D. Radmacher, et. al., eds.  The Nelson Study Bible:  New King James Version.  (Nashville:  Thomas Nelson Pub., 1997), 1702.

[isoboto]

literally a whole ass racist a whole ass 4? 5? blog posts defending ur moronic conservative beliefs

1) sorry, which post are you referring to specifically? which part of the post(s) do you disagree at? i put a disclaimer on everything that’s it’s my opinion. you can agree or disagree. so far, seems like you focus on the hating the general beliefs and unable to point out specifics that you disagree at.

2) also, excuse me, “moron”/”moronic” is an offensive word. it’s up there with the “retard” category. as an SJW, you should know better.

3) i’m actually not a conservative. centre-libertarian.

4) Have you heard of freedom of thoughts and beliefs? the ability for one to have their own beliefs system and should not be infringed? or does that only apply to people that readily agree with you?

[teacupballerina]

I'm not following how you think that that post might be a troll. Unfortunately, they've deactivated, so they can't respond, but is not what they true? I'll be honest, I can't follow everything you've said there, but I want to.

I thought it might be a troll because the post is so steeped in misinformation and identity politics that I almost can’t take it seriously. However regardless of whether or not OP genuinely believed their post, I don’t doubt that many of the 180k+ notes were supportive. I want to help other people see the truth, so I’ll elaborate really quick.

First, “Islam” is not a race, so comparing Muslims and white people is a false equivalence akin to apples and oranges. There are white muslims, and people of arab, middle eastern, and north african descent are not all muslim. Already the post’s premise has fallen apart, but let’s continue.

Second, thinking that 9/11 is the reason for “Islamophobia” or racism is ignorant regardless of political affiliation. American media has been demonizing muslims for decades to generate support for Israel, who then uses America as an attack dog to fight proxy wars and clear the way for more settlements (”invade their countries and kill millions of civilians”). To put it in the simplest terms possible, 9/11 was part of this.

Got some solid stuff on how mass shootings are politicized in favor of a specific narrative:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBego4zKk08https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IULSD8VwXEs (first two minutes at LEAST)

“Kill random POC” is probably the most ridiculous part of the post (and what made me think it might be a troll) because it implies that evil rayciss wypipo are going out and killing innocent black people for no reason, en masse. Which is wrong. Very, very, very wrong. Backwards, even, according to the statistics.http://www.aim.org/special-report/black-criminals-white-victims-and-white-guilt/http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-know-about-black-black-crime-aaron-bandlerhttps://www.amren.com/archives/reports/the-color-of-crime-2016-revised-edition/

Finally, we DO call violent groups of white people terrorists. Antifa is one of the most well-known terrorist groups in the US and it’s almost all white people. :^)

[felixandpjareathing]

Hello

Nobody asked but I thought I'd tell some of my thoughts on the situation that's going on right now. (First, I haven't really been watching Felix's livestreams and I've been kind of lacking on keeping up with everything, so please fill me in if you think I have any false information.) Someone left a note to my latest Felix!post and asked how could I like Felix after him saying the n-word and I just wanted to clear up that I did not know what was going on. I'm 100% against racism. [I took the photos from weheartit at the time (btw if you know those are yours, please message me! I'm sorry, I usually use my own screenshots on edits but I was too busy, please forgive)] All people do mistakes and stupid shit. Felix is a person and does too. I do support him, but not everything he says or does. Specially things like these. Felix has apologized on his "jokes" and things he has said before and did now too. But of course it still does not make what he said okay, and nothing will. What I'm trying to say is that what he did wasn't intentional, but that doesn't make it okay. He took the responsibility of what he said and knows it's wrong. He fucked up. But I'm sure he'll change his actions, slow down with the jokes and be more careful from now on. He probably should've done that before but atleast he realizes it now.

// Felix's video: https://youtu.be/cLdxuaxaQwc

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/trump-knew-about-email-hack-cohen-expected-to-tell-congress/

Trump knew about email hack, Cohen expected to tell Congress

Image copyright EPA

US President Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen is expected to claim Mr Trump knew beforehand about a leak of hacked Democratic emails.

In congressional testimony, Cohen will also say Mr Trump directed plans for a Moscow skyscraper even during his White House campaign.

According to prepared testimony, Cohen will brand Mr Trump a “racist”, a “conman” and a “cheat”.

Mr Trump hit back: “He is lying in order to reduce his prison time.”

The US president took time out from preparing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Wednesday to lash out in a tweet at his former fixer.

Cohen, 52, will start a three-year prison term in May for the campaign finance violation of paying hush money to one of Mr Trump’s alleged mistresses, tax evasion and lying to Congress.

Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked’s lawyer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019

End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

What will Cohen say about the email leak?

In prepared comments for his public testimony to the House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Cohen is expected to say he was in Mr Trump’s office in July 2016 when Roger Stone, a longtime political adviser, called the then-Republican presidential candidate.

US media have published a copy of his opening statement online.

Cohen will say Mr Stone told Mr Trump he had been speaking to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who told him there would be a leak of emails within a couple of days that would politically embarrass Hillary Clinton’s White House campaign.

Mr Trump has denied having prior knowledge of Wikileaks’ disclosure of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails during the election.

The messages caused a damaging rift among liberals by exposing Democratic officials’ favouritism towards Mrs Clinton over her challenger for the party’s White House nomination, Bernie Sanders.

Mr Stone, a self-proclaimed political dirty trickster, is currently facing charges of lying to Congress about his communications with Wikileaks and witness tampering.

The Trump-Russia saga in 250 words

Michael Cohen: Trump’s personal lawyer

What will Cohen say about Moscow project?

He will say Mr Trump repeatedly inquired about plans for a Trump Tower Moscow while stating publicly that he had no business dealings in Russia.

The former attorney will say: “He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars.”

However, Cohen told Congress in 2017 that attempts to build a Trump skyscraper in Moscow had stopped by January 2016.

He has since admitted negotiations actually continued until June 2016 in the midst of the election campaign, though the real estate project ultimately did not go ahead.

Cohen is expected to apologise on Wednesday for his earlier false statements to Congress, which he will claim were “reviewed and edited” by Mr Trump’s lawyers.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionHow the jailing of Cohen affects Trump

What else will he say about Russia?

Cohen is also expected to testify that, contrary to Mr Trump’s repeated claims, he had advance knowledge of a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan between his campaign aides and a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Mrs Clinton.

The June 2016 meeting has been investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is winding up a 21-month justice department inquiry into whether the Trump campaign colluded with an alleged Kremlin plot to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

Cohen is expected to relate an incident when Mr Trump’s son, Donald Jr, walked behind his father’s desk and told him in a low voice: “The meeting is all set.”

Mr Trump, Cohen is set to testify, replied: “Ok good, let me know.”

Cohen will also testify that he has no direct evidence that Mr Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.

“I do not,” his prepared testimony says. “I want to be clear. But I have my suspicions.”

More on Trump-Russia:

What about the racism allegations?

Cohen is expected to tell lawmakers that Mr Trump is a racist.

According to his prepared testimony, Cohen will say: “He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole.’

“This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States.

“While we were once driving through a struggling neighbourhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way.

“And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. And yet I continued to work for him.”

What else will Cohen say?

He is expected to tell lawmakers that he wrote letters on behalf of Mr Trump threatening the Republican candidate’s high school, colleges and the College Board not to release his grades to reporters.

Cohen reportedly plans to provide evidence of reimbursements he received from the president for hush money Cohen has admitted paying to a porn star who says she had an affair with Mr Trump.

Cohen is expected to show the committee a copy of a $35,000 (£26,000) cheque that Mr Trump signed in August 2017.

He will say it was one in a series to reimburse him for the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels.

“Lying to the First Lady is one of my biggest regrets,” Cohen is expected to say. “She is a kind, good person. I respect her greatly – and she did not deserve that.”

Trump says hush money payments were legal

[bluewatsons]

Tom Mills, The Last Days of the BBC?, Jacobin (December 2019)

Streams of reports point out the bias at work in BBC’s politics coverage. As it edges ever closer to Britain’s Conservative Party this election campaign, it’s clear the public broadcaster needs radical reform if it is to be saved.

As Britain faces a crucial general election, its second in two years, one of its most venerable institutions has been busy demolishing what’s left of its reputation. The BBC has long been admired internationally for its well-resourced drama and documentary programs, and respected for the professionalism of its journalism. But its hollowing out by a series of neoliberal governments looks to have finally caught up with the once august institution. Whatever the merits of the BBC’s educational and cultural output — a large proportion of which anyway come from private companies — its political journalism, which is at the heart of its public service remit, has failed in the most important test it faces.

For those of us familiar with the politics of the BBC, it has all been fairly predictable, even if still a little depressing, and sometimes even shocking, to watch. Let’s start with the prime minister. As a number of critics have noted, the public persona of “Boris” was partly honed on the BBC in a series of appearances on its tired satirical show, Have I Got News for You, and the institution has since proved for the most part either unable or unwilling to puncture the performance and hold the politician to account.

Like his friend Donald Trump, Johnson has displayed remarkable arrogance and dishonesty. But while the US president is a crass bully, Johnson disguises his narcissism and ambition with a practiced self-depreciation and convivial manner that allows him to be both evasive and domineering with journalists. A revealing moment came last year shortly after his resignation as foreign secretary. Upon returning to the backbenches, the Old Etonian quickly secured the highest private income of any MP: among his various side hustles was a return to the Telegraph as a weekly columnist, for which the Conservative-supporting newspaper paid him almost £23,000 a month (which he failed to disclose to the appropriate authorities).

In one of his first articles in that post, Johnson described Muslim women who wear the burka as “look[ing] like letter boxes.” The calculated racism was widely condemned, including by the Muslim Council of Britain and by the then-chair of the Conservative Muslim Forum, Mohammed Amin. At the height of the short-lived controversy, the media gathered outside Johnson’s home. When the future prime minister finally emerged, he approached them with no comment, but armed with plenty of boisterous charm and a tray full of mugs of tea. It was enough to disarm the group of reporters who laughed along with Boris. The BBC later posted a clip of the encounter on its YouTube channel.

Johnson, of course, emerged politically unscathed, as he has from every outrage. When he was elected Conservative leader earlier this year, Mohammed Amin resigned in protest, charging that Johnson was “morally unfit” to be prime minister and “does not care whether what he is saying is true or false.”

Part of the reason these traits have helped rather than hindered Johnson’s rise is that his vices are shared by institutions at the heart of British politics. Not just the Conservative Party itself — which has conducted what is likely the most dishonest campaign in British political history — but also the country’s utterly unscrupulous right-wing press, which has polluted and corrupted British public life for decades, but which BBC’s managers and senior journalists still treat as if they were vital components of democratic life.

Many journalists do find Johnson objectionable, and one reporter who stands out in particular is Peter Oborne, a conservative critic of political “spin” in the Blair era who resigned from the Telegraph over its dropping of an investigation into a major advertiser, HSBC. Early on in the election campaign, Oborne raised concerns that the British media as a whole were not holding Johnson or his ministers to account, and were too often relaying unsubstantiated claims from anonymous government sources. Not only did Oborne point in particular to the role of the BBC’s most senior political reporter, Laura Kuenssberg, he also revealed that senior BBC executives had told him they thought it would be wrong to expose lies told by Johnson, since it might undermine trust in politics. The BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards responded with a statement insisting that its journalists would challenge all “lies, disinformation, or untruths,” but stressing that the BBC would never label a prime minister a liar. This, he said, was a judgment for the public to make.

In fact, one of the first significant challenges to the prime minister’s dishonesty on the BBC was to come from the public rather than its journalists. As part of a series of broadcast events, the BBC hosted a special edition of its weekly TV show Question Time, in which party leaders were in turn questioned by a selected studio audience. It was an unusually engaging program, during which all the leaders faced sustained and challenging questions, suggesting perhaps the potential of a more participatory public media. During the discussion, one member of the audience asked the prime minister: “How important is it for someone in your position of power to always tell the truth?” Sections of the audience burst into laughter and applauded, while Johnson twice replied that he thought it was “absolutely vital.”

When the clip of the exchange later appeared on BBC news bulletins, the audience’s reaction had been cut out, with the footage skipping to Johnson’s second reply made after the laughter had subsided. When this was brought to the attention of the BBC’s editor of live political programs, Rob Burley, on social media, he dismissed the criticism, noting simply that the original program had been broadcast on the BBC. The following day, after facing sustained criticism, the BBC put out a statement acknowledging that the audience laughter had indeed been edited out, and conceding that this had been “a mistake on our part.”

Following that unfortunate error, the BBC had a lot to prove in its next showcase piece of political television: The Andrew Neil Interviews, a series of broadcasts in which each of the major party leaders faces a grueling half-an-hour, one-to-one interrogation with the BBC’s toughest political journalist.

Andrew Neil comes from the hard right of British politics, having made his name as editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. He has fronted a number of prestigious BBC political programs over the years and, in addition to receiving over £200,000 a year from the corporation, also chairs the company that owns the Spectator, an influential conservative magazine formerly edited by Boris Johnson. Naturally, Neil is particularly hostile to the Left, but he has a reputation as a formidable interviewer for any politician to face.

The first to go head-to-head with Neil was the Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, who faced fierce questioning over her party’s policies on the EU and her record on health policy. Sturgeon is an adept politician, but it was generally agreed that it was a difficult and likely damaging half-hour. Next was Jeremy Corbyn, and ahead of the interview being aired, rumors circulated that it was, as the journalistic cliché has it, a “car crash.” Though there was arguably some hyperbole from the right on this, it was indeed an uncomfortable half an hour for Labour. Neil was typically belligerent, focusing on the issue of antisemitism, which was once again dominating the news agenda following an intervention by Britain’s chief rabbi, as well as fiscal policy, which is said to be core to Neil’s own right-wing politics. “Is there no limit to what can go on the Corbyn credit card?” he asked derisively.

The wider media response focused on Corbyn’s supposed refusal to apologize for antisemitism (which he has done many times) and on Labour’s plans to abolish a £250 tax break for married couples. On the latter, the BBC joined the right-wing press in running a plainly misleading headline: “Corbyn admits lower earners face tax hike under Labour,” which was later amended to read: “Corbyn concedes lower earners could pay more tax.” The BBC’s Rob Burley once again took to Twitter after the interview was aired to note “almost a clean sweep of the front pages in the morning.” Still in a celebratory mood the next day, he reported that three million people had watched the program.

The Neil interview was damaging for Labour, but it was probably unavoidable, and quite proper given that all leaders would face the same level of scrutiny. Or so it seemed. A few days after it was broadcast, the BBC announced the dates of scheduled interviews with the Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson and the Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage. But there was no mention of the prime minister. In a follow-up tweet, the BBC press team stated that discussions with Johnson’s team were “ongoing” and that the BBC hadn’t “yet been able to fix a date.”

Labour supporters were incredulous, and it was subsequently reported that the party had been told by the BBC that interviews with all the other party leaders had been agreed (this is denied by Rob Burley). It soon became clear that the Conservatives had no intention of Johnson being interrogated by Andrew Neil, and instead offered to put the prime minister forward for The Andrew Marr Show, widely perceived to be a softer option. The BBC declined, publicly calling on Johnson to sit down with Neil, as the other leaders had, or had agreed to do. Meanwhile, BBC Politics put out a video of the prime minister eating a scone and commenting in his usual jocular manner about the technicalities of applying jam and cream.

Remarkably, the BBC’s neglect of its public service obligations did not end there. Following a terrorist attack in London — which the Conservatives shamelessly sought to politicize contrary to the explicit wishes of one of the victims’ family — it agreed to have Johnson on The Andrew Marr Show after all. It cited the “public interest” to justify the U-turn while emphasizing that it would “continue to urge Boris Johnson to take part in the prime-time Andrew Neil interview as other leaders have done.” There were then regular reports that negotiations over the Neil interview were ongoing, but Neil himself subsequently confirmed that this was another lie. There were no negotiations.

Facing an unprecedented deluge of criticism, the BBC’s Fran Unsworth wrote a piece for the Guardian affirming the BBC’s commitment to political impartiality. She was, she said, “as disappointed as our audiences that the prime minister, unlike all his fellow leaders, has not yet confirmed a date,” explaining that the “logistics of pinning down party leaders is complex.”

The complacency of the apologia is quite something. The BBC’s failure to secure an interview with the prime minister ahead of broadcasting politically damaging interviews with opposition leaders is a major political scandal, not a slightly unfortunate mishap. But what is more, the whole sorry episode is revealing of a systematic failing at the BBC. Here is a state broadcaster subjecting the opposition to relentless and damaging political interrogation, while seeming unable or unwilling to do the same when it comes to the government.

Conspiracy!

In her Guardian piece, Fran Unsworth argues that the BBC’s critics are seizing “on a couple of editorial mistakes” as evidence of “an editorial agenda that favors the Conservative Party,” while ignoring hundreds of hours of impartial political journalism. She then goes a step further, dismissing all accusations of bias as “conspiracy theory”:

We are a large organization that employs thousands of independently minded journalists. Our editors employ their judgments on their own programs for their own audiences. These aren’t the ideal conditions for a conspiracy.

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s former political editor who now presents BBC Radio 4’s flagship political program, Today, shared Unsworth’s article on Twitter, remarking that “the conspiracy theories are absurd if you give them more than a moment’s thought.”

Where to start with this? As I recently wrote for the Guardian — which I assume Unsworth will have read — no one serious is suggesting that presenters and reporters take instructions from the government, or that there has been an edict from the BBC hierarchy instructing staff to undermine the Labour Party. But like any organization, the BBC has a working culture based around policies, conventions, and incentives that influences how the people who work there behave, and who is appointed or promoted to key roles. This is how all institutions work. We needn’t detain ourselves explaining basic sociology to Unsworth and Robinson, however, since neither seems to see any issue with the claim that the BBC has generally upheld “due impartiality” across its programming, something which itself could be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” on these same terms. How could a large organization employing thousands of independently minded journalists possibly ensure conformity to a shared set of editorial values and policies?

We all say silly things to try and win arguments, so let’s put the obtuse remarks about conspiracy to one side and proceed on the assumption that the BBC, for all its complexity (everything involving human beings is complex), possesses a certain structure, culture, and set of policies which — for better or worse — give rise to certain regular patterns of reporting. In this, it is just like any other media organization, every one of which seems mysteriously to exhibit distinct reporting styles and political orientations despite being staffed with independently minded journalists.

Is the BBC Impartial?

The day before Unsworth’s Guardian article was published, the Media Reform Coalition — an organization of which I am vice chair — published an analysis of the BBC’s election reporting undertaken by Justin Schlosberg, of Birkbeck College, University of London. It noted a number of areas where the BBC has failed in its impartiality obligations during this election campaign.

Schlosberg’s report found that, in terms of access to broadcast media, the two main parties are broadly even, but as Unsworth notes, “BBC impartiality does not rely on a stopwatch.” The prominence given to different policy issues and stories tells a different story. Brexit and the economy, the two policy issues pushed by the Tories are the most prevalent in television news, ahead of health and the environment, which are key issues for Labour. This is despite the environment and the economy being of equal concern to voters, and health being considered much more important, according to polling.

Schlosberg also notes the strikingly different responses of television news to very similar stories about the Conservatives and Labour. One very revealing example is the response to the manifestos. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a respected think tank given enormous prominence in the British media, produced a critical response to both parties’ manifestos, yet its response to Labour’s was covered fifteen times in the two days following its manifesto launch, compared to just once in the two days following the launch of the Tory manifesto. There were similar imbalances in television coverage of allegations of racism in both parties. Schlosberg writes:

During the first two weeks of the campaign, there were almost identical pairs of stories involving two Conservative candidates and two Labour candidates who were suspended or forced to resign over alleged antisemitic comments made on social media. We examined a sample of online coverage that included all national newspapers and broadcasters, as well as all scheduled TV bulletins and news programs on BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky. Surprisingly, there were a virtually equal number of headlines focused on the Labour candidates versus the Conservatives (fourteen and fifteen, respectively). But on television, the Labour candidates were three times more likely to be mentioned. And when the chief rabbi intervened by accusing Labour of harboring rampant antisemitism, it was a lead story across television news, far eclipsing a statement made on the same day by the Muslim Council of Britain, which was a scathing attack on Islamophobia in the Tory Party.

None of these findings are surprising. Previous work by Cardiff University academics noted that the BBC gave greater prominence to policy issues pushed by the Conservative Party than Labour in the 2015 election — which was before the leftward shift of the party under Corbyn — and earlier work led by Schlosberg has identified serious failings in the BBC’s reporting on Labour since then.

During the so-called coup against Corbyn by the Parliamentary Labour Party following the 2016 EU referendum, the BBC gave critics of the Labour leader twice as much airtime as supporters — an imbalance not evident on ITV News (the BBC’s main commercial rival) — and the issues mobilized by Corbyn’s critics were given much greater prominence. That research also noted the pejorative language BBC reporters used to describe Corbyn, his team, and his supporters. Research on the BBC’s reporting of Labour antisemitism, meanwhile, not only revealed an overwhelming source of imbalance, but also found that the number of inaccurate and misleading statements in BBC TV News was as high as in the Sun newspaper, and far exceeded the number on ITV or Sky, the BBC’s two main commercial rival.

All this research should be considered in the context of a broader body of scholarly work on the BBC’s reporting, the findings of which are fairly consistent. Like other large media organizations, its routine news reporting is strongly shaped by governments and corporate interests, while its political output is overwhelmingly shaped by political elites, along with an associated clique of newspaper columnists, consultants, and pundits from think tanks (many with opaque funding). Its economics and business reporting has reflected a narrow range of elite opinion that has favored the Conservative Party and the interests they represent, and there is, moreover, some good evidence that in the years leading up to this election it has drifted further right.

I rather tire of having to review the academic evidence on the BBC’s reporting, because it is always ignored by the BBC’s senior journalists and executives, who seem blithely indifferent to criticism, no matter how reasoned and considered, unless it comes from the right. Rather than offering serious engagement with evidence, they prefer to issue banal and sentimental statements about the BBC’s values and public purpose.

There are a number of reasons the BBC feels so secure in ignoring academic evidence. One is that ultimately it is much more concerned about criticisms that come from powerful people and institutions than from academics and left-wing activists. Another reason though is that it can point to surveys that suggest continued public trust in its reporting.

It would be complacent, however, to imagine that such data adequately captures people’s experiences or perspectives on an organization like the BBC. I was reminded of this when an interviewer from Ipsos MORI knocked on my door one afternoon in May. As a sociologist I was rather pleased to be on the receiving end of some research, and so happily agreed to answer some questions. I was then somewhat taken aback when it gradually became clear that this was a survey to assess public attitudes to the BBC. My responses to the set questions in the survey — cited in the BBC’s latest annual report — made me appear highly supportive and trusting of the BBC. Suffice to say, this doesn’t fully reflect my views on the organization.

I think it is likely there has been a shift that has been underway in public attitudes to the BBC, even before this election. Britain’s communications regulator Ofcom recently published a review of the BBC’s news and current affairs programming, which included a report detailing workshops and in-depth interviews conducted by the accountancy firm PwC. Participants raised concerns over the impartiality of BBC’s reporting on several areas including Brexit, Corbyn, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Black British and British Muslim groups both expressed concerns about the lack of diversity at the BBC and its representation of ethnic minorities, while the latter group said they thought BBC journalism was risk averse because of its dependence on the government for funding. According to PwC, others also said they thought the BBC was less critical compared with other outlets for the same reason. One working-class respondent remarked: “I trust them to give the facts, but I’m less trusting that they are not biased toward the government.”

A Quasi-Independence

What’s interesting is the extent to which these views — in contrast to much of our public debates around the BBC — tally with the scholarly research. Tom Burns, the sociologist who conducted the first major study of the BBC, described it as a quasi-governmental organization that “has had to speak in ways acceptable, ultimately, to the political establishment.” This is still the case today. The license fee — which is the BBC’s major source of funding — is often said to offer a unique form of political independence, the argument being that the BBC’s revenue comes not from general taxation, as with other state broadcasters, but directly from its audience, whom it seeks to represent. The license fee system does have the advantage that all the BBC’s domestic audience is in economic terms equally important, in contrast to market-based funding systems where there are systemic pressures to target particular demographics. But it certainly does not afford the political independence that the BBC’s uncritical supporters like to imagine.

What matters is not who pays, but who controls the money; and it is governments — not audiences — who have set the rate of the license fee. This has meant that the BBC’s funding has always been highly politicized. Most recently, the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne — who, almost in a parody of the incestuousness of Britain’s elite, was subsequently appointed editor of London’s only daily newspaper — negotiated a secret deal with the BBC’s director general, Lord Hall, severely cutting the corporation’s funding. This prompted a former chair, Christopher Bland, to warn that the BBC was drawing “closer to becoming an arm of government.” Sir Christopher was right to be concerned. But in reality, the BBC has always been close to being an arm of government, perpetually kept in a grey area somewhere between genuine independence and direct political control.

In recent decades, even the highly circumscribed independence that the BBC enjoyed in its Golden Age has been steadily eroded. The changes the BBC underwent in the wake of Thatcherism are a major focus of my book, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, and so I won’t recount them in much detail here, but the net effect was, in essence, a form of elite capture. Over the course of several decades, the BBC was radically restructured along neoliberal lines, with its news journalism brought much more under centralized editorial control and its program-making integrated into the market and its reporting restructured around the new economic orthodoxies.

The effect was a serious undermining of the organization’s public service ethos, and the creation of a highly affluent and politicized strata of executives and senior editors, who today define the tone and content of the BBC’s output.

The last charter renewal process, which took the broadcaster into its ninetieth year, only worsened matters. It introduced a change to the BBC’s governance whereby government appointees are now involved in day-to-day management.

More significant though, and largely ignored in liberal commentary, was the return to the radical neoliberal managerialism of the 1990s. The BBC’s current director general, Tony Hall, a key player in that early period of reform, promised the Conservatives a “competition revolution” at the BBC, opening up all BBC program-making to private sector competition, with a few exceptions, notably news.

The vision shared by the Conservative government and the BBC’s managerial elite is of a BBC that acts as a quasi-official news service, a source of revenue and resources for private profit, as well as a prestigious British brand and distribution system that can give UK-based media companies a competitive edge in the international market. The result has been a broadcaster that remains publicly owned, and which on paper remains committed to a distinct set of public service values, but which, as we have seen in this election, is plainly not fit for purpose.

Is Another BBC Possible?

Given the BBC’s record, many on the Left now hope for the abolition of the BBC. I find this to be completely understandable under the circumstances, though I consider it to be a disastrously shortsighted ambition. The problems with the BBC are severe and they are deep-seated, but they could be addressed in a way that preserves some of the positive elements of the public service tradition, allowing a modern public digital media to be built around the existing public infrastructure and resources.

Last year, a working group of the Media Reform Coalition I chaired developed a set of proposals for the radical reform of the BBC, arguing that it should become a modern, democratized public platform and network, fully representative of its audiences and completely independent of government and the market. A radically reformed BBC would have to be barely recognizable compared with its current incarnation, and we should be in no doubt that any such change would be strongly resisted by the BBC executive class.

My sense is that ultimately they much prefer the current situation where the BBC’s public reputation can be managed — or rather mismanaged — through private negotiations in the corridors of power, where the threats to its independence are at least manageable and familiar, than the prospect of radical change and democratic accountability. Perhaps the greater barrier to effective reform, though, is that so many people on the Left will now regard the BBC’s journalism as having been so obsequious in its treatment of an unscrupulous ruling party, and so negligent of its public service duties, that they see little much of worth to defend or to salvage.

[ghaw2007]

The Deadly Deception

The Deadly Deception

One in this series of science documentaries. This 1993 edition of NOVA on PBS examines the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which 400 black men in Alabama were deceptively experimented upon over the course of several decades. Several elderly men who were involved in the real-life case attend a production of "Miss Evers' Boys," a play by David Feldshuh inspired by the story. George Strait journeys to Alabama to research the case, and Dr. Vanessa Gamble explains that the men were mostly poor sharecroppers, the descendants of slaves, and had little access to healthcare. Historian Allan Brandt describes the heightened fear of syphilis in the 1920s and '30s and how it was treated, somewhat effectively, with various poisons. In 1930, a pilot treatment project in Alabama discovered that 35% of the black residents were infected, but the ongoing Depression and high cost of the medicines proved insurmountable and the scientists soon left. Researcher Taliaferro Clark then suggested that study would be cheaper than treatment and that the Alabama residents would make the perfect subjects, given their poverty and "rather low intelligence." Wondering if blacks and whites were biologically dissimilar and would be differently affected by the disease, he appealed to the Tuskegee Institute for help and, assuming that his intentions were legitimate, they agreed in autumn 1932 to allow their hospital and labs to be used.

There were no regulations for medical test subjects at the time, and "undesirables" such as prisoners were often used as guinea pigs. As Herman Shaw and Charles Pollard explain, the Alabama men were promised free medicine to cure their "bad blood," the euphemistic term for various diseases. However, they were not actually treated at all but instead studied, undergoing painful procedures including spinal taps in order to give the scientists information about syphilis, particularly its symptomless latency period, which can last for years. They all received letters falsely promising "very special treatment," and most did not question the doctors' authority. Program director Raymond Vonderlehr proposed extending the test far beyond the original six months, and Nurse Eunice Rivers was hired as a liaison between the men and the scientists, summoning them for their annual round-ups at which they were studied and given placebos. Some of the men were given small "life insurance" bribes to fund their eventual burials, though they were first studied in autopsy. Remarkably, the study and its findings were published in major journals, and yet no one spoke up about its clear immorality. Vonderlehr mounted a national syphilis treatment program in the late '30s but deliberately excluded the Tuskegee men, and Shaw recalls being tossed out of a doctor's office for "abrogating the study."

The Tuskegee men were also exempted from the WWII draft, and although a breakthrough came when penicillin was found to be highly effective in treating various diseases, this too was denied to the test subjects. A legal code requiring patients' informed consent was established after the Nuremberg trials of 1947 revealed the Nazis' excessive human experiments, though John Heller, who replaced Vonderlehr, protested that it did not apply to the Tuskegee men, arguing that the Nazis' crimes were not comparable. Attorney Fred Gray comments on the irony of the rise of the civil rights movement right alongside such a widely-ignored example of racism, and the Central for Disease Control took over the experiments by the mid-'60s. Epidemiologist Bill Jenkins explains how he attempted to blow the whistle by sending the results to the media, but admits that he was naïve in assuming that it would have an impact. In San Francisco, Peter Buxton spoke out when he heard of a doctor being punished for treating an infected man, and was then severely "lambasted" by Dr. John Cutler for compromising the experiment at a conference in Atlanta. An all-white panel of CDC doctors decided that the experiments should continue, feeling that it was too late to help the men with medicine anyway, though Gene Stollerman objected to the "paternalistic" decision to keep the subjects in the dark.

Buxton sent his findings to the Associated Press in 1972, and the experiment was finally halted in October. Pollard met with Gray and Gray filed suit on behalf of the men, though the eventual settlement awarded the men less than $38,000 each. Brandt points out that the experiments were conducted sloppily as well as immorally and that the "negative results" only proved established data and nothing new, though Cutler continues to defend the study. Gamble explains the long-term effects of the deception on blacks' mistrust of white doctors, and Professor Jay Katz pursues law cases of uninformed patient consent. Shaw, who still lives in Alabama, celebrates his ninetieth birthday, but acknowledges that many of the other men in the study were less lucky than he and suffered the effects, including premature death, of their untreated illness.

http://musicbanter.com/song-writing-lyrics-poetry/79770-ghaw2007s-lyrics-collection.html http://futureproducers.com/forums/production-techniques/songwriting-and-lyricism/ghaw2007s-lyrics-523656 http://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/topic/55799-ghaw2007s-lyrics http://allthelyrics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=159439 http://musesongwriters.com/forums/index.php?/topic/65827-ghaw2007s-lyrics http://writerscafe.org/ghaw/writing http://justusboys.com/forum/threads/435561-ghaw2007-s-Lyrics http://gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=536605 http://songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=11560.0

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: February 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of February 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Golf claps all round for Jussie Smollett not just for staging an attack and thinking that he would get away with it, something that was always going to be difficult considering the high-profile nature of the assault that he staged, but also guaranteeing that until the end of time every single time there’s a racially-aggravated assault by members of the far right we will hear the mantra of “It’s fake because Jussie Smollett faked his attack” by members of the alt-right who are relieved that, for once, they don’t have to delete dozens of tweets calling something that reflects badly upon them as a false flag attack, as evidenced by their rabid demands for a pound of flesh because this one time they cried wolf there just so happened to be a wolf nearby - with Dinesh D’Souza going so far as to try and cast doubt on attacks that took place in the 1950s and 60s

It would take a real piece of work to outright lie about policy that you’re screwing up on a daily basis, so to the surprise of nobody Theresa May did exactly that when she claimed that the Britait process was being slowed down by those who don’t agree with her deal - even though she was the one who cancelled the vote when it was initially scheduled before Christmas in an obvious attempt to slow down the process and scare everyone into voting for her deal because she’d run down the clock by several weeks

How brave of Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes, Gavin Shuker and Ann Coffey to all resign from the Labour party to form their own party - with blackjack, and hookers! - and to announce as their first order of business that they would not be calling by-elections for the seats they won under a labour manifesto, which certainly doesn't make them look like a bunch of cowards looking to line their pockets at their constituents’ expense while not allowing said constituents the opportunity to say which party they want representing them...but then again The Independent Group aren’t a political party, they’re a limited company (which just so happens to get around Electoral Commission rules on announcing their funding) whose website is based in that well-known tax bolthole that is Panama

And then Angela Smith further discredited The Independent Group PLC when, during a televised debate about racism, she described BAME people as being “black or a funny tinge” - and in doing so she exposed that The Independent Group Ltd not only don’t have any disciplinary procedure of any kind, but there is also no way for anyone to register a complaint

And then we have Joan Ryan jumping ship, somehow neglecting to mention losing a No Confidence vote last year (which saw her throw one hell of a temper tantrum on her Twitter feed when the result came in) or the time she was caught on camera manufacturing accusations of antisemitic abuse, and soon after she joined she attempted to deny there is a video of her discussing a £1m bribe from Shai Masoud - this video, in fact - soon followed by being reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office for attempting to access the data of Labour after she had resigned, which she gave plentiful evidence of her involvement by sending a mass e-mail to Enfield North members after she had resigned

This was soon followed by Anna Soubry demonstrating her devotion to The Independent Group Ltd’s new politics by calling nine years of Tory austerity “marvelous” before complaining that she was no longer allowed to campaign on behalf of Tory council candidates, while Heidi Allen spoke in favour of Universal Credit and stated she would support Theresa May if she faced another No Confidence vote in parliament, because apparently supporting not just the policies but the leader of the party you just left is “new politics” now

According to Candace Owens there was absolutely nothing wrong with Hitler until he began to interfere in other countries as (and these are direct quotes) "it’s important to retain your country’s identity”, that he “just wanted to make Germany great” and “The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalise” - which I am sure would have come to some degree of comfort to the countless Jews residing within Germany who found themselves the target for persecution and extermination long before Hitler considered invading Poland

After loudly pondering to anyone with press credentials about how to combat the knife crime problem it finally occurred to Sajid Javid what needs to be done - he needed to cut funding for knife crime programmes, soon followed by not even bothering to show up in Commons when questions about knife crime were on the agenda, choosing to send a lackey to dodge any and all questions in his stead

In yet another case of Arron Banks needing to lie because his bullshit had been exposed by real life intervening, when his comment that Britait wouldn’t affect Toyota investing in Sunderland was undermined by Toyota moving manufacture of the new X-Trail out of Sunderland and relocating it to Japan, the best he could come up with was the market for diesel cars in Britain isn't that great - which I’m sure will come of great comfort to the people of Sunderland who will be out of work because of this move

It appears that Liam Neeson doesn't have a particular set of skills when it comes to promoting his films as nobody’s talking about his latest film and instead talking about how he said that he wanted to murder a black man after somebody close to him was raped by a black man - not the black man responsible, mind you, but any black man he could find while roaming the streets.  Even his attempt at recovering fell a little bit flat when he suggested that people need to talk about feelings of rage-fuelled vengeance, but the issue is nobody was talking about this because Neeson himself talked about it in the worst way possible to begin with

Somehow the message didn't reach Chris Williamson as, in an effort to criticise the weaponisation of antisemitism to manufacture a weapon to bludgeon Labour with, he did so in such a way that the main takeaway was he said Labour were “too apologetic” when faced with accusations of antisemitism and guaranteed that, as a result, that blunt weapon would be brought out to bludgeon Labour with yet again

It really does say something that Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrea Leadsom, David Davis, Arlene Foster, Sajid Javid, Kate Hoey, Peter Bone et al were all up in arms at Donald Tusk’s comments about there being a special place in hell for those backing the Leave campaign without ever formulating a plan, each of them finding their own way to whine about how insulted they were (as if we hadn’t had years of various Leave backers comparing the EU to either the Soviet Union or Third Reich) yet not a single one of them seemed to think it worth suggesting that they had a plan let alone suggest what that plan was

This wasn’t the only time Kate Hoey mouthed off and looked an idiot because of it either, as she also tooks to Twitter to dust off that old chestnut of how nobody voted for any member of the EU, specifically targeting Guy Verhofstadt - only for  Verhofstadt to point out that hundreds of thousands did, and it says a lot that those so adamant about leaving the EU don’t know a bloody thing about it

Another month and another example of the BBC using Question Time as a platform not for informed debate but an echo chamber for the far right, with them bussing in and spouter of all manner of bigoted and sectarian bile Billy Mitchell once again tucked away in the audience masquerading as a member of the public, which is at least the fourth time this has been noticed, and they went so far as to allow Mitchell to chat with at least one member of the panel before the taping began which is in direct contravention of the BBC’s own rules - and even edited out the SNP panelist’s response.  Of course Mitchell isn’t the only case of this, as the Bolton chapter of the English Defence League were invited en masse to one taping while last year Jonathan Jennings was given similar treatment to Mitchell in spite the minor inconvenience of him being given a prison sentence for posting antisemitic and Islamophobic comments online and threatening to kill Jeremy Corbyn - which means it's worth mentioning that the Question Time audience being picked by Alison Fuller Pedley who, prior to deleting her Facebook account, shared material from Britain First among many other far right groups

Barking mad idiot Nadine Dorries managed to top her usual level of batshittery by tweeting a video of journalist Ash Sarkar while stating it was Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen - and when this mistake was pointed out to her she didn’t apologise but say she got confused because the two had similar accents, which doesn’t at all sound like she thinks all Asian women look alike - which is clearly the case, given she has not apologised to Sarkar or Shaheen, but did apologise to the BBC

Beating the deadest of dead horses was Chris Quinn as he became the latest person determined to die on the hill where Jack Thompson and Leland Yee died on when he decided that the one thing guaranteed to stop school shootings was for Pennsylvania to introduce a 10% Sin Tax on violent video games - yet at no point in his proposal did he ever suggest that maybe these things called guns might have something to do with America’s school shooting problem

Because saying his Chinese wife was Japanese wasn’t enough proof that Jeremy ...Hunt is a hapless failure as Foreign Secretary, on a visit to Slovenia he described the country as a “Soviet vassal state” - in other words he publicly stated he can’t tell which country was part of the Soviet Union and which country was part of Yugoslavia while in a country that was part of Yugoslavia

Another month another humiliation for Chris Grayling - but this time he really excelled himself by being banned from the port of Calais by French port authorities who’d had enough of his impotent posturing and were happy to slap him with what was, in effect, a diplomatic ASBO

Convicted rapist Bill Cosby is clearly still coming to terms with that guilty verdict he was slapped judging by the statement he released where Cosby howls about how he’s a political prisoner, going so far as to compare himself to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, talking conspiratorial gibberish about the judge who passed sentence and the DA who brought charges, and finishing up by saying he has no remorse, because saying you have no remorse for what you were locked up for is always a good look...

Sneering fuckwit Toby Young had one takeaway from the schoolchildren going on strike to protest against climate change, and that takeaway was that if they were going to strike they should do it at the weekend - which makes it sound an awful lot like sneering fuckwit Toby Young doesn’t understand the concept of a strike - although the sneering fuckwit was hardly alone, not when Theresa May dismissed them as “disruptive” and (irony of ironies) “Wasting time” while Daily Mail hatchet-wielder and person who has seen Michael Gove naked Sarah Vine sneered they were taking “an excellent opportunity to avoid doing any work”, soon followed by Andrea Leadsom harrumphing about “truancy” while James Cleverley, Dan Hodges and Christopher Hope all made remarkably similar comments about “bunking off”

Not only is Tom Bower such a joke that his expose of Jeremy Corbyn reveals the shocking revelation of him eating baked beans *dramatic chord* but he then went on Good Morning Britain and referred to Michael Segalov as “a self-hating Jew” which, the last time I checked, sounds uncannily like he discriminated against a Jewish person on the basis of their religion while being broadcast live on national television...which none of the GMB hosts did anything about and I don’t see any of The Independent Group Ltd making so much as a peep about it either

Filibustering enthusiast Christopher Chope once again demonstrated his levels of respect and tolerance for women by deciding to block a vote on laws protecting at risk children from female genital mutilation, a move which drew condemnation from both side of the House of Commons, which as per usual he attempted to deflect by saying he won’t let any Private Members Bill pass without debate - apart from the dozens he let through without debate

At first it appeared that Mark Lewis was continuing his sleazy approach to lawyerly matters of randomly tweeting people to say he was representing them and demanding they post their personal information online - only for it to soon transpire that, no, Lewis was actually acting on behalf of Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman as they decided that encouraging their Twitter followers to dogpile onto anyone who dares disagree with them is no longer enough, now it's time to make an example of them by dragging them to court while crying to their friends in the press about how they are the ones being bullied and harassed online

According to Jacob Rees Mogg it was...let me double check my notes...right, according to Jacob Rees Mogg there was nothing wrong with the concentration camps used by the British during the Boer War because the number of people who died in them was consistent with the mortality rate in Glasgow at the time.  He overlooks the part about the numbers of women and children dying in those camps being much higher than the numbers of women and children in Glasgow, but why quibble about that when his main argument was justifying the use of concentration camps?

In a fit of desperation Brandon Lewis decided to harrumph loudly about Sally Keeble liking a dick pic on Twitter - which only led to people noticing that he didn't have problems when it was Tory MP Andrew Griffiths sent dick pics in their hundreds to his constituents, and that him being restored to the party in order to have Theresa May narrowly win a vote of No Confidence from her own party could only have been signed off by...Brandon Lewis

It appears that a very different version of history was taught at the school Daniel Kawczynski attended compared to that of everyone else educated at the time, judging by his tweet suggesting that Britain did not receive a penny after WWII as there was no Marshall Plan for us...other than the $4bn that the UK received from the Marshall Plan, but that’s not important right now

In a remarkable lack of self-awareness Suzanne Evans bitterly complained about the roaming charges on her phone contract increasing, seemingly unaware that the reason those roaming charges used to be much lower was because of EU legislation - yes, since you asked, that would be the exact same EU that Suzanne Evans was a prominent advocate of leaving because apparently they offer no benefit to the British whatsoever...

Proving that the apple doesn't fall far from the orange-hued tree was Donald Trump Jnr tweeting a photo as he tried to suggest every single woman in Congress (including Nancy Pelosi) was a traitor for not wearing a US flag pin - only to have it pointed out to him that neither was he...

Somebody at THQ Nordic thought it was a brilliant idea to announce an AMA not on Reddit nor Twitter but on 8chan, because the one place any company should be hosting an AMA is on 4chan’s even nastier little brother than has been delisted from Google due to being used to share images of child pornography

Showing they hadn’t read Downsize This! at any point in the last 23 years those fine folks at Activision announced record profits while also laying off 8% of their staff, a reported 800 people, because their record profits somehow didn’t translate into record bonuses so somebody had to pay for it

As it's been a while since Youtube did something harebrained that made things far more complicated for content creators with their latest genius idea is to demonetise channels because of comments that other people made on the video, with them going so far as to demonetise videos of creators who were moderating their comments section on the presumption that dodgy comments might be coming sometime soon

It seems that Ja Rule is having difficulty accepting that the Fyre Festival was a blatant scam arranged by an obvious scammer, because even after two documentaries picked apart just how non-legitimate the entire endeavour was he’s saying he hasn’t given up on the idea, which maybe isn’t the smartest position to take when there’s numerous lawsuits and criminal investigations that happen to have his name on them

Because it appears Bethesda can’t go a month without Fallout 76 being the decrepit goose that keeps shitting on their shoes, they decided to make sure they were responsible for needing yet another change of loafers by banning a player who had amassed over 900 hours in the game for having too much ammunition.  Because when your playerbase has nosedived since launch, the one thing you really want to do is ban one of the players whose put a lot of time into the game for reasons that make no sense because anyone playing the game for 900 hours would pick up a hell of a lot of ammo

Don’t worry, folks, it appears that Julia Hartley Brewer has solved all the post-Britait issues in one tweet when she said it took just twenty seconds for her to get across the border between France and Switzerland so everything will be alright.  In other words, Julia Hartley Brewer either forgot about or merely omitted that Switzerland is part of the Schengen agreement, she was travelling between France and Switzerland rather than the UK and any EU country, and that the UK currently being part of the EU is the reason her border check took so little time and that wouldn’t be the case if she was traveling on, say, a Latvian passport

Hentai enthusiast thewisemankey, otherwise known as tedious shitposter Gregory Prytyka Jr. (and no doubt several other Disqus pseudonyms) was so gracious enough to boost my analytics in an effort to prove how he was definitely not thin-skinned and incapable of taking responsibility when his shitposting backfires...which demonstrated he’s thin-skinned and unable to take responsibility when his shitposting backfires, and considering said shitposting was last December the fact he’s still bawling about it in February really isn’t normal behaviour, is it?

And, of course, getting remarkably triggered by Spike Lee suggesting people vote with love not hate in the 2020 election is Donald Trump and his charming habit of being more concerned for the wellbeing of one of his supporters than the journalist his supporter happened to be assaulting at the time, who also believes he can steal a march on China by demanding American businesses adopt non-existent 6G technology now

[isoboto]

why do you sound like someone who's about to tell me wearing a mask makes me a sheep? (different anon here)

hey, you wear masks if you want. i don’t care if you want to wear masks. your body your choice, eh?