#The American Experience

[tomorrowusa]

"Nazi Town, USA" is a 2024 feature in PBS's American Experience series. It looks into the surprising degree of influence which Nazis had in the United States in the 1930s. There were even Nazi summer camps for kids.

It can be viewed (probably for a limited amount of time) at the series link above. Here's a preview...

To explore the topic more deeply, check out Rachel Maddow's excellent 8-episode podcast Ultra.

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra | an MSNBC original podcast

Ultra has somewhat more emphasis on Nazi attempts to penetrate government.

Those espousing Nazi-friendly views in the 1930s did not disappear when the US entered World War II and fascism became very unfashionable. Those half-hidden feelings hibernated and occasionally emerged from time to time to poison discourse and endanger democracy. There are obvious echos of that movement today.

[charmwasjess]

small town rural life is so insane, the dichotomy between "truly wholesome" and "genuinely batshit" in two real life examples:

My town has a legitimate spiderman: a random dude who dresses up in a spiderman costume, hangs out downtown, and helps people. Nobody knows who he is, he's not on anybody's payroll, he just literally hangs out and tries to do random acts of kindness, find lost dogs, point lost people to the best taco spot...

recently, the main bar in my town had an incident where a guy sat on his friend's lap, causing the loaded, un-safety'd gun in his pocket to go off, shooting directly into said friend's dick and balls (everyone lived but oh my god) Now, my friends and I can go to the bar and choose whether or not we'd like to sit in the spot where that one guy got his dick shot off.

I feel like these two stories perfectly encapsulate both sides of this experience.

[xtruss]

The Bombshell Political Report So Shocking A U.S. President Tried To Pretend It Didn't Exist! LBJ Tried To Torpedo The Official Kerner Commission Record. Instead It Became A Bestseller

— May 10, 2024 | Jelani Cobb

President Lyndon Baines Johnson listens during a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room, March 26, 1968. LBJ Presidential Library.

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson created the [Kerner] commission in July 1967 it was tasked with understanding what had happened up to that moment. Nearly two dozen uprisings or, in the antiseptic language of the report, “civil disorders,” had occurred between 1964 and 1967, with the largest and most destructive taking place in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles over the course of five days in August 1965.

Kerner has endured not simply for its prescience but also for the breadth of its analysis of the moment when it was conceived. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which became more commonly known as the Kerner Commission—a reference to then-governor of Illinois Otto Kerner, who served as its chairman—was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11365 on July 28, 1967. The order was issued as entire stretches of the city of Detroit lay smoldering.

On July 23, 1967, a police raid on an after-hours bar in Detroit sparked an explosion in which residents hurled rocks and bottles at police and culminated in a nearly week-long uprising marked by arson, looting, and forty-three deaths. Just eleven days earlier, the city of Newark had detonated following the assault on John Smith, a Black cab driver, by white police officers. The reactions in the community were immediate and incendiary. In the chaos of social retribution that ensued, twenty-six people were killed and hundreds more injured, while the city sustained an estimated ten million dollars in damage.

Newark and Detroit were just the most notable of more than two dozen American cities that ignited in revolts in that summer of 1967. It appeared as though a valve of the city reservoir had been opened. An apocalyptic fury, the response to decades of discriminatory policy and centuries of racial exploitation, suddenly spewed out in American cities.

Johnson charged the eleven-member Kerner panel with answering three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” These were Johnson’s precise words. Addressing these questions, however, would mean answering dozens of subsidiary questions the roots of which lay deeply tangled in American history and public policy.

The members themselves represented a cross section, albeit not a representative one, of domestic interests. Chaired by Kerner, the second-term Democratic governor of Illinois, the commission included two of his fellow Democratic elected officials, Congressman James Corman, the fourth-term representative of California’s twenty-second district, and freshman senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma. They were joined by three Republicans, New York City mayor John V. Lindsay, Rep. William M. McCulloch of Ohio’s fourth district, and Edward Brooke, the freshman Massachusetts lawmaker and the sole African American serving in the United States Senate at the time.

By current standards the commission was overwhelmingly white (nine of the eleven members) and male (ten of eleven). Katherine Peden, the commerce secretary of Kentucky, was the sole female commission member. Roy Wilkins, the political moderate and executive director of the NAACP, joined Brooke as the only Black people at the table. In addition, I. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers of America, represented labor in the proceedings, and Herbert Jenkins, the police chief of Atlanta, Georgia, represented law enforcement. Charles Thornton, the CEO of Litton Industries, spoke for the manufacturing sector.

President Lyndon Johnson (seated, center) shakes hands with members of the Kerner Commission. July 29, 1967. White House Photo Office Collection, LBJ Presidential Library.

What differentiated the Kerner Commission from the outset was the historical scope of the investigations: the members were not seeking to understand a singular incident of disorder, but the phenomenon of rioting itself. Despite the heterogeneity of interests, if not the bipartisan backgrounds, of the members, the concluding report spoke with a strikingly unified voice about the problems that the various committee participants sought to understand. And that voice was an unabashedly integrationist one. Their most immediate and salient observation was that, even though the police had been involved in these most volatile incidents, American cities were not simply facing a crisis of policing. Rather, police were simply the spear’s tip of much broader systemic and institutional failures.

[T]he Kerner Report noted that the “problem” had been, first and foremost, inaccurately diagnosed. The so-called Negro problem was, in fact, a white problem. Or, as the report noted in one of the oft-quoted sections of the summary, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

In a best-case scenario, Kerner would have become a kind of guidebook for the War on Poverty policies then being enacted by the Johnson administration. In more practical terms, the commission recommended new community-based guidelines covering how police needed to interact with citizens of “the ghetto,” as Black communities were dubiously classified in the report. It devoted an entire chapter to the ways in which justice should be administered in the course of riots; it suggested a national network of neighborhood task forces, local institutions that could bypass the bureaucracy and red tape of city administration and head off problems before they erupted into crises. It suggested “neighborhood service centers” to connect residents of these communities with job placement and other forms of assistance and proposed expanded municipal employment as a means of diminishing chronically high unemployment in these areas.

Perceptively, its members suggested that the monochromatically white news media that reported on these uprisings was also a symptom of the bigger problem. That social upheaval that had been created by overwhelmingly white institutions and maintained by said white institutions was then investigated and reported upon by yet another overwhelmingly white institution constituted, in their assessment, a racial conflict of interest. They closed with a raft of specific recommendations for housing, employment, welfare, and education. Kerner was possibly a victim of its own meticulousness. The report brims with suggestions. One reason why its proposals were not realized might be that it simply made too many of them.

The commission could not have known when it released its findings in March 1968 that it was issuing a preface, not a postscript. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following month, and more than one hundred American cities exploded into just the type of violence that the Kerner Commission had sought to understand if not prevent. [T]he Report was fated, from the moment it reached shelves, to operate more crucially as a forecast than a review. “Our Nation,” it warned in 1968, “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

— Excerpted From "Introduction" By Jelani Cobb, From The Essential Kerner Commission Report, Edited By Jelani Cobb, With Matthew Guariglia.

[methotrex8]

Me reading about how goldfish crackers potentially have exposure to cancer-causing chemicals while simultaneously shoving goldfish into my mouth: huh. Interesting

[acrowseye]

i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

[steelsartcorner]

nobody took my pen away so the hades-crossover-fever continues. i’m ill

others: the dark urge (OC); minthara (bg3), karlach (bg3), shadowheart (bg3), gale (bg3), halsin (bg3), lae'zel (bg3), astarion (bg3), kotallo (horizon)

[thatnerdio]

Guys, I need to know something (if you're american)

[bet-on-me-13]

Clark grows up on Amity

So! When Clark's shup landed on the Kent Farm, it unfortunately started a bit of a Fire. It was pretty bad, and by the time it was put out most of their Crops had been burned up.

Using their Savings, the money from the remaining Crops, and some goodwill from their neighbors, the Kent's managed to get enough money together to move to a new Town to start over. It also helped that in a new town nobody would question them suddenly having a Baby despite Martha not being Pregnant.

They Move to a small farm on the Edge of Amity Park.

Clark Kent grows up in Amity Park, goes to Casper High, and befriends Danny, Sam, and Tucker as his childhood friends.

When his powers come in, they are the first ones to know. When Danny has his Accident, Clark is there to help him control his new abilities. When Clark has to move away for his new Job in Metropolis, they are all there to wish him good luck and throw him a Going Away Party.

As Superman, Clark is more open to joining a Team since he used to be on Team Phantom.

When Justice League Dark is formed, Superman is a Suprise Member, since he actually had a lot of experience with the Supernatural.

When Kon is born, he turns to his best friends for help and advice on his to deal with the situation. Danny had Ellie in very similar circumstances, so he is more open to the idea of adopting Kon since he has personal experience with Clones made by Madmen.

Thoughts?

[tragicc]

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[ultrataintedviolence]

me when i get creepy men in my DMs:

[pumpkins-and-penguins]

best part of fantasy high has to be that brennan lee mulligan famously

a. did not attend high school

b. is not from a suburb

[mueritos]

happy pride to all queer children of immigrants

patreon

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Funny things about being in jewish culture™

You absolutely cannot expect jews to (1) stay on a topic topic or (2) be concise. The notion of "having a topic" to talk about is merely a suggestion (apparently, this includes me)

Jewish time means you're transported into a universe where time doesn't exist. Every shul has to have a portal to a different plane of oblivion - it's as important as having the scrolls in the ark

You might only know someone by their hebrew name and consider if they will look at you weird if you call them by it outside of shul

There is a latent jewish mother hiding in everyone and that mother will arise like a sleeper agent if someone has deduced that you aren't eating enough during any potential communal meals

Why so many puns

Why are all of you as sarcastic as me...

The one person who's actually fluent in hebrew flexing their superior language comprehension (diaspora)

Celebrating having a minyan

Singing prayers to popular children's songs

It's surprisingly normal to ask about someone's bris if it comes up

There are seven people in the building, yet I thought there were twenty

[miiilowo]

truly fucked that eye contact is seen as a threat or challenge to most animals but people have decided that it's polite and you HAVE to do it. Get real

edit: turning off reblogs because too many people are saying its only like this in western culture. i am aware of this and its irritating me. youll never guess where im from buddy

[acrowseye]

part 2 of my experiment: what english-speaking country are you from, what region and what do you call the following images? if you don't know what the first image is please try to guess i'd love to see it