#it could be the american State's inability to create a national identity that matches the historical characteristics of its territory

[wachi-delectrico]

Spent all of yesterday studying on the problem of Nationality and the creation of a National Identity and ngl I haven't stopped thinking and trying to figure out how yankee's modern idea of nationality came to be, specifically thinking of white American people who say they're of a nationality based on "ancestry" with no personal cultural ties to it

[noisemakerreviews]

‘Joker’ Paints An Uncomfortable Picture of Today’s World

Never did I think I’d see the day where I could parallel even the darkest of Batman themes to the world we live in. 

Todd Phillips’ latest blockbuster Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix as the clown prince of crime we all know and love. Phillips’ other films include the Hangover trilogy, but this new film doesn’t have a happy go-lucky trio trying to remember their drunken stupors and find their fourth mate. 

Joker makes the audience laugh, but in a nervous, sort of uncomfortable way. 

At the Venice Film Festival, Joker received an eight-minute standing ovation. 

Reviews poured in following the Italian premiere and they backed up the hype. Mark Hughes of Forbes said, “The fact is, everyone is going to be stunned by what Phoenix accomplishes, because it’s what many thought impossible — a portrayal that matches and potentially exceeds that of The Dark Knight’s Clown Prince of Crime.”

The film opens with Phoenix touching up his makeup in front of a vanity. He hooks his fingers in the corners of his mouth and pulls them upward in a smile, downwards in a frown, then back up again; a single, mascara-stained tears roll down his cheek, and laughter ensues. 

Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, an eccentric man with a funny laugh and a horrifying past, searching for his identity. The film encapsulates Arthur’s journey with himself and his downward spiral into becoming the Joker.   

There are some prevalent themes within Joker that are worth talking about; the most prevalent being mental health and its effect on people in today’s society. There are several scenes in which Phoenix is sitting in front of his therapist, and she eventually jerks the needle off the record and informs him that the city has cut the clinic’s funding and their meetings must come to an end. The therapist goes on to claim that the higher-ups, “don’t give a shit,” about people like him or her. 

According to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health, in 2016, 9.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the U.S. had a serious mental illness; 2.8 million of those adults were below the poverty line. Insurance companies have also been known to skimp when it comes to mental health cases, which makes it that much harder for people relating to Arthur to seek help. According to a study published by Milliman, in 2015, behavioral care was four to six times more likely to be provided out-of-network than medical or surgical care. In President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget, his administration aims to cut $241 billion from Medicaid, an assistance program that provides healthcare to low-income Americans.

Dancing is a symbol that is heavy in Joker. According to a Harvard study, “dance helps reduce stress, increases levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, and helps develop new neural connections, especially in regions involved in executive function, long-term memory, and spatial recognition.” After especially tense scenes, Arthur begins a slow, emphasized dance routine that is hauntingly beautiful.

 With mental health being such a prevalent theme, Arthur clinging onto dancing as a coping mechanism or escape from the world backs up the analysis that he’s doing it to improve his mental health — or at least attempt to. 

In any Batman rendition — comics, movies, TV shows, video games — Gotham is always on fire… literally. In Joker, we see a bright Gotham in the beginning, with normal big-city crimes happening: teenagers stealing things, muggings, etc. By the end of the film, Arthur has bred chaos in the streets, and we see the imagery of Gotham that has become so prevalent within the Batman universe. In both Arthur and Gotham’s descent into madness, there’s an arc that’s ever present: protesting the elite. 

All around the country, protests have emerged to combat the elite. Most recently, climate change has brought criticism on the world’s elite members and their inability to make a change. In the past, police brutality has created protests in riots from victim’s families and their supporters, calling for change in law enforcement procedures. Countless marches have been held in response to several pieces of legislations passed (abortion laws, Planned Parenthood budget cuts, LGBTQ+ rights). 

“Kill The Rich” is a headline that pops up time and time again throughout the film, feeding into this “protest the elite” arc. Arthur guns down three rich men in the subway following their harassment of a woman and a physical altercation between himself and the men. This sparks a movement within Gotham that empowers Arthur and makes him feel noticed, something he’d never experienced in his life before. Citizens of Gotham supporting this movement don clown masks to imitate the suspect, aka, Arthur. 

Joker has faced its fair share of backlash. Stephanie Zacharek of Time Magazine took no prisoners in her review, stating that Joker, “lionizes and glamorizes Arthur even as it shakes its head, faux-sorrowfully, over his violent behavior.” Other reviews have had similar opinions. In 2012, a mass shooting broke out at a Colorado movie theatre during The Dark Knight Rises premiere. The assailant fatally shot 12 people. Family members of the slain victims wrote a letter to Warner Bros. expressing their concerns. 

Sandy Phillips, mother to 24-year-old victim Jessica Ghawi, told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don't need to see a picture of [the gunman]; I just need to see a Joker promo and I see a picture of the killer … My worry is that one person who may be out there — and who knows if it is just one — who is on the edge, who is wanting to be a mass shooter, may be encouraged by this movie. And that terrifies me.”

In what is perhaps its most iconic scene, Arthur eccentrically dances down the stairs that we see him trudge up throughout the film. This is also the first time we see him in that iconic purple suit, green hair, and a full face of makeup. He is dancing to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part Two,” which has earned the film more backlash. Gary Glitter is a convicted pedophile currently serving a 16-year prison sentence. According to CNBC, Glitter is allegedly slated to receive royalties from the use of his song in the movie. 

People took to Twitter to post their opinions about the film. One user tweeted, “#JokerMovie was the most brutal, uncomfortable and tense movie experience I’ve had in a long time. Joaquin Phoenix is chilling. The film was spot on and did everything it should have for a character like the Joker.”

Another user tweeted, “Outstandingly Disturbing. Prolific. Necessary Blessing to Modern Cinema.”

As much as I enjoyed the film’s premise, production, and Phoenix’s performance, I do think there are some troubling themes that need to be brought up. Arthur often justifies his heinous actions by stating “they deserved it” and using the defense that society treats “people like him” like “trash” so, they should all die. He feeds into the “Kill The Rich” movement that he involuntarily created in the subway when he committed what we presume to be his first murder(s). 

Though I know the concept behind the Joker character, I can see how this can be construed as glorifying gun violence. However, we can’t have the Gotham supervillain without violence and guns. It’s an accurate representation of the character, and it’s unfortunate that it parallels a lot of what’s going on in the world today. 

The Joker is also painted to incite pity within viewers, which a lot of times, it does --- or at least attempts to. This is classic Joker behavior. In Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s comic Mad Love, readers meet Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. She gets assigned to none other than --- you guessed it --- the Joker. Though this woman is highly educated (we won’t talk about the things she did to get that education), the Joker still manipulates her and convinces her to not only help him escape Arkham, but become his partner-in-crime as well; Harleen Quinzel is no more and Harley Quinn is born.

She pities him and his situation, and he spins his tale of woe so expertly that she has the wool pulled over her eyes. Throughout the comic --- and the general timeline for Joker and Harley --- Joker mercilessly abuses Harley, from pushing her out a window to not noticing she was gone for six months. He is a cruel, manipulative psychopath that nobody should follow in the footsteps of; however, he’s good at his job, and Joker showcases that, however controversial and uncomfortable it may be.

Joker is rated R for a reason; not only are there a few F-bombs, the violence is staggering. However, when dealing with a character that is known for inciting violence and not caring about the consequences, tough scenes are necessary. Phillips didn’t shy away from blood and intensity in his murder scenes, and Phoenix went all in when it came to brutality. Personally, (spoiler!) I never really wanted to see Robert De Niro’s brains blown out the back of his skull, but you can’t have the Joker without some blood. 

And finally, while the troubled citizens looking for a leader are terrorizing Gotham following Arthur’s murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on live television, our hero’s story starts. Thomas and Martha Wayne are gunned down in an alley outside a theatre by a rogue thug and Joker fan, and young Bruce Wayne begins his famous story. 

Joker was original in concept and plot, but had just enough callbacks to the comics to make it permissible. The atmosphere in the full theatre I was in was palpable. There were chuckles and titters here and there when Arthur would make a funny joke, or everyone was just laughing off the tension of the moment. There were also audible gasps and groans when things got especially rough (such as the aforementioned Robert De Niro scene). Joker did exactly what the real Joker would have wanted: it incited a reaction out of people.

I had low expectations going into the movie because, as someone who grew up reading Batman and loving to hate the Joker, I was afraid my favorite complex villain was going to get ruined (looking at you, Jared Leto). I was pleasantly surprised by Phoenix’s performance and Phillips’ take on Mista J, and it was a refreshing performance that was a polar opposite from the late Heath Ledger’s, but equally as convincing and chilling.

An Oscar seems to be on the horizon for both Phillips and Phoenix for Joker. The film is raunchy and tense, and I didn’t know I could hold my breath for two hours. It’s exactly what a Joker movie should be, and I’d encourage anyone to go watch it.

[bountyofbeads]

The New Stephen Miller

In Ken Cuccinelli, President Trump’s biggest immigration hard-liner has found the consummate ideological ally.

ELAINA PLOTT | Published AUG 14, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted August 18, 2019 | 11:35 AM ET |

When President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday rolled out its so-called public-charge rule, which would allow the government to deny permanent residence to legal immigrants receiving public assistance, whispers of Stephen Miller were immediate.

Miller, the 33-year-old Trump adviser, has created many of the White House’s most controversial immigration policies over the past two and half years, and sure enough, when Acting Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli announced the plan, which is scheduled to take effect in 60 days, reports detailing Miller’s handiwork were not far behind. It was as though Cuccinelli, in briefing journalists on the rule, had served as little more than a suited vessel for Miller’s worldview. But to shift focus away from Cuccinelli is to ignore the very real convictions he brings to bear in this administration.

A former senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be frank, told me that one of the chief challenges in staffing this administration has been finding people whose fervor for hard-line immigration policies matches that of the president, and whose résumé includes even one line of government experience. Miller has thus found himself on an island at times in his attempt to execute his more extreme visions for the nation’s immigration system. (A screaming match on the topic of, say, the proposed Mexican border wall is not unusual, said the source, who was party to one such exchange.)

Enter Cuccinelli. The former Virginia attorney general joined the Trump administration in late May. His background includes trying to eliminate birthright citizenship, questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and proposing to make speaking Spanish on the job a fireable offense. Accordingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised the president against nominating Cuccinelli to any post that required Senate confirmation. To some, Cuccinelli’s arrival meant that Miller had, at long last, found the consummate ideological ally. (A representative for Cuccinelli declined my request for a phone interview with the director.)

Cuccinelli may well have been created in a Trump-branded petri dish. He’s spent decades advocating for far-right positions on a variety of social issues, and the 50-year-old practicing Catholic enjoys widespread support among conservative evangelicals. Cuccinelli used his 2013 loss to Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race to reinvent himself as a conservative pundit, and for the past few years has offered a reliably pro-Trump perspective across cable networks (a bonus for anyone seeking this president’s favor). As someone who built much of his popularity on polarizing immigration policies and incendiary rhetoric, Cuccinelli was as natural a choice as any for an administration hoping to make progress on the president’s signature issue ahead of the 2020 election.

This week, Cuccinelli has gone on a media blitz of sorts to defend the administration’s crackdown on legal immigration. The new public-charge rule specifically allows the government to deny permanent residency to legal immigrants it deems a financial burden, based on an individual’s current or likely reliance on programs such as food stamps or Medicaid. In an interview with NPR yesterday, Cuccinelli went so far as to suggest a rewrite of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. “Would you also agree that … ‘Give me your tired, your poor’ are also part of the American ethos?” the host Rachel Martin asked Cuccinelli. “They certainly are,” he replied. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

Cuccinelli began his career as a state senator in Virginia, where he served from 2002 to 2010. In 2008, he introduced legislation that would have allowed employers to fire those who didn’t speak English in the workplace. Under his plan, those fired would have subsequently been ineligible for unemployment benefits. At the time, state Senate Majority Leader Richard Saslaw called it “the most mean-spirited piece of legislation I have seen in my 30 years down here.”

In 2009, Cuccinelli ran a successful campaign for Virginia attorney general, serving under Governor Bob McDonnell. Much of the controversy surrounding Cuccinelli’s four-year tenure touched on health care—he was the nation’s first attorney general to file a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act—and LGBTQ rights, including his defense of a state law prohibiting sodomy, which was struck down in 2013, and his attempt to remove sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes within state universities’ nondiscrimination policies.

Cuccinelli was just as active on the issue of immigration. In 2010, he issued an opinion that authorized law-enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they stopped for any reason, a move that followed a similar practice in Arizona. That same year, he said it didn’t “seem beyond the realm of possibility” that Obama was born in Kenya—a statement he later walked back.

All of which was enough to splinter support across the Republican Party when he decided to run for governor in 2013. As The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher noted in the spring, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was a major backer of McDonnell, refused to give Cuccinelli a dime toward his campaign. After then–Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling withdrew from the race, he also declined to back Cuccinelli, arguing that it was crucial for the party to “reconnect with a more diverse voter base.” Cuccinelli, upon winning the GOP nomination, lost the general election to McAuliffe by two and a half percentage points.

Cuccinelli continued to remain active in the party. He advised Ted Cruz’s campaign in the 2016 presidential race. He went so far as to lead the senator from Texas’s effort to unbind delegates ahead of the party’s convention, and yelled “Shame! Shame!” on the floor to protest Trump’s nomination. But like so many other anti-Trump Republicans, Cuccinelli quickly fell in line, and has spent much of the past two and a half years praising the president.

The public-charge rule is in many ways the result of this administration’s inability to enact its desired “merit-based” immigration laws through Congress. With Trump’s first term nearing its conclusion and Congress impossibly gridlocked, many more such crackdowns on immigration—both legal and illegal—are likely to originate in the executive branch. If the latest rollout is any indication, it could be that Cuccinelli, as much as Miller or anyone else, is eager to bring those ideas to life.

Trump’s White Identity Politics Appeals to Two Different Groups

The president’s overt racism now risks fragmenting his coalition.

David A. Graham | Published August 8, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted August 18, 2019 11:45 AM ET |

Over the past month, President Donald Trump has embarked on a concerted push to place race at the heart of the 2020 election, first by saying that a group of four progressive congresswomen of color should “go back [to] the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and then with a sustained campaign against Representative Elijah Cummings, an African American Democrat. Trump has been using race as a political wedge for nearly a decade, dating back to his campaign against an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan; these moves are, as I have argued, a more explicit version of that long-standing strategy.

Commentators seeking to contextualize this political strategy have sometimes labeled it “white identity politics,” a phrase that mirrors the label (often pejorative) given to politicians who have emphasized race and gender issues. Calling it “white identity politics” also emphasizes the way in which whiteness, though commonly treated as a default or an absence of race, is very much an identity of its own.

But simply labeling Trump’s strategy as white identity politics doesn’t differentiate it from other race-based approaches to politics, much less explain why it works, what its limitations might be, or to whom it appeals.

These are all questions that the political scientist Ashley Jardina explores in a book published earlier this year, aptly titled White Identity Politics. (She is a professor at Duke, where I sometimes teach journalism.) Jardina’s research finds that it isn’t just pundits and political scientists who have zeroed in on whiteness as an affirmative political identity: Many white Americans are identifying themselves with their racial group as well. That’s a departure from recent years, though it has likely happened at other times in American history as well, and it has important political ramifications. White identity was an important predictor of voting for Trump.

But Jardina finds some surprising things about white identity politics. For one thing, there seems to be a real psychological divide between whites who hold animus to other racial groups and those who show little sign of typical racial prejudice but are concerned about protecting their own group—though in practice, they often end up supporting politicians and policies that do hurt minority groups, as with Trump. Meanwhile, despite common oversimplifications about who these voters are, Jardina finds little evidence to suggest they are largely members of an economically fragile working class.

Trump’s political success has been built in part on his ability to appeal to both whites who are prejudiced and those who are not, using the same policy ideas. But moves like his attacks on the “squad” or Cummings test the outer limits of this two-pronged strategy, threatening to turn off whites who don’t think of themselves as prejudiced. There’s been a 10-percentage-point drop in white identifiers—whites who indicated their racial identity is really important to them—since the 2016 election. Trump’s recent moves toward cutting budgets for entitlement programs popular among white identifiers also risk alienating the voters who helped put him in office. Jardina walked me through her research, and discussed how her findings might apply to the president’s recent racist outbursts. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

David A. Graham: I see a growing number of people using the phrase white identity politics, sometimes to mean different things. What do you mean when you refer to white identity politics?

Ashley Jardina: The term refers to the psychological attachment to their racial group that many whites in the United States possess. Whites with a racial identity feel a sense of racial solidarity with their group and see whites as having similar interests. White identity politics refers to the way in which this sense of racial solidarity influences whites’ view of the political world. Generally what that looks like is whites with a sense of racial identity prefer political candidates and policies that protect their group’s interests. In the U.S., protecting these interests often means attempting to preserve privileges and advantages that whites, on average, have relative to other racial and ethnic groups.

Graham: Is this a recent phenomenon?

Jardina: I think of it as an episodic phenomenon. Until recently, it might seem like we haven’t seen white identity influencing whites’ political preferences in any serious way. But if we had historical political polling data, we might. For example, it isn’t hard to imagine that the white backlash to the civil-rights movement was not just about racial animus, but also about whites feeling like their political power was going to shift markedly as African Americans achieved more political rights and opportunities. Another moment white identity politics was likely at play was in the U.S. in the 1920s, just before the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. Coming on the heels of a large influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, many Americans were worried about the changing racial composition of the United States. If you read the Congressional Record at the time, politicians were having very similar conversations to the ones we’re having today. They expressed opinions about what the racial composition of the country should look like and considered from where we should limit immigration. Most of these conversations were about maintaining the image of the U.S. as a “white” nation. Members of Congress even talked about preserving the “Nordic stock” of the nation.

My argument is that the reason white identity politics matters today in a way it didn’t matter in the 1980s or 1990s or even 2000s is because of a confluence of things happening in the political and social environment. The country is changing demographically because of immigration that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s, and because of differences in birth rates across racial and ethnic groups. The U.S. is becoming far more racially and ethnically diverse at a rapid pace, and perhaps most symbolic of these changes was the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. These are all factors in the political environment that some whites, I argue, are interpreting as a threat to their group’s power and their status.

Graham: You draw some conclusions about what the typical white identifier looks like. Can you sketch that?

Jardina: It’s not who you might expect. I think the term white identity politics often conjures up this image of a working-class white man who maybe lost his manufacturing job and feels he’s being left behind. There’s not a lot of evidence that such a person is the typical white identifier. People high on white identity tend to be older and without college degrees. Women are actually slightly more likely to identify as white than men. And white identifiers are not exclusively found among those in the working class. White identifiers have similar incomes, are no less likely to be unemployed, and are just as likely to own their own home as whites who do not have a strong sense of racial identity.

Graham: There’s an idea in circulation that white identity politics is driven less by poverty than by a sense of fragility—a sense that one’s economic status is endangered. Is there evidence for that?

Jardina: I find very little evidence that a sense of economic vulnerability leads whites to adopt a racial identity. I asked people whether they think their families are better or worse off than they were a few years ago and find that their answers to this question are not at all predictive of whether they identify as white. I also looked to see whether people who were worried about losing their job might be more likely to identify as white, and I don’t find a relationship there, either. There really isn’t a strong relationship between subjective or objective economic circumstances and the propensity to adopt this identity.

In addition to whether or not someone went to college, I find that higher levels of white identity tend to be associated with certain personality traits. Whites who are more authoritarian or who score higher on this metric we call social-dominance orientation—a psychological predisposition that leads individuals to prefer hierarchy, or to believe that society should be organized hierarchically—these are the white people more inclined to identify with their racial group.

Graham: You say about 38 percent of whites score high on racial identity but low on racial resentment. What does that look like in practice?

Jardina: This is a really important distinction for a number of reasons. When social scientists think about how people act as groups in society, we make this distinction between the negative attitudes that people hold toward out-group members and the attitudes people have toward members of their in-groups. Traditionally, we have often focused on the negative out-group attitudes that white people have toward people of color. We call these attitudes racial prejudice.

White identity is an in-group attitude. There isn’t necessarily a strong relationship between feeling favorable toward one’s own racial group and strongly disliking members of other racial groups. Many white identifiers aren’t especially racially prejudiced in the classical sense. Nevertheless, they do want to do things that benefit their group, and while they’re not necessarily motivated to do so at the expense of other racial or ethnic groups, it turns out that the policies and candidates white identifiers support in the name of their group’s interests can hurt other groups. In a world in which whites have a disproportionate share of power and resources, having a preference for protecting your group inherently preserves a system of racism and racial inequality.

This distinction between whites who have a sense of racial identity and whites who are racially prejudiced matters a lot for today’s politics. Many of Trump’s racist or racially charged remarks likely appeal to two distinct sets of white voters. Take a recent example, when Trump told several members of Congress to “go back to your countries.” We might think that this remark, which is racist because it suggests that these women of color are not truly American, would only seem acceptable to the most racist of whites. But this sentiment might also appeal to white identifiers who look around a more racially and ethnically diverse nation and worry that they are no longer seen as prototypical members of the United States.

Graham: I suspect a lot of people will view this skeptically: Is there really a difference here? The example that persuaded me in your book concerned “racialized” programs like welfare and Medicaid.

Jardina: I find that white identity isn’t at all associated with views on a lot of policies that we know traditionally are overwhelmingly associated with racial prejudice. People with high levels of racial animus are far less supportive of welfare and Medicaid, social-welfare policies that have been associated with erroneous and disparaging stereotypes about African Americans. White identity is unrelated to attitudes on these policies. Whites with high levels of identity are not any more supportive of reductions to these policies than whites with no sense of racial identity. There are some social-welfare policies that I and other scholars have argued are traditionally associated with whiteness or with disproportionately benefiting white people: Social Security, Medicare. These are especially popular among white identifiers.

The distinction between white identity and white racial prejudice also matters when we think about political mobilization. We know that both white identity and racial prejudice were powerful predictors of Trump support. Whites high on racial prejudice and whites high on white identity were both likely to vote for Trump. Trump was an unconventional Republican candidate, in that he parted ways with the traditional GOP party platform: He promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, a campaign promise that appealed distinctly to white identifiers.

But Trump was very strategic and very much set out to attract both the racially prejudiced whites and whites who were high on a sense of identity. For instance, Trump has basically hammered over and over again the issue of immigration—an issue very important to whites who feel a sense of prejudice toward Latinos and to whites who are worried about the loss of their race’s numerical majority in the country. All Trump has to do is say, “I’m going to restrict immigration; I’m going to build a border wall.” This message appeals to both types of white people but for different reasons.

Graham: When Trump adopts these racist attacks, does he risk turning off white identifiers who aren’t high on racial animus?

Jardina: It’s a little complicated. What we do know is that when Trump associates himself with extremist groups or white supremacists, many white identifiers are turned off. It’s a little more complicated when you’re talking about remarks that apparently to some white Americans are more ambiguous in terms of whether they’re seen as racist, like “Send her back.”

There may have been a period in American politics where, when politicians made racist or racialized comments, the public would recoil. One of the things I’ve found in my research is that accusations of racism have become politically ineffective. People often see them as “crying wolf.” Think about the “Go back to where you came from” controversy. In reaction to Trump’s racist remarks, Democrats were outraged and called Trump racist. Republicans simply responded by saying, You just want to make everything about race. You just want to play the race card.

Trump does this all the time. He makes racist remarks and then denies that his remarks were racist. It allows Republicans to completely spin the narrative. After the “Send her back” controversy, a lot of the conservative talking points drew attention away from the “Send her back” language. The narrative became that “these four members of Congress were complaining about America so Trump told them to leave.”

Graham: It’s reframing them as classic “Love it or leave it” rhetoric.

Jardina: Right. But there is some evidence that despite his efforts, Trump has turned away some of his initial supporters. I’ve found that after the 2016 election, there was a 10-percentage-point drop in the number of white people who identify as white. I’m working on a study now with some colleagues that tries to understand why we’ve seen this drop. What we’ve found thus far is that the drop has largely been motivated by dislike or disgust toward Donald Trump. There’s also some evidence that Trump is partly responsible for a reduction in levels of racial prejudice among some whites. Since Trump’s election, white Republicans have not become less racially prejudiced, but white Democrats have.

Both these changes are really interesting and surprising, because social scientists often think of these racial identities and racial attitudes as really stable dispositions—ones that people adopt early in their lives. They don’t tend to shift, even when things are going on in the political environment. The fact that Trump is, in part, causing these shifts is really surprising.

Graham: At the same time, we see Trump talking about cutting budgets in the second term, and his most recent budget cuts entitlements. Is that likely to hurt him with white identifiers?

Jardina: Yes, and it’s an opportunity for Democrats to win over these white identifiers, since Democratic candidates tend to be more supportive of protecting these programs than Republicans. But Trump can always play the immigration card. He can talk about cutting these programs and then distract by turning the public’s attention back to immigration and talking about an immigration crisis.

He’s done this before. Think about Trump’s strategy leading up to the midterm elections. Suddenly, we have a caravan of migrants coming to storm the border. The midterm elections happen, and suddenly, no caravan. It’s a very effective strategy, because many people are concerned about immigration, and it is an issue that is especially important to white Republicans, both those who are high on white prejudice and high on white identity.

Graham: Yeah, but the midterm elections were awful for Republicans. Are you saying the results might have been worse if not for that rhetoric?

Jardina: One thing we need to think about is the difference between changing voters’ attitudes and mobilizing voters. Is Trump’s racist rhetoric actually mobilizing white liberals and mobilizing people of color in response? It’s clear his rhetoric isn’t doing much to turn away Republicans. After his “Send her back” remarks, Trump’s approval ratings actually went up with Republicans. So when we think about the results of the midterms, or look toward 2020, the big question, I think, isn’t whether Trump’s racist messaging is going to alienate his supporters. It’s whether whites and people of color are appalled enough by Trump’s racism to show up to the polls and vote.

[eekispyykes]

“the citizens united v FEC opinion is of poor judiciary fitness due to Kennedy’s questionable partisan alliance and unwillingness to question corporate personification as a corruption in of itself. “- Michael Bench

The matters of Justice Kennedy’s ability to remain in the supreme court are being directly raised. I find his Citizens United opinion to be drawn of convenience. A system that only regards quid pro quo a sole identity of corruption is incapable to correct itself. Allowing all other methods in disenfranchising political speech to have an individual and untethered principle of inalienable influential purpose protects a financially polluted campaign cycle from actually providing necessary information to the marketplace of ideas. 

If Justice Kennedy will be so bold to overturn Austin V Michigan, he should raise an eyebrow.. two eyebrows.. and all academically inclined nasal hairs to the absolute catastrophe term lengths are making of congressional business. A two year term for the house may have been sufficient for 13 Colonies/states, let us now regard it far too short for incumbents to correctly attent themselves to issues voting and legislating instead of fundraising simultaneously almost from inauguration.  In that itself is a closely related association of legislation in process and the change of money from donor to elected official. 

Lets now see that only congress can face its own accountability to not accept funds per service nor disguise access as other than influence. The political party ‘donor brackets”, guarantee access to congresspersons.

While money might be seen the vehicle, the currency as career politicians understand influence is re election. Term limits are a precedent per the Presidency and must be understood a protection against corruption by the affiliation of elected officials and donors becoming ever familiar with each other. The quid pro quo is in found matching influence with prior contributions ( Jacobson, 2005).

 By that stare decisis all other forms of inequality and suspect behavior even as to be known the appearance of corruption are only in centrist relationship to ‘quid pro quo”. Thus all sense of corruption that amount to fiscal , social , or partisan influence that intend unequal representation facially are   suspect, and likely of occurring..  The Supreme Court must continually press the government has proven a justifiable reason in avoidance of corruption to suppress corporate free speech. It is however not an originalist stare decisis that corporations had such speech. More a precedent, by being tested, corporate speech become corrupt when unlimited was determined substantial and overwhelming evidence that regarded Austin V Michigan Chamber of Commerce a purposeful foundation of avoiding corruption. I now request you share this matter with the American Bar Association.

On an additional matter , Warren Buffets circus of redstate bloggers have shared extensive email chains about his ‘one his wonder’ congress fix of ineligibility. In 2014 Richard Dorment (Esquire Magazine) wrote a column detailing 22 fixes for congress. Is it that Warren Buffet knew and protected the congress from their own lousy structure or that he didn’t care to know and would enable a perpetually broken tradition of law making /law buying. The latest edition of the Buffet chain letter asks for life salaries for Majority leaders even though itself is no accolade beyond the party itself; a salary they could easy more afford with their war chest than dig a deeper deficit for the nation. Buffet actually walked back his statements in that CNBC interview and considered congress salary the sole instrument of damage. He’s either too rich to be that stupid or now an unearthed parasite found out for the press secretary of deregulation easily summed as Steve Forbes political wing. So I also welcome you to address Buffett why he’s so short on solutions as a so called “Oracle of WallSt.”

THIS IS MY LETTER TO DISTRICT COURT:

Dear Honorable Beryl Howell

I am contacting you on a serious matter of judicial fitness I have found Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy lacking in reference to the Citizens United decision. Relating to the cases of McConnell et al v FEC and Citizens United FEC, the United States Supreme Court made no deference in being treated a fool that deliberate intent to break law would be challenged as unconstitutional under statutes that did not apply. In McConnell v FEC indicated that party's making the appeal desired to launder hard money into soft money purposes and vice versa. State and Local Committees were called in question whether they could transfer funds from other accounts to handle costs of soft money related costs.Many of McConnells challenges were accurately dismissed per curiam.

To Anthony Kennedy's failure was going so far to overturn Austin fully and McConnell in part and not further addressing a completely untested precedent in 1880s that offered corporations personification without a test of the precedent. In todays society, the groundwork of  San Mateo vs Southern Pacific Railroad would have no standing because the right a company to purchase land for commercial use is a zoning issue of county urban planning. WEB Du Bois and his lawyer Roscoe Conklin misrepresented the 14th Amendment to presume its original intent was personification of corporations and people. https://ratical.org/corporations/birthOwhiteC.html .  

Taking this into account, Chief Justice Morrison Waite accepted Conklins account of “his copy of the 14th Amendment Committee journal” verbatim before it was published and clearly brazenly misrepresented. Perhaps Morrison Waite was even worse; knowing the account to be false and part of its perpetuation. By this matter we have Citizens United seeking shelter under the Wellstone Amendment and if not the BCRA Wellstone Amendment, then Snow-Jeffords.Citizens United need not have move past this point since Citizens United didn't know which statute it was premising legal action. If they took the time to construct Hillary as a bait for a majority court to overturn Austin, they should've made the effort in details to know which subsection of PACs they were operating under.

Anthony Kennedy has created a mess of his Citizens United Opinion. The judicial branch cannot exist in an echo chamber to ignore the ongoing efforts and or appeasement 'political messages' assuring compaign corruption will be regulated and managed to avoid the appearance of corruption. In recent years FECA was passed and then  BCRA. The Supreme Court must recognize a compelling effort against corruption is known in all its 31 flavors by Congress .This congress to even suggest corporate influence contributes to the appearance of corruption leads to a suspect doubt of corporate purpose of free speech during the 20th century. Anthony Kennedy offered the appealant consideration what methods would be necessary to mangle either Wellstone or Snow Jeffords to their liking.

Where I find Kennedy's credibility is botched is that if so much precedent will be ripped out of the books in Citizens United ,the existence of corporate personification is also foreign to the constitution. The country did assert term limits for presidents, yet in Thornton v Termlimits the Supreme Court acted so originalist that it didn't notice the 1951 amendment making term limits an established limitation on congress/office access. In the constitution, forms of personfication were differentiated between Blacks , Whites and historically in broad senses...Native Americans also. A corporation is more likely to have an unequal stake in free speech next to flesh and blood White Citizens than peer per an originalist drawing of corporate personification.

Kennedy had other options: 1)Bottleneck all PACs to a behavior that must be identical no matter their contributors. 2) Regard the district court's ruling .. which was airtight. For SCOTUS to take Citizens United at all discredits the legal system. 3) Draw comparison between McConnell v FEC and Citizens United to show a consistent and deliberate circumvention of statute by associates of  the republican party, 4) finally , that Kennedy should not have enabled Citizens United to seem bipartisan with his vote /authorship when the clear partisan lines in the Supreme Court are evidence itself of the power of distortion. Corruption is not going to be a single dark horse. We just saw Senator Corker get a favor for his vote in the tax reform bill. That is very much quid pro quo personal aggrandisement. Corker is enriched. Stripping away his political identity, his vote benefits a bill political access to presidential affirmation no matter its addition to the deficit. Add to that a brokered Democrat Primary and a complete flight from values for republican voters. If the parties will not abide their own sacred cows , they can't be presumed to uphold federal morality for the sake of the system supported above them either as a republic or a democracy.

Anthony Kennedy observed a serious inability to regulate corporate speech by the statutes that were designed to regulate it. He did not take any time toward recommending the reworking of BCRA language as was done in the Voting Rights Act, and did not take effort to address the non Native existence of corporate speech from the Classical reading of the first amendment. Kennedy's obligatory strict scrutiny for free speech matters should have been inclusive of US Supreme Courts unique and sole duty to overrule its past decisions when necessary, and  narrowly tailor its rulings to the topic at hand. Citizens United is A PAC. As a PAC it is other than a common or generalized sense of a corporation. Its a nonprofit and intangible. If Citizens United were a corporation, it would be a media/ advertisement industry partner which also divides its interests from any typical corporation stereotype.

Perhaps some would call Citizens United a political industry partner. If so, its political identity even supports distortion a real and damaging force. Is the Supreme Court willing to say distortion as defined is non-existent: if yes , its overturn of Austin inturn has a strict scrutiny of narrow tailoring in the end result.

By overturning Austin, Kennedy and his cohorts challenged the definition of 'Distortion”, and all corporate speech for too narrow a situation and for too illprepared a challenge. In confrontation of the Supreme Court , Citizens United did not manage a facial challenge to Wellstone or Snow Jeffords because it didn't know/ or care which one it was pretending to be protected by.  Citizens United also demonstrates how political criminals will be treated as far too 'well meaning' by the Judicial branch even when official holders can be just as nefarious, immoral , and misleading in their purposes as murderers, car salesmen, and HIV infected hookers serving their IRA at all costs. A conservative majority affirming their stance is not justice. The face if a District Court having a very different analysis of the PACs blatant offense of FEC policy sounds the bells of distortion. Checks and balances now caters to rival definitions in government purpose in all branches.

Its additionally my purpose to call on an injunction of all cases regarding corporate speech until Corporate Personification is given strict scrutiny and weighed in light of corruption and appearance of corruption effects that required FECA and BCRA. Top Jurists shouldn't be so eager to discount that law student footnote in Bellotti.By identity law students don't misidentify planks they put forth. McCutcheon's opinion by Chief Justice Roberts used the same tactic as San Mateo to declare terms of his opinion for ease or distortion. Roberts indicated it was not a debate whether a person could donate less than the maximum limit. Similarly Morrison Waite declared corporate personification applied. If Roberts overturned McConnell by that matter , the state and federal political parties would reapply donations to balance that out anyway.  The conservatives are trying to pave a road that makes corruption sound normal. Being on that road can only be understood as ruling wrong no matter how impressive or scholarly. Conservatives are synonymous with the hand of distortion.

Thank you for your time

Michael Bench, MEP GERT

Physiologist, Gender Anthropologist

[kineticent-blog]

BLACK WOMEN & BLACK IDENTITY

Black identity is a tricky, ever changing, and evolving concept. From the terminology of what we want to be called to the ideas, objects, and traditions that are deemed inherently “black.” Black women are just as essential to defining black identity as men, but are often held back by societal roles and stereotypes forced upon them. Women are often used to tear down the black community and create molds that were never organically there for them to fill. Black women are either over sexualized, degenderized, muted, stereotyped, or a combination of the four. The images of mammies, breeders, jezebels, and hood rats have been evolving since slavery. In the terms of black identity, black women have been used to tear down their race, but at the same time be the backbone in a crisis.

Historically black women have been torn down at every turn, not only by oppressive groups, but also even by their own people. It started with degenderizing and displaying the role of “mammy” in slavery days. Black women were silent and docile when in the presence of Anglo-Saxon people, but displayed “tough love” towards their own people and often emasculated their men. With the image of a man who could not protect his own family and was disrespected by women, the self esteem and image of the black man declined. Degenderizing portrayed the black woman as a non-sexual being. Which is ironic considering her role as a “breeder” and the sexual assault that ran rampant on slave plantations.

The jezebel was a stereotype created by slave masters to justify the rapes and sexual abuse afflicted on their black, female, slaves. The jezebel is a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite or in other words a nympho. A jezebel cannot be raped because she always wants sex anyway. This stereotype, started in the 1800s, is so ingrained in the black psyche that it has survived even to modern times through the 1970s Blaxploitation films, 1990s Hip Hop, and the embodiment of the hood rat or “THOT,” in modern times. In Toomer’s Karintha, a young girl is lusted over by older men as a child, growing up to use men for her benefit. The norm of over sexualization in the black community is a factor in many issues such as unwanted pregnancies and disease.

Like women of all other nationalities, black women are no strangers to being silenced. In On Being Young – A Woman – And Colored Bonner states “That’s being a woman. A woman of any color. You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears, and throat. Somehow all wrong.” (Bonner, 1267). The world suffocates women and prefers for them to be put in their place. Black women that speak out on issues or have an opinion are seen as “angry black women” a title that acts as a gun to shoot down any opposing argument she ever states. The fear of becoming an “angry black woman” is a deterring factor for black women to speak up and for black men to support them.

The “Ghetto” stereotype is one of the most prevalent and disheartening stereotypes labeled upon black people. Not only is being ghetto an insult hurled at people to insinuate they are “acting too black,” but the negative attributes are perpetuated by black people to other black people using it as a determining factor to deem if someone is “black enough.” In On Being Young – A Woman – And Colored Bonner expresses how if you do not fit into certain categories of what a black woman is supposed to be, you are often outcast and said to be “…craving to pass for Ariel,” (Bonner 1267). In other words, trying to be white. This narrow minded view of how black people are supposed to be, is a factor as to many black people’s disconnection with actually identifying as such. What if you do not fit into that mold? Are you not black? If your qualities do not match your black skin what can you possibly be in a world who praises black attributes but not so much the black people they belong to?

Black women have served as the backbone in black history and identity for as long as they have been used to destroy it. On Being Young – A Woman – And Colored Bonner says “You must sit quietly without a chip… when the Time is ripe, swoop to your feet – at your full height – at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why…Wherever God motions,” (Bonner 1268 – 1269). Through all the racism and misogyny, black women still come in and stand when needed. For example, in the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2015, black women were standing on the front lines defending black men wrongly killed in racially motivated attacks by crooked police officers. Unified images such as that work to abandon the stereotype of black women’s inability to work together.

Black identity is a very complex and multifaceted concept. Centuries of being oppressed have left black people in a brainwashed psyche similar to that of a battered woman. Black women take on the role of an abused child, often ignored and taken advantage of. What’s the place of African American women in the development of the black identity? The same as men. Both have been stereotyped and torn down; and both have been essential in the uplift and progress of a people. Women have served as both the backbone and backache of the black race.

[nw7us]

Insightful Expose: Inside the Kremlin’s Hall of Mirrors (very long article) by Peter Pomerantsev, 9 April 2015

Here is an important article discussing what might very well be the root of the current media blitz of out-right lies and noise.

For those not desiring to click and read the article, here are some educational excerpts that hopefully convince you to read the entire article.

Quote (no grammatical correction have been made):

After months working at StopFake, she began to doubt everything. Who was to say that “original” photo of a dead child she found was genuine? Maybe that, too, had been placed there? Reality felt malleable, spongy. Whatever the Russians were doing, it was not simply propaganda, which is intended to persuade and susceptible to debunking. This was something else entirely: not only could it not be disproven, it seemed to vaporise the very idea of proof.

* * * Late last year, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (The 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al, and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 roubles). The book is designed for “students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants” – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, “acts like an invisible radiation” upon its targets: “The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defence mechanisms.” If regular war is about actual guns and missiles, the encyclopedia continues, “information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack”.

I had always imagined the phrase “information war” to refer to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right. But the encyclopedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations” and “control over the sources of strategic reserves”. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants.

But when I began to pore over recent Russian military theory – in history books and journals – the strange language of the encyclopedia began to make more sense. Since the end of the cold war, Russia had been preoccupied with the need to match the capabilities of the US and its allies. In 1999, Marshal Igor Sergeev, then minister of defence, admitted that Russia could not compete militarily with the west. Instead, he suggested, it needed to search for “revolutionary paths” and “asymmetrical directions”. Over the course of the previous decade, Russian military and intelligence theorists began to elaborate more substantial ideas for non-physical warfare – claiming that Russia was already under attack, along similar lines, by western NGOs and media.

In 2013 the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery Gerasimov, claimed that it was now possible to defeat enemies through a “combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns”. This was part of a vision of war which lay not in the realm of physical contact but in what Russian theorists described as the “psychosphere”. These wars of the future would be fought not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.

Disinformation and psychological operations are as old as the Trojan horse. But what distinguished the Kremlin’s approach from that of its western rivals was this new stress on the “psychosphere” as the theatre of conflict. The information operation was no longer auxiliary to some physical struggle or military invasion: now it had become an end in itself. Indeed, as the Russian encyclopedia for its practitioners concluded: “Information war … is in many places replacing standard war.”

The idea was clear enough. But what could “invisible radiation” really achieve? Was it simply an attempt to put a hard edge on what the Americans call “soft power”, conducted through cultural outreach and public diplomacy? Or was it really some new form of war – one that could outfox Russia’s enemies without firing a shot? * * * A guiding tactical concept in the Russian information war is the idea of “reflexive control”. According to Timothy L Thomas, an analyst at the US army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and an expert in recent Russian military history and theory, reflexive control involves “conveying to an opponent specially prepared information to incline him voluntarily to make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”. In other words, to know your adversary’s behaviour patterns so well you can provoke him into doing what you want.

One well-known example during the cold war would take place at the annual Red Square army parades, when the USSR would show off its nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets to the world. The Soviets knew this was one of the very few moments western analysts would be able to see their arsenal, and they would plant fake nuclear weapons with exceptionally big warheads meant to send the west into a panic about the power and innovation of Soviet weaponry. “The aim,” writes Thomas, “was to prompt foreign scientists, who desired to copy the advanced technology, down a dead-end street, thereby wasting precious time and money.”

Applied to the landscape of information warfare, “reflexive control” means that the Estonians are kept guessing about the Kremlin’s intentions, and paralysed by inability to formulate a response to provocations whose origins and aims are impossible to determine – whose aims, in fact, may simply be to induce an overreaction. “When Russian politicians make threats about being able to conquer Estonia, does that mean they would actually invade?” asked Iivi Masso, Ilve’s security adviser when she joined us at the president’s residence. “Are they just trying to demoralise us? Or do they want western journalists to quote them, which will send a signal to the markets that we’re unsafe, and thus send our investment climate plummeting?”

* * * Nato remains undefeated on the battlefield, but Laity wanted to make clear that the “narrative landscape” represented a new and unfamiliar battleground – one in which Nato no longer appeared to hold a clear advantage. This realisation has dawned more clearly over the past year, as the Kremlin appears to be trying to test the limits of the cold war alliance, in sometimes subtle, sometimes overt ways. The semantic lock that seals the North Atlantic treaty is Article 5, which states that a military attack on one Nato nation is an attack on all. Obama cited Article 5 in his Tallinn speech, describing it as “crystal clear”. But what if you could undermine this principle without firing a single bullet? Would a cyber-attack on Bulgaria by unknown actors sympathetic to Russia invoke Article 5? What about a tiny insurrection in a Baltic border town, organised by locals with suspicious ties to Russian security services? Would all the countries in Nato go to war to keep Estonian electronic banking online?

... Where once the KGB would have spent months, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the west, the new dezinformatsiya is cheap, crass and quick: created in a few seconds and thrown online. The aim seems less to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the status of truth. In a similar vein, the aim of the professional pro-Putin online trolls who haunt website comment sections is to make any constructive conversation impossible. As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper, at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories – for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow) government.

Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to listen.

The mindset that the Kremlin’s information warfare seems intended to encourage is well-suited to European citizens at this particular moment. In a recent paper called “The Conspiratorial Mindset in an Age of Transition”, which looked at the proliferation of conspiracy theories in France, Hungary and Slovakia, a team of researchers from European thinktanks concluded that the “current period of transition in Europe has resulted in increased uncertainty about collective identities and a perceived loss of control. These are in turn the ideal conditions for the proliferation of conspiracy.” Conspiratorial inclinations are especially rife among supporters of rightwing nationalist and populist parties, such as the Front National in France or Jobbik in Hungary – which support, and are supported by, Moscow. (Marine Le Pen admitted in November that the FN had taken a €9m loan from a Moscow bank owned by a pro-Kremlin businessman; she insists that the deal had nothing to do with her support of Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) Some 20% of the members of the European parliament now belong to parties – largely on the far right – sympathetic to Moscow.

... Russia is hardly alone in its exploration of these methods. In Asia, China has deployed a potent mix of psychological and legal warfare to strengthen its claims to hegemony over the South China Sea. A 2013 report called “China: The Three Warfares”, prepared for the Pentagon by a group of scholars led by Cambridge University’s Stefan Halper, describes the Chinese response to a standoff with the Philippines over a disputed shoal claimed by both countries, which involved economic sanctions, psychological intimidation (in the form of military ships sailing into Filipino waters) and a media campaign depicting Manila’s behaviour as dangerously “radical”. “Twenty-first-century warfare is guided by a new and vital dimension,” writes Halper, “namely the belief that whose story wins may be more important than whose army wins.”