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reasoningdaily · 1 year

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White lynch mobs in America murdered at least 4,467 people between 1883 and 1941, hanging, burning, dismembering, garroting and blowtorching their victims.

Their violence was widespread but not indiscriminate: About 3,300 of the lynched were black, according to the most recent count by sociologists Charles Seguin and David Rigby. The remaining dead were white, Mexican, of Mexican descent, Native American, Chinese or Japanese.

Such numbers, based on verifiable newspaper reports, represent a minimum. The full human toll of racial lynching may remain ever beyond reach.

Religion was no barrier for these white murderers, as I’ve discovered in my research on Christianity and lynch mobs in the Reconstruction-era South. White preachers incited racial violence, joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched black people.

Sometimes, the victim was a pastor.

Buttressing white supremacy

When considering American racial terror, the first question to answer is not how a lynch mob could kill a man of the cloth but why white lynch mobs killed at all.

The typical answer from Southern apologists was that only black men who raped white women were targeted. In this view, lynching was “popular justice” – the response of an aggrieved community to a heinous crime. A white lynch mob in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1941. Bettmann via Getty

Journalists like Ida B. Wells and early sociologists like Monroe Work saw through that smokescreen, finding that only about 20% to 25% of lynching victims were alleged rapists. About 3% were women. Some were children.

Black people were lynched for murder or assault, or on suspicion that they committed those crimes. They could also be lynched for looking at a white woman or for bumping the shoulder of a white woman. Some were killed for being near or related to someone accused of the aforementioned offenses.

Identifying the dead is supremely difficult work. As sociologists Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart Tolnay argue persuasively in their 2015 book “Lynched,” very little is known about lynching victims beyond their gender and race.

But by cross-referencing news reports with census data, scholars and civil rights organizations are uncovering more details.

One might expect that mobs seeking to destabilize the black community would focus on the successful and the influential – people like preachers or prominent business owners.

Instead, lynching disproportionately targeted lower-status black people – individuals society would not protect, like the agricultural worker Sam Hose of Georgia and men like Henry Smith, a Texas handyman accused of raping and killing a three-year-old girl. The National Memorial For Peace And Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates the victims of lynching. Bob Miller/Getty Images

The rope and the pyre snuffed out primarily the socially marginal: the unemployed, the unmarried, the precarious – often not the prominent – who expressed any discontentment with racial caste.

That’s because lynching was a form of social control. By killing workers with few connections who could be economically replaced – and doing so in brutal, public ways that struck terror into black communities – lynching kept white supremacy on track.

Fight from the front lines

So black ministers weren’t often lynching victims, but they could be targeted if they got in the way.

I.T. Burgess, a preacher in Putnam County, Florida, was hanged in 1894 after being accused of planning to instigate a revolt, according to a May 30, 1894, story in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Later that year, in December, the Constitution also reported, Lucius Turner, a preacher near West Point, Georgia, was shot by two brothers for apparently writing an insulting note to their sister.

Ida B. Wells wrote in her 1895 editorial “A Red Record” about Reverend King, a minister in Paris, Texas, who was beaten with a Winchester Rifle and placed on a train out of town. His offense, he said, was being the only person in Lamar County to speak against the horrific 1893 lynching of the handyman Henry Smith.

In each of these cases, the victim’s profession was ancillary to their lynching. But preaching was not incidental to black pastors’ resistance to lynching.

My dissertation research shows black pastors across the U.S. spoke out against racial violence during its worst period, despite the clear danger that it put them in. Ida B. Wells, the great documentarian of the lynching era, in 1920. Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Many, like the Washington, D.C., Presbyterian pastor Francis Grimke, preached to their congregations about racial violence. Grimke argued for comprehensive anti-racist education as a way to undermine the narratives that led to lynching.

Other pastors wrote furiously about anti-black violence.

Charles Price Jones, the founder of the Church of God (Holiness) in Mississippi, for example, wrote poetry affirming the African heritage of black Americans. Sutton Griggs, a black Baptist pastor from Texas, wrote novels that were, in reality, thinly veiled political treatises. Pastors wrote articles against lynching in their own denominational newspapers.

By any means necessary

Some white pastors decried racial terror, too. But others used the pulpit to instigate violence.

On June 21, 1903, the white pastor of Olivet Presbyterian church in Delaware used his religious leadership to incite a lynching.

Preaching to a crowd of 3,000 gathered in downtown Wilmington, Reverend Robert A. Elwood urged the jury in the trial of George White – a black farm laborer accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old white girl, Helen Bishop – to pronounce White guilty speedily.

Otherwise, Elwood continued, according to a June 23, 1903 New York Times article, White should be lynched. He cited the Biblical text 1 Corinthians 5:13, which orders Christians to “expel the wicked person from among you.”

“The responsibility for lynching would be yours for delaying the execution of the law,” Elwood thundered, exhorting the jury.

George White was dragged out of jail the next day, bound and burned alive in front of 2,000 people.

The following Sunday, a black pastor named Montrose W. Thornton discussed the week’s barbarities with his own congregation in Wilmington. He urged self-defense.

“There is but one part left for the persecuted negro when charged with crime and when innocent. Be a law unto yourself,” he told his parishioners. “Die in your tracks, perhaps drinking the blood of your pursuer.”

Newspapers around the country denounced both sermons. An editorial in the Washington Star said both pastors had “contributed to the worst passions of the mob.”

By inciting lynching and advocating for self defense, the editors judged, Elwood and Thornton had “brought the pulpit into disrepute.”

#Black churches resist white supemacists #Black Pastors #white supemacy #white hate #Lynching preachers: How black pastors resisted Jim Crow and white pastors incited racial violence #Black church

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bradshawswife · 2 years

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absolutely fucking drooling

#not tgm #izzy loves rhett #rhett abbott #rhett abbott <3 #southern bob >#southern bob supremacy #cannot and will not ever shut up #about this #my god #he just looks so delicious

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protoslacker · 4 years

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Music at work

It's a bit depressing to me to see so many Trump signs along the way. More than any election before when I will vote against the candidate with a sense of urgency.

At work there is something of a graffiti battle going on in the men's room stalls beginning with a rather smallish rendering of "All Lives Matter." The lettering has grown bigger and louder as the graffitti is altered. Graffitt in in the stalls up until now hasn't been a thing.

The workplace is a little more diverse now than it was a couple of years ago. Much of that diversity comes from the corporation eliminating jobs in favor of hiring outside vendors.

I was surprised to hear the Bob Marley & The Wailers song "Rebel Music" in the store music mix. At first I thought I must have imagined it, but I heard it again, and then again.

Shrinkrants pointed to an essay by Hari Kunzru at Portside, first in The New York Review of Books, The Wages of Whiteness. Portside offers this take on it:

A deep dig into the literature on white supremacy shows how even such salient insurgent movements for social justice and racial equality as Black Lives Matter can be transmuted by corporate manipulation into instruments of ruling class stability.

I suspect whoever programmed the recent mix of music for the corporation must be old like me. I'm not sure what songs I'd select, but I feel pretty sure the playlists are heavily scrutinized. Somehow "Rebel Music" passes muster, perhaps because the cops retain the upper hand. When Natty Dread first came out there was no question that the album was 'politically charged." If there was any lingering question, The Wailers's album Burnin', which came out prior to Natty Dread, but I suspect many many Americans like me heard it only after, answered it: Yes, this is rebel music.

I don't anticipate hearing Tyler Childers’s new song Long Violent History at work anytime soon, but I'll be listening. In the meantime it’s worth visiting the Website to see what Childers is up to. Ann Powers at NPR says he is pushing back on Southern values, but his critique affirms Southern values too.

#music #business #freedom songs #hickman holler #appalachia #bob marley #tyler childers

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wutbju · 4 years

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Last April, WutBJU connected BJU Class of 2009 Sarah Dersch Centers to white supremacist reasoning in the pandemic. Ms. Centers was casting doubt on the WHO as a Chinese-dominated organization trying to control the free-thinking, science-denying Americans like herself. The parallel was argumentatively clear, but nuanced.

Ms. Centers was very upset at WutBJU. She gained much sympathy from her followers when she claimed this argumentative parallel put her family at risk. She was not arguing that her wrong-headed and anti-science position put her family at risk, mind you. No, it was WutBJU pointing that out that was the problem.

She has not corrected herself, however.

It didn’t take long for Ms. Centers’ full-throated white supremacy to make it into her Facebook feed. When Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacists in the first presidential debate, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

That’s when this BJU BA in Technical Writing took up the cause for the Proud Boys. Her entire statement follows:

A dear friend of mine sent this to me. She is friends with the POC in this video. She refused to be bullied and was pulled to the ground by her hair by "just an idea" antifas.

(Did you know that P[eople] O[f] C[olor] who are conservative, make up 20% of the P[roud] Boys, or support our president and recognize all he has done for minorities and are *actually* white supremacists in disguise? Did you know that the P[roud] B[oy]s, led by a black/cuban, escorted and provided protection for Bevelyn Beatty, a black woman, as she walked the streets of Seattle's "CHAZ" to preach the message that Jesus matters?)

We are not in a "race war". We are in an ideological war.

POTUS did not start this divide in America. It started when the side that lost refused to show up to the inauguration. Can you imagine the reaction had the losers to Obama done the same? The Washington Post published minutes later the (bogus) impeachment process had begun. Or did you already forget?

Americans have short memories, and the media banks on this.

There is no factual basis to Ms. Centers’ Klandamentalism here. There are no Black members of Proud Boys. You can read the wiki page documenting their hate or the Southern Poverty Law’s research on them. You can google Bevelyn Beatty too. She’s like BJU’s Charrise Lane.

Sarah, my dear, these are dangerous and false ideas you are touting. They are more than run-of-the-mill privilege. They are more than even run-of-the-mill white supremacy a la BJU. This is white nationalism. Please reconsider.

And to the many BJU millennials who follow Ms. Centers, please know:

Her “research” is not fact-based. She is an unashamed Trump supporter. Her ideology has no room for equality.

This is Bob Jones University.

#Bob Jones University #Sarah Dersch Centers #ProofIsInTheProduct #Proof is in the Product #Klandamentalism #Class of 2009

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emblem-333 · 6 years

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In Retrospect, Henry Clay and the Elections of 1824 and 1832

The American “Antebellum Era” is seldom spoken about. Sandwich between the revolutionary and civil war periods, the antebellum age is defined by various titans of the time. 1824 was when the first generation of America’s Goliath’s began to exit stage right into retirement. In the formative years of the republic the position of Secretary of State was seen by many as a stepping stone to the presidency. After all, future presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and even the aforementioned James Monroe held the prestigious position before elevating to the Executive Mansion. Whomever Monroe selected to be his Secretary of State likely would succeed him in the presidency.

Henry Clay desperately wanted to be that man. So much so, he tried to dictate his own faith by crowning himself John Quincy Adams’ Secretary of State after making him president in after the hotly contested election of 1824 went to the House of Representatives, where he was House Speaker.

In any other previous election Clay would have been President. In 1824 Clay was young, vibrant, still riding off the fumes of his war hawking for conflict with Great Britain twelve-years earlier. Ironically, it was his nemesis Andrew Jackson ultra-successful campaign in New Orleans which shifted not only the tides of the war, but saved Clay’s career. By 1815 the British had enjoyed smashing success against the Americans after recently vanquishing the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the red coats no longer needed to fight off the pesky Americans with one hand tied behind their back.

Four months and thirteen days after Bonaparte’s abdication, in 1814 the British burnt America’s capital to the ground. Though the Americans outnumbered the British by more than three-thousand men, the U.S militia groups proved not on the same level as the expertly skilled British fighting force already experienced from fighting Napoleon and his various allies. The White House burned, as well as many other public buildings, followed by the brief occupation of the District of Columbia. If it weren’t for Mother Nature and her conjuring up sudden, heavy thunderstorms and throwing in a tornado for good measure, forcing the British back to their ships, the capital likely suffers the fate similar to Carthage at the hands of the Romans - except no salting of the Earth in the literal sense.

If such events occurred, it is safe to assume the war’s main proponent, Henry Clay, his political career would go up in smoke. Instead, the Battle of New Orleans gave the United States the leverage it needed for its diplomats to carve out a favorable peace, basically resulting in the status quo ante bellum. The British dream of reconquering their lost colonies extinguished and the United States would never again face a on-land invasion. The War of 1812 didn’t benefit anyone besides Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. The two people who’d continuously duke it out for supremacy in the world of politics.

It is initially believed before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s only white men could enjoy the privilege to vote. This is definitely true, but it is far too narrow of a description. You also must be rich and own land none of which easy to come by. This is how you get leaders who are not necessarily rockers of the boat into the White House under the perceived guise of anointment. Andrew Jackson represented the downtrodden poor and he saw himself as their champion.

1824 is the precursor to the election we just witnessed in 2016. A frustrated, vitriolic base in America feeling ignored find their man to pin all their hopes and identity on no matter what the facts are. Bypassing accomplished, skillful politicians along the way in favor of continuing the practice of scapegoating various minority groups.

Now, Henry Clay and those in his flock accomplished more than the establishment guards today could only dream. You can say many things about Clay, you cannot say he merely sat around and voted on bills that renamed post offices. Known as “The Great Compromiser” Clay saved the nation numerous times in 1820, 1833 and 1850 that did prolong the American Civil War and continue the practice of slavery. If you are to hold that last paragraph against Henry Clay I will not call you out on it. But at the various times it seemed war between the regions was unavoidable, the north and south were on even plains, the north becoming more industrial and advanced as time marched forward setting the stage for a war where the north held substantial advantages.

But the outcome of the American Civil War wasn’t a forgone conclusion. At many points the Confederates could have secured their independence. Clay successfully kept a ambivalent south obviously itching to succeed, from doing just that in times they likely would have won.

By 1824, Henry Clay started a war, ended one and saved the nation. At forty-seven Clay ran as one of the four Democratic-Republicans in the swan song election during the “Era of Good Feelings.” After the collapse of the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans were the only viable political party in the U.S. The Federalists lived on in the Northeast, particularly New England in representative John Quincy Adams. A great man. An honorable, distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts whose unjustly forgotten in history. What did the Federalists in wholly was the Hartford convention in December of 1814, when the War of 1812 looked its most bleak for America. The convention called for removing the three-fifths compromise, which gave slave states disproportionate power in Congress and controversially flirted with New England seceding. When Jackson essentially won the war, the Federalists came off as unpatriotic to those outside of New England. This damned the already fledgling Federalists into their coffins.

Adams, son of second President John Adams, embodied the fictitious views we hold of the founding fathers today. Adams wasn’t a slave owner, fought against its expansion and later became a fervent abolitionist. Hamstrung by a congress becoming ever more friendly to his foe Jackson and lacking the skills someone like Henry Clay has, Adams’ presidency goes down rightfully as a failure and as merely a buffer between eras. Sort of like how no one can name the quarterback of the Miami Dolphins before Dan Mario and after Bob Griese. You’d be hard pressed to find people who know who David Woodley and Don Stock are. And you’d be equally taxed finding someone who gives two damns about John Quincy Adams.

Clay retired from his role as House Speaker, his term officially ending when the new congress is scheduled to have sworn in. His last act as House Speaker in 1825 is manipulating the House to bend to his whim and elevate Adams to the presidency after neither candidate in the 1824 election achieved the majority in the electoral college. Despite Jackson running away in both the electoral college (99) and popular vote (41.4%), it was Adams who’d be sworn in on March 4th, 1825. If Henry Clay won just three more electoral votes, enough to secure third-place from William H. Crawford of Georgia, “The Western Star” possibly is able to work his magic to select himself over both Adams and Jackson.

Arguably, the most damning political miscalculation during Clay’s first chapter in politics is not the “Corrupt Bargain,” but the naked ambition it failed to mask. If Clay simply not accepted Adams’ invitation to become Secretary of State, perhaps he’d become President feasibly in the near future.

So what-if Clay had become President in 1824? For starters, he’s more aggressive in pursuing his legislative goals than Adams. Like Barack Obama long after him, Adams fell under the delusion his political enemies were acting under good faith and not out of naked partisanship.

Clay dreamt of an American economy independent from the British through protective tariffs on foreign goods imported to the states. Part of this principal resides in Clay’s famed “American System.” It’s core tenets are:

• It’s main tenants are the establishment of a protective tariff, a 20%–25% tax on imported good.

• The establishment of a national bank would promote a single currency.

• The improvement of the country's infrastructure, especially transportation systems.

Much of this cannot be accomplished in four-years - especially with the Jacksonians wrestling more and more power away from people like Henry Clay. In two-years the newly formed Democrats takeover the House, Senate and the Executive Mansion by 1829.

Like Adams, a Clay presidency only is viewed in a better light by historians who admire their apparent foresight and compassion regarding the plights of native Americans and enslaved blacks, comparably when held up against expansionist slave owners like John C. Calhoun who referred to the institution of slavery as a “positive good.” While Clay acted as an unabashed war hawk in Congress in 1812, twelve-years have passed since then and he’s matured somewhat. Both Clay and Adams believed the Union was big enough as it was and foresaw the only way for the complete emancipation of slaves is through warfare.

Historian H.W Brands, author of the fantastic “Heir to the Founders” described the complex Clay as a slave-owning emancipator. As a slave owner himself southerners were more receptive to Clay’s rhetoric than Adams. Clay believed slavery to be evil, not just for the enslaved, but the slave owner and thought if given the chance the horrible institution would die the way it did in the north. The north did not have a fit of morality when they eventually abandoned slavery. Economically it became untenable. Such fate awaited the south.

The one flaw with this is logic is having to believe all the south wanted was to be left alone. In reality, the faction labeled “Slave Power” fought mightily to drag the north to not only accepting their wrong, but for them to join them in calling it right. When the Fugitive Slave laws passed and was signed by President Millard Fillmore, effectively making every norther complicate in the slave trade having to notify authorities if they suspected a black man to be an escaped slave, the Republic was firmly in the bloody grasp of the pro-slavey faction.

However, Henry Clay did not want to see the expansion of slavery and he didn’t want to see the expansion of the union, less they continue to open Pandora’s box again and again.

That all being said, imagine losing someone like Clay in the heated moments following Jackson’s elections. Numerous times before the Confederates firer on Fort Sumter, the Union nearly split itself in half. If Clay decided, after suffering defeat at the hands of Jackson in 1828, to retire can Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams or anyone else hold a candle to how he handled the calamitous situation? Hardly. A Henry Clay presidency in 1825 likely leads to civil war between the regions and likely the loss of half a union.

Fast forward eight-years later, Jackson and his acolytes have firm control of the government. Jackson is running for re-election and during this time the following issues dominate the campaign:

• The expiring charter of the 2nd National Bank

• The Indian Removal Act

• The ongoing Nullification Crisis

The Democratic-Republicans splintered off, Jackson carrying the banner for the Democrats and Henry Clay running under the label “National Republican” made up remnants of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans loyal to Adams and Clay.

Jackson despised the national bank because he believed it was directly funding Clay’s campaign. The American people perceived banks to be solely for the elite. Believing the national bank to be corrupt, Jackson set out to destroy it and by securing re-election the destruction of the bank was all but assured. The blame of the subsequent Panic of 1837 befell Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, few realized it was his predecessor who laid the groundwork for the economic collapse.

Coming into the contest Clay had little chance of unseating the incumbent Jackson. Riding a wave of popularity, “Old Hickory” was viewed as one of the common folk while Clay a part of the political elite (because he was). Only way for Clay to pull victory from the jaws of defeat is if one of the following happens.

1. Andrew Jackson dies

2. Economic strife becomes prevalent sooner

3. Clay campaigns on his part in ending Nullification crisis and not stressing the importance of banking to an electorate which was at best apathetic on the matter.

Now the Nullification crisis was still ongoing during the election. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun renounced his role as vice-president to Jackson in favor of being elected senator to better oppose Jackson’s tariff bill. Ironically, Calhoun began his career as an ally to Henry Clay. South Carolinian politicians blamed the economic downtown of the 1820’s primarily on the tariff of 1812 which promoted American manufacturing heavily at the cost its European competition.

While Jackson and Calhoun nearly came to blows, Clay carved out a compromise which lifted the protectionist tariff until 1842.

If there ever was a time to fear monger about possible succession prior to the civil war, it was during the 1832 campaign.

So what if Henry Clay pulls off the monumental upset and unseats King Andrew I?

Well, for one, we see the president play a crucial legislative role in putting out the fires caused by Calhoun and Jackson. Back in the early 19th century, the presidency didn’t hold the powers it holds today. It mostly acted as a rubber stamp for congress, using their veto powers sparingly. Even the vicious King Andrew only used his executive powers to veto a bill he didn’t like twelve times in his eight-years in office. Times were different and the country was still finding itself.

Another plus for Clay and the nation is his election wipes away the travesty committed by the U.S government known as the “Trail of Tears” a series of forced relocations of Native American tribes west to make room for white settlers. The Supreme Court, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, said the Indian Removal Act was unconstitutional and the government had no right to do it. To put it bluntly, Jackson could have given less of a shit and relocated the native Americans anyway. Over 4,000 natives died on the trail.

The United States also averts the Panic of 1837 thanks in large part to Clay’s American System and the re-charter of the second national bank. Quite possibly, America missed out on one of their best presidents in Clay by not electing him in 1832 and saving themselves the worst of Jackson’s reign.

Course, the Democrats might’ve still held control of the House until 1840. The National Republicans/Whigs slowly ate away at their deficit culminating in them sweeping the House, Senate and Presidency with William Henry Harrison as their leader. How much Clay could have reasonably expected to accomplish is up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is the fact I believe Jackson did more harm to this country than good and like Trump, his greatest feat is his swindling of the American electorate to believe he emphasized and understood their plights. While Jackson can claim to have the best intentions, his disregard for the complexities of governance lead to much disruption and chaos.

The mystic of Andrew Jackson was just far too much to overcome for any mere mortal. It too five-years, the retirement of Jackson and an economic collapse that would not be rivaled until the Great Depression to shake the people out of Jackson’s trance.

#free coinage of silver #Henry Clay #Andrew Jackson #Bank War #Whigs Party #Alternate History #what-if

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shadoesainte · 6 years

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When Top 40 Radio Was Boss In L.A.

Welcome world! My name is Randolph Antony Pulido. As you know, this is my first blog of any kind. My blog will be based on my research that I have done in college. The colleges I attended were Cypress College, Cerritos College, and California State University, Long Beach. The research topics I have researched on had to do with research on the Protest Music of the 1960's in the Folk Song Genre, Disco Music's Return to Retro-"Spect", and the topic I researched on in Communication Studies dealing with the Theory of Self-Disclosure Within Relationship Development Leading Towards Relational Satisfaction. These three topics I have researched on went into developing articles for magazines where all my works have been sent to several magazine companies over the course of two years.

The article based on the "Protest Music of the 1960's" deals with the controversies surrounding the mixed interpretations and misunderstandings of lyrical content in musical messages striving for acceptance in society. These protest folk songs expressed messages that were either listened to, mocked at, or even misunderstood in reference to its music styles in communicating issues towards the mainstream music listening audience. As a musical researcher and former disc jockey, I propose to further elaborating on this topic in future blog postings in an effort to see the public coming to an understanding and belief what the messages entails and what the social and political struggle stood for.

The second article is a retrospect on the Disco music phenomenon of the 1970's. There were changes that was brought on that affected and influenced the music audience, the television and movie industry, the FM radio airwaves, roller disco and areas of this genre from the underground counter-culture into the popular mainstream. In regards to this musical phenomenon, the time has been 40 years since the disco music phenomenon became part of the mainstream culture. This musical genre gained acceptance by the pop music audiences while creating it into a multi-billion dollar industry and influencing a generation of popular music audiences worldwide.

The third article deals with the theory based on my research article "Self-Disclosure Within Relationship Development Leading Towards Relational Satisfaction". This was the topic that was researched on at California State University, Long Beach in the Communication Studies department.

As a researcher on the topic of "self-disclosure", developing relationships becomes the norm when it comes to couples striving towards relational security and success. The length and longevity of relationships is revealed during initial disclosure exploring dimensions of disclosure adequacy and reciprocity in interpersonal relationships. Appropriateness in initial self disclosure is determined in first impressions towards relational trust in developing relationships towards success.

As you can now see, the first four paragraphs of my new blog is a sneak peak of my credentials and past accomplishments in the three articles that I typed and sent to various magazine companies across the country. This particular blog will now deal with a change in niche and topic that I have grown accustomed to having many conversations about over the years with many people who grew up with Los Angeles Radio back in the 1960's and 1970's. This Blog shall be entitled "WHEN TOP-40 RADIO WAS BOSS in LA". This shall cover the various covering the radio stations, disc jockeys, and the television dance shows we all grew up with back in the day. The "BOSS"days of radio probably had to go back as far as 1958 or probably earlier when a radio station called KFWB called itself "Color Radio", and was arguably the first Top-40 radio station to have a strong format playing the latest hits and upcoming new songs of the day. KFWB was the first # 1 Top-40 Station in Los Angeles and pretty much had the whole city to itself as far as listenership was concerned. As the years matured, so did the number of upcoming and competing AM Top-40 Stations that would compete with KFWB and eventually give KFWB a run for the money. The next great radio station to give KFWB some competition and eventually overtake them as the LA ratings champions is Radio 1110 KRLA. This process of KRLA eventually overtaking KFWB in the ratings took a long six years and a lot of tough competition between the two Top-40 heavyweights. As this blog progresses, I shall mention the disc jockeys who worked at the various competing Los Angeles radio stations that entertained radio audiences all over Southern California. There were more radio stations that I shall mention as the years progress chronologically throughout the 1960's and 1970's.

As we fast forward into 1964, the Beatles just made their initial appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the musical British Invasion just literally invaded America by storm, and the Mod look was the trend that everything had to look British. That was the year ratings champion KFWB started to show its age by slowly decreased listenership in its audience as the audience slowly moved over to KRLA in order to get the latest information on the Beatles, because KRLA was where it was at for the Southern California Beatle connection. Because of this trendsetting transaction that took place at Radio 1110 KRLA, there was a new champion in LA radio as far as the ratings go. KFWB later joined on the Beatle bandwagon. but it was too late for them to make up any deficit they had in the ratings as KRLA climbed its way into Number 1. 1964 was the year of the post Kennedy assasination, and America mourned a tragic loss of its President and political leader. America wanted to become happy again. Across the Atlantic over in Liverpool, England, there were four young lads who called themselves the Beatles. Beatlemania was the trend started by the Beatles all over America and worldwide abroad. Beatlemania was the magic touch that catapulted KRLA into first over KFWB. On KRLA, they played all Beatle singles, album cuts, even their foreign recordings of their songs. It was a Beatle bonanza on KRLA, along with the Top-40 hits and hit previews of songs that had promise for the times. Just as KRLA was soaking in Beatlemania and its Number 1 ratings, another development was around the corner across town. By 1965, KRLA was still the ratings champion, but a new Top-40 station debuted as 93/KHJ. KHJ was originally established in 1922, and had various programming. Before early 1965, it was a MOR formatted station. The Drake-Chenault Company came in and decided along with RKO to turn 93/KHJ into a hit music station to compete with KRLA, and to hopefully beat KRLA in the ratings. 1965 was the year to be Beatle Radio versus Boss Radio. To Be Continued.....

In 1965, KRLA was basking in their Number 1 ratings while KHJ was the new kid on the block about to make some noise at 930 on the AM dial. KRLA disc jockeys Rebel Foster and Bob Eubanks were responsible for bringing the Beatles to Los Angeles, first to the Hollywood Bowl, then to Dodger Stadium. There would be countless contests on KRLA in order to win Beatle concert tickets. The most famous contest was called Beatleball, where three Beatle songs would be played in fragments and the listener would come up with the correct title of these songs. If the contestant identified these songs, they won tickets to the upcoming Beatle concert. While all this Hullabaloo and Beatlemania was going on at KRLA, the other side of town showed KHJ tooting its horn in trying to earn bragging rights for the first time on who was "boss" in Los Angeles radio.KHJ was the newest kid on the block trying to make some noise on the KRLA Beatlemania party, while KFWB was slowly dying in the ratings that later in the decade, they had to switch to an all-news format from their original Top-40 format. KHJ countered KRLA with non-stop contest offering more money than other stations could afford, cut the commercials to the minimum required to be played every hour, cut some of the disc jockey chatter, and present more non-stop music played each hour. Between the years 1965 thru 1967 waged the war between KRLA'S "Beatle Radio" versus KHJ's "Boss Radio".

These two stations would go toe to toe in their battle for radio supremacy in all of Los Angeles and Southern California. KHJ had their connections with the Beatles also, as they played all the Beatle singles and their "Boss Hit-Bound" Goldens. While over at KRLA, you had the Beatle connections with the latest fads, trends and news from KRLA disc jockeys Dave Hull and Bob Eubanks. KRLA not only played Beatle singles, but all cuts from all their albums up to date.

Meanwhile, there was another radio station brewing across town in Burbank as the "little station that could" on 1500 on the AM dial. KBLA was the station that never became a ratings champion because of its weak signal and could not be heard in parts of the Southland; however, the station does deserve a special mention here because their station had first rate air personalities who would work for other LA radio stations throughout the years to come. KBLA came into existence around 1964 when KRLA, KHJ, AND KFWB were going for supremacy. KBLA was the station that did things different with their Top-40 format that the other competing stations did not do before them. It was 1966 when KBLA first experimented with long play album cuts played for an AM radio audience, that was otherwise heard on the FM band. It was former "KHJ Boss Jock Dave Diamond" who started expirmented with playing these long album cuts for the AM audience otherwise unheard of on AM radio Yes, KBLA dared to be different as the little frog in the big pond of Southern California Radio. Because of their weak signal and not being able to be heard in parts of the Southland, KBLA finally signed off in June, 1967. The last disc jockey to be heard on KBLA was none other than than Dave Diamond, who adopted the name of his show "The Diamond Mine" on KBLA. He would carry the "Diamond Mine" handle to the other stations he would later work for in the years to come.

By June, 1967, KBLA had just signed off, the Monterey International Pop Festival took place as like the Woodstock of the Westcoast, and KRLA and KHJ continued the battle for radio supremacy. It was a year away before KFWB would leave the Top-40 ranks in LA radio and become an all-news station. 1967 became the year that KHJ took over sole possession of first place in the ratings. It was Boss Radio that finally showed who was "BOSS" in Los Angeles Radio. With their non-stop contests, concert ticket giveaways, more money and music, it was no wonder KHJ was beating KRLA at its own game. KRLA had sunk into a semi-automated radio station where a live disc jockeys worked part of the schedule and the remaining time was taped broadcasts of the disc jockeys show. The difference was that KHJ had live disc jockeys 24/7 while KRLA divided half disc jockeys and the other half to automation. There is nothing like the spontaneity of live radio that was happening over at KHJ. This is one bloggers opinion. .

When KHJ became a hit music station in 1965, the fast-paced format had an accelerated feel than previous top 40 radio stations across the country, with their less talk and short playlist. the station sounded like it was playing hit after hit continuously. The programming at KHJ in the sixties had the most impact than any other station in America at that time. KHJ showed who was "BOSS" by maintaining strong ratings versus its other competitors in Los Angeles radio. Strong ratings at KHJ was consistant until the late 1970's when music fans began to migrate to the FM band where the improved technology and the sound quality of stereo was superior to that of the mono sound heard on AM radio. By 1980, in spite of their highest rating in years, KHJ regretably switched to a Country format, since that was the musical genre for the times. Another format change came to KHJ when they went back to their Top-40 format combined with traffic reports meshed into their broadcasts with their format called " Car Radio". By February, 1986, the 930 AM call letters of KHJ became KRTH, using the same call letters as the sister station at 101.1 M. 930 AM KRTH became "Smokin' Oldies."

By 1978, John Sebastian, a former KHJ disc jockey, became the program director. It was the time when Sebastian took on the monumental challenge of programming an aging Top-40 AM station despite the fact that the FM band was sweeping the nation and in Los Angeles. The vast percentage of the listening audience was already on the FM dial simply because the sound quality was better in stereo as in contrast to AM which the sound was in mono. During John Sebastian's tenure at KHJ, he was proud to have scrapped up the last great ratings as a Top-40 station in the waning days in KHJ history. KHJ in 1978 was able to beat a laundry list of such heavyweight stations like KTNQ (Ten Q), KFI, KIIS-FM, KIQQ, and even tying the hottest AOR stations in the country, KLOS and KMET. Quite an accomplishment in the last few years as a station that was once a proud Top-40 powerhouse in the country. The last Program Director of KHJ as a Top-40 station was Chuck Martin from 1979-1980. Martin was responsible for bringing in Rick Dees from KHJ's sister station in Memphis, WHBQ. Rick Dees and his Cast of Idiots were known for the parody disco hit "Disco Duck". KHJ went to the Country format ny November, 1980 despite high ratings in their last Top-40 format ratings book.

There were the radio personalities and disc jockeys who shaped 93/KHJ throughout its Top-40 heyday from 1965-1980 that needs to be mentioned. Ones that became famous via radio, television and other facets of media. Those who grew up with the popular television dance shows of the 60's were the DJ's that were from KHJ, KRLA, KFWB, and some from even KBLA. Many grew up on POP Dance Party, Hollywood a-GO-GO, 9th Street West, Boss City, The Lloyd Thaxton Show, Groovy, The Real Don Steele Show just to name a few. I could have sworn there was a dance show hosted by Wink Martindale called POP Dance Party, and there was Shebang hosted by Casey Kasem. A number of the so-called "BOSS JOCKS" had distinguished television careers from Sam Riddle to the Real Don Steele. Even Robert W. M organ had TV exposure hosting Groovy on KHJ-TV Channel 9. Remember back in 1965 when Sam Riddle hosted 9th Street West then later Boss City? These were the local dance shows shown in "BOSS ANGELES" back in the day.

Nationally on network television, KRLA alum Jimmy O'Neill hosted the television musical dance show SHINDIG on ABC-TV. Jimmy O'Neill was the first disc jockey to open up the mic at 1110 KRLA. Shindig was a musical dance party that described the typical 60's dance show accompanied with musical artists and celebrities and a whole lot of dancing. Radio DJ's hosting their own local TV dance show enhanced the popularity of the radio personalities, especially when it came to not only spinning the Top-40 hits of the day, but in interviewing musical artists and entertainment celebrities in the world of folm, radio, and television. Another KRLA alum Bob Eubanks used radio as a springboard to parlay his career into television as the host of the long running game show "The Newlywed Game" along with dozens of other game shows he would host throughout his illustrious television career. Some of us may remember that radio in Los Angeles also provided Bob Eubanks the medium to promote and bring the Beatles to the Southland for their concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium. Bob Eubanks was "THE MAN" who brought the Beatles to Los Angeles. All LA Beatlemaniacs can be grateful and owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Eubanks.

Los Angeles radio provided local Angelenos and national audiences with voiceovers that were heard over the years through radio and television commercials, movies and radio and TV station ID's. The most recognizable voice of note has to be another KRLA alum, and that is Casey Kasem. From counting down the nation's musical Top-40 to announcing commercials, Casey Kasem had to be arguably the hardest working radio pitchman in the business. His American Top-40 Radio Shows can be rebroadcasted throughout the country on many radio stations that carry his former syndicatedradio show. Early in his career, Casey Kasem had television exposure hosting the TV dance show SHEBANG on KTLA-TV Channel 5. That show marked the early television exposure that introduced Casey Kasem to Los Angeles audiences.

The Golden Age of Radio in Los Angeles back in the 60's showed the medium for radio personalities as a springboard toward potential television exposure resulting from increased popularity within each radio personality. The popularity of TV dance shows were in abundance back in the day in contrast to today which is pretty much extinct in LA, i hate to say. The local TV dance shows springing from radio shows are no longer the norm in society today unfortunately. That goes for just about most major cities across the country. Hopefully, a few cities may tape a few local TV dance shows spawning from radio stations from that respective city depending on the local television station. It seemed TV dance shows were the ones to watch in the afternoon or weekends when all the teenagers were all watching their favorite radio personalities on television doing their thing hosting the show while being part of the young audience.

As a young child, yours truly, fantasized and pretended to host a mock dance show during parties in the backyard of our home. I would literally style my hair like the dance show host of the day, be it either a Sam Riddle,or Dick Clark. I would take a tablespoon and pretended it was a microphone. I would comb my hair every ten minutes using my father's Brylcream. They once said a "little dab will do you", to me as a kid, it was a "Big Glop". I guess it was my dream as a kid to be the next Lloyd Thaxton, Don Cornelius, or even Dick Clark.

Maybe that is why, yours truly, studied, and majored in Communication Studies. The intent was to get into radio Broadcasting, which I accomplished at the community college level at both Cypress and Cerritos College respectively. Today, I'm a writer of the articles I've mentioned earlier in this blog and the continuing saga of "When Top-40 Radio Was Boss in LA". The decades of the 1960's and 1970's featured the competitive era in the wars between the Top-40 radio station giants. There were dozens of stations to choose from in the Los Angeles market alone. For any aspiring radio broadcaster, most gained their experience by announcing in the smaller markets across the country. Many would strive for the goal to make it to the "Big Time", that is LA radio. The majority of aspiring disc jockeys across the country wanted to make it to BOSS RADIO- 93/KHJ, the top radio station in the country. KHJ was the ultimate radio goal for any disc jockey to have on his or her resume. It was those distinct KHJ microphones that made every disc jockey sound powerful and unique on the air, giving that "Boss Jock" sound.

My personal favorite "Boss Jock" type sounding voice has to be Charlie Van Dyke, since his voice is heard all over the country in various TV and radio station ID's and is one of the premier voiceovers with his deep and resonate voice. That is the voice I aspire to have, although mine can come close. Charlie Van Dyke was a former 93/KHJ disc jockey and station program director who guided the station to its highest ratings in the history of KHJ during the 1975-76 years. Those kind of ratings were the ones that made KHJ the Top-40 powerhouse across the country which seemed to be an unbeatable combination at the time. That was the time when KHJ had its final number one ratings book in 1976 with a jock lineup that included Charlie Van Dyke, Mark Elliot, Bobby Ocean, Machine Gun Kelly, Dave Sebastian Williams, Dr. John Leader and Beau Weaver (Weekends). Afterwards, the PD chair over at KHJ seemed to have broken continuity after the Charlie Van Dyke PD regime. After 1976, every year, KHJ had a new program director until 1980 under KHJ's Top-40 format. Besides the change in format to Country, KHJ's audience migrated to the FM band where the physical sound of music was better in FM stereo.

It should be noted that Chuck Martin, the last PD of Top-40 KHJ opened up a new format at the new K-WEST 106 (KWST), in 1981, which sounded like a continuation of KHJ in FM stereo. Complete with late 70's sounding KHJ type jingles and the "Boss Jock" announcing approach, it was no wonder that K-WEST 106 literally brought KHJ from the dead for a brief year and a half. Ratings wise, K-WEST 106 could not muster enough ratings to overtake other competing stations in LA. In spite of Chuck Martin's brave attempt at raising KHJ "from the dead" sort of speak, K-WEST 106 lasted until the summer of 1982. Simply put, Rick Dees over at KIIS-FM was running away with the Top-40 competition during the 1981-82 season. By that time, K-WEST PD Chuck Martin was no longer able to land Rick Dees like he did during the KHJ days. Many say that the power of a disc jockey's popularity plays a big role in a station's top rating. It may have been a posability that Rick Dees would have made a difference in K-WEST's fortunes, but unfortunately that was not the case.

There were other competing AM Top-40 stations that competed strongly against the competition, being KHJ and KRLA. One station that deserves a special mention is KTNQ (The New Ten-Q) at 1020 on the AM dial. During the late 70's, KTNQ became a legendary Top-40 station because of the top air talent that worked during the era when most listeners migrated to the FM band for better sound quality. In 1977, KTNQ made movie history when it was the featured radio station in the Ron Howard film Grand Theft Auto. During the era of the New Ten-Q, the station not only played the current hits, but were not afraid to mix it up with up-and-coming artists that KHJ and KRLA simply avoided playing. The musical playlist included some punk rock and emerging radio talent, along with radio veteran The Real Don Steele, which made the station memorable. Their contests of money giveaways and fast paced jingles made the station addicting for the first time listener of the station. Unfortunately, by July 31, 1979, KTNQ was purchased by Julio, Elias and Liberman and switched the format to Spanish. The call letters would remain the same through decades of ownership changes.

Another AM Top-40 station that emerged south of the border from Tijuana, Mexico was XETRA, better known as the " Mighty 690". The station was very powerful that it could be heard across Western America way past 50,000 watts. The "Mighty 690" was another KHJ offspring, since it included KHJ's similar radio jingles, only identifying the station as "The Mighty 690". The station was sure reminiscent of 93/KHJ, since their jingles were similar and their "Boss Jock" sound had the same quality the way the announcing was approached on AM radio. Like many competitors of Top-40 radio, "The Mighty 690" had a short life span of its own for over four years. By 1984, The Mighty 690 became "69 XTRA GOLD". Their format focused on oldies from the 60's and 70's.

Top-40 radio not only came out of the Los Angeles area, but as we look to Orange County, radio flourished in 1190 AM KEZY in Anaheim, California. KEZY was known as "The Mighty 1190," making its on-air launch on May 18, 1959. KEZY was one of the choices of AM Top-40 stations to choose from during the radio wars of the 60's and 70's. During the late 60's, the station played a mix of pop and middle of the road music, then shifted the format to Top-40 to take on the LA radio giants. KEZY was run under program director Arnie McClatchey from 1967 until 1974 when the Top-40 format continued under the new PD Mark Denis in 1975. By 1979, there was a change in format to Heavy Metal to probably compete with the FM album rock stations playing their dose of heavy metal at that time. That lasted until 1982 when KEZY switched format again, this time to a pop/oldies format. Obviously music audiences shifted to the FM band for better sound quality and AM radio became a staple for talk radio. In March, 1983, KEZY switched to an all-news station and became KNWZ. Due to the station's low ratings with their all-news format, by February, 1984 switched back to the KEZY call letters with a Top-40 music format. That lasted until April 2, 1985 when KEZY became KPZE (K-Praise) playing religious music. By February, 1989, the call letters became KORG, better known as K-0range, which broadcasted a different variety of formats over the years. Today, the 1190 frequency airs a Korean gospel format under the KGBN call letters.

Another AM radio station that competed well with other Top-40 stations in LA came out of the 1580 dial. That station is KDAY, Santa Monica. 1580 KDAY had a long history of delivering Top-40 pop hits and R&B Soul Music as well. The station started in 1968 as a Soul?R&B station as a competitor to another soul station, AM 1230 KGFJ. KDAY briefly took a shot at the Top-40 format for a few years to compete with the LA Top-40 heavyweights. When KDAY shifted its format to AOR (album oriented rock) their biggest asset was bringing in Wolfman Jack to American radio airwaves from the border radio he was broadcasting in Mexico. The KDAY gig for Wolfman Jack led to a bigger and brighter future for this trendsetter once known as Bob Smith. His KDAY on-air live radio show 6 nights a week led to his hosting the Midnight Special on NBC and being casted in the movie American Graffiti. By 1974, KDAY returned back to its original Soul/R&B roots while continuing its brave competitive battle with the other top LA stations. By the 1980's, KDAY shifted its format to Urban Contemporary, emphasizing its airplay to early rap and hip-hop artists. The KDAY call letters disappeared by the 1990's when the 1580 frequency became KBLA and shifted to business talk radio. By September, 2004, the KDAY call letters resurfaced at 93.5 FM, licensed to Redondo Beach, California.

Beginning in 1936, one of the oldest stations in Los Angeles is the first radio station to broadcast a 24-hour schedule on a regular basis. By 1954, KGFJ was that station to bill itself as "the original 24-hour station." At 1230 on the AM dial, KGFJ played a mix of news and orchestral music in the daytime, and R&B music at night. The mid-1960's was when KGFJ adopted their trademark Soul/R&B format full time around the clock under the ownership of East West Broadcasting Inc. As an adolescent listening to Soul/R&B music on KGFJ, I remember how KGFJ would come in clear during the daytime hours. The nighttime hours were a different story as far as listenership goes. In parts of the Southland at night, KGFJ was hard to get that clear signal due to television interference in the airwaves. As always, their anagram stood for "Keeping Good Folks Joyful." That is exactly what KGFJ did throughout the decades. One of the more memorable personalities at KGFJ was Hunter Hancock, where listeners loved to go "Hunting with Hunter." Hunter Hancock was one of the first white disc jockeys to broadcast rhythm and blues music to black and white audiences in America. KGFJ always had a history of intergrating its radio station, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. Always a positive in living up to its moniker of "Keeping Good Folks Joyful," KGFJ has lived up to that tradition in broadcasting and appealing to audiences of all races. Whether the disc jockeys were black or white, all of them were knowlegable about the Soul/Rhythm&Blues music and its artists played on KGFJ.

Radio was made famous south of the border beyond Southern California across all of Western America from Rosarito, Baja California. XPRS was the station that was made famous by the legendary Wolfman Jack. XEPRS, the official call leters to the station, originally began as XERB in the late 1930's. By 1965, Robert Smith aka Wolfman Jack started recording his own shows and selling commercial time on XERB while running the station from his home in Minneapolis. XERB was earning most of its income from their money machine, Wolfman Jack, who profited the station by selling 15-30 programming blocks of commercial airtime on the station to many religious organizations. By the early 70's, the laws caught up with XERB and were passed in Mexico preventing religious groups from purchasing radio air time. As the situation came to a brew, the revenue and profits finally dried up and the Mexican owners eventually took ownership of the station changing the call letters to XEPRS in 1971. It was by that time the station billed itself as "The Soul Express." Wolfman Jack would remain with "1090 Soul Express" until 1972. Ironically after Wolfman left XEPRS, Mexico would reverse its laws banning religious entities from radio broadcasting and selling blocks of commercial airtime. Wolfman Jack would be on his way to American radio airwaves and his fortunes would take a big turnaround in years to come.

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frontproofmedia · 2 years

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Vasiliy Lomachenko to Face Unbeaten Contender Jamaine Ortiz

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Published: September 13, 2022

NEW YORK — Ukraine’s former pound-for-pound king, the man known as “Loma,” is back. Vasiliy Lomachenko, a three-weight world champion, will make his triumphant New York City return in the 12-round main event Saturday, October 29, against undefeated contender Jamaine “The Technician” Ortiz at Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The 10-round featherweight co-feature sees two-time Cuban Olympic gold medalist Robeisy “El Tren” Ramirez attempt to author a career-best win against former world champion Jessie Magdaleno. U.S. Olympic silver medalist Richard Torrez Jr. (3-0, 3 KOs), who is coming off a 44-second knockout over Marco Antonio Canedo in August, looks to make it 4-0 in a six-round heavyweight special feature. Lomachenko-Ortiz, Ramirez-Magdaleno, and Torrez Jr. headline a card that will stream live and exclusively on ESPN+. Promoted by Top Rank, tickets starting at $56 go on sale Thursday, September 15 at 12 p.m. ET and will be available to purchase at Ticketmaster.com. Lomachenko was set to fight then-unified lightweight champion George Kambosos Jr. earlier this year, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, he put his boxing career on hold to join a territorial defense battalion in his homeland. “Vasiliy Lomachenko is a credit to his country and the sport of boxing,” said Top Rank chairman Bob Arum. “When his country needed him, Vasiliy did not hesitate. We are thrilled that he is safe and fighting once again at Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden, his home away from home. Jamaine Ortiz is a young, hungry, undefeated fighter who understands that a victory over a living legend like Loma would be life-changing.” Lomachenko (16-2, 11 KOs) has a résumé that is unmatched in modern boxing. A two-time Olympic gold medalist for Ukraine, he had a 396-1 amateur record, won a world title in his third pro fight, and became a three-weight world champion in his 12th bout. Lomachenko unified three of the four lightweight titles before a loss to Teofimo Lopez in October 2020 derailed his quest for undisputed supremacy. Last year, he came back with one-sided victories over Masayoshi Nakatani and Richard Commey. Lomachenko is 5-0 at Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s venues, including the win over Commey and his one-sided drubbing over fellow two-time Olympic gold medalist Guillermo Rigondeaux. He arrived in Southern California last month to resume his career and work towards his goal of capturing the undisputed lightweight title, which is currently held by Devin “The Dream” Haney. Lomachenko said, “I love my sport, and I am so glad to be back. My goal is to win the undisputed lightweight title, but I will not take Jamaine Ortiz lightly. Madison Square Garden and Hulu Theater at MSG have been special places in my career, and I look forward to making more great memories on October 29. I want to dedicate this fight to all my Ukrainian people. I wear the flag proudly every time I step in the ring.” Ortiz (16-0-1, 8 KOs), from Worcester, Massachusetts, enters this bout hoping to stun another former world champion on the comeback trail. He last fought May 21 in Las Vegas, wearing down Jamel “Semper Fi” Herring down the stretch to earn a 10-round unanimous decision. Ortiz is a six-year pro who plied his trade on the New England club scene. Three months before the Herring triumph, Ortiz won the NABF lightweight strap with a clear decision win over Nahir Albright. Ortiz made his Top Rank on ESPN debut in April 2021 with an eight-draw against Joseph Adorno, surviving a pair of knockdowns in one of the year’s best action battles. Ortiz said, "I'm excited about this fight. Vasiliy Lomachenko is a great fighter, but I'm here to win. Once I win this fight, I'm targeting a world title opportunity. This is a dream come true." Ramirez (10-1, 6 KOs), from Cienfuegos, Cuba, starred at the 2012 London Olympics alongside Lomachenko. He won the first of his gold medals, while Lomachenko dominantly captured gold medal number two. Ramirez ruled the amateur ranks for another six years before defecting from Cuba. After a stunning loss in his 2019 professional debut against Adan Gonzales, Ramirez has been flawless during a 10-fight winning streak that has seen him avenge the Gonzales loss and crack the top 15 of all four major sanctioning organizations. He authored his most notable victory to date in June at Hulu Theater at MSG, knocking out the previously undefeated Abraham Nova with a left hand in the fifth round. That one-shot knockout propelled Ramirez into the title conversation, and he hopes to get that shot before long. But, first, a former world champion stands in his way. Ramirez said, “It is great to be back at the iconic Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. I am particularly excited to do so as co-main event of the evening that marks the return of the great Vasiliy Lomachenko, whom I admire and consider one of the greatest talents of all time. It’s rare to have two two-time Olympic gold medalists on the same card, and it is an honor for me. As far as Magdaleno is concerned, he represents an important challenge as he is an excellent boxer, a southpaw, and a former world champion.” Magdaleno (29-1, 18 KOs) ascended to the top of the junior featherweight division in November 2016 with his decision victory over Nonito Donaire. His title reign ended at the hands of Isaac Dogboe in April 2018, but he is 4-0 since losing to Dogboe and subsequently moving up to featherweight. He shook off an extended layoff in May to shut out Edy Valencia over eight rounds. A native of Las Vegas who has showcased his talents at many of the city’s most storied venues, Magdaleno will be making his New York City debut against a recently unstoppable train. Magdaleno said, “I am coming to shock the boxing world. I know what a victory would mean for my career. My goal is to become a two-time world champion, and Robeisy Ramirez is in my way. Just know that I am ready.” In addition to Torrez, three of his Olympic teammates from Tokyo will see action under the lights. Tiger Johnson (5-0, 4 KOs) makes his New York City debut in a six-round junior welterweight bout, featherweight silver medalist Duke Ragan (7-0, 1 KO) steps up in his first scheduled eight-rounder, and Troy Isley (7-0, 4 KOs) tests the junior middleweight waters in an eight-rounder. Cleveland-born lightweight sensation Abdullah Mason (4-0, 3 KOs) will fight in his first six-rounder, while junior lightweight Haven Brady Jr. (7-0, 4 KOs) makes his division debut in an eight-rounder.

#HF #Vasiliy Lomachenko #Jamaine Ortiz #Top Rank Boxing #ESPN

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berniesrevolution · 7 years

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DISSENT MAGAZINE

Fannie Lou Hamer traveled a long way out of the Mississippi Delta to the center of the stage at the Democratic National Convention of 1964. In Atlantic City, Hamer implored the nation to witness the violence she endured for exercising her right to vote—and in the process, helped force one of the most dramatic shifts in the U.S. political order since the Civil War. The youngest of twenty children, Hamer began picking cotton on a sharecropper plantation at the age of six. In 1961, she was involuntarily sterilized when a white doctor surgically excised her uterus. The next year, when the civil rights movement came to Mississippi, Hamer was personally recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s field secretary, Bob Moses, to build a mass base of autonomous local organizers that would become the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. While returning from a voter registration workshop in 1963, she was arrested in a bus station, thrown in jail, and cudgeled, leaving her with permanent kidney damage. And in Atlantic City—out of the Delta, out of prison, out of poverty—Hamer led a delegation of poor, rural African-Americans to the DNC to realign America’s political parties.

October 6th marks the centennial of Hamer’s birth. She is remembered for her outspoken moral courage (“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” has traveled from epitaph on her gravestone to epigraph of working-class exasperation), her magnanimity, and, whenever morale waned, her impassioned renditions of the spirituals “Go Tell It On The Mountain” and “This Little Light of Mine.” But her own charisma might overshadow her deeper contributions to the movement. Her commitment to voter registration and her personal philanthropy as an anti-poverty worker in Mississippi later in life are well known. But by taking advantage of the crumbling political order to win enfranchisement of African-Americans within the Democratic Party, Hamer proved to be one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. On the 100th anniversary of her birth, it’s worth examining how today’s left can learn from this overlooked part of her legacy.

While “seat the Freedom Democratic Party” rang out across Mississippi at rallies ahead of the showdown in Atlantic City in the summer of 1964, gaining seats at the DNC was only a corollary to the movement’s—and Hamer’s—broader goal. The hubbub surrounding the national convention gave the MFDP a rare opportunity to force America’s attention onto the plight of poor black Mississippians. Since the “regular” Democratic Party in Mississippi was composed of racists utterly opposed to African-American participation in politics, Hamer took her struggle national. The MFDP wanted nothing less than the expulsion of the racist Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party.

Hamer and her crew succeeded, stirring the realignment in America’s electoral map that had been brewing since the New Deal. Today, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are harbingers of another realignment. By looking to Fannie Lou Hamer, movement organizations on the left can seize this uncertain political moment to build a multiracial working-class faction to transform the Democratic Party.

Even as the civil rights movement reached its peak, Southern white supremacist legislators known as the Dixiecrats—or Southern Democrats—enforced segregation in their states with lethal force. Jim Crow was so absolute in rural Mississippi in the 1960s that the forty-year-old Hamer did not know that voting was her constitutional right until the day Moses invited her to join SNCC. African-American men had won suffrage with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, yet in 1963, Mississippi —and the lowest percentage of blacks who were actually registered. According to data required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Mississippi denied the right to vote to 94 percent of its half-million eligible African-American citizens.

In addition to lunch counter sit-ins, then, voter registration was a powerful tactic in challenging white supremacy. Hamer accepted Moses’s invitation into SNCC to spread the gospel of voter registration and inform black residents across the South of their constitutional right—which, invariably, was illegally and violently denied by local and state Dixiecrat authorities.

In order to enfranchise the hundreds of thousands of black voters in the South, organizers had to compel the federal government to enforce the law. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC, launched the famous voter registration campaign Freedom Summer in Mississippi with such a challenge to the feds: “Will the government, at last, take action on the intimidations, threats, shootings, and illegal arrests, searches, and seizures that are a direct result of voter registration activities?”

(Fannie Lou Hamer, in hat with placard, leads a “Freedom Day” voting rights march in front of Forrest County courthouse, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, January 22, 1964. The SNCC campaign sought to register hundreds of African-Americans in the county to vote, at a time when not a single black person was registered there. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. )

But the federal government itself was hamstrung. Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, and yet advanced no major federal action on civil rights. Kennedy himself was only a lukewarm supporter of full enfranchisement, in large part because he had to placate the Southern faction of his party—the Dixiecrats.

Democrats had long been the only viable candidates in the South, still carrying the mantle of resistance to the Republican party of Lincoln. These Dixiecrats were some of the most fervent segregationists in power. The Senate’s seniority rules meant Dixiecrat members were the bottleneck of the chamber’s bills. This procedural technicality became known as the “Southern Veto,” giving senators from former Confederate states enormous power to dictate which legislation moved forward. If there was any hope for a federal law guaranteeing the right to vote, Hamer and other movement leaders concluded, it flickered and flared with the power of the Dixiecrats.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #fannielouhamer #civil rights movement #voting rights #black history

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bradshawswife · 2 years

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mhmmm southern Bob in the morning <3

#izzy loves rhett #rhett abbott #mmhmmm #not tgm #lewis pullman #southern bob <3 #southern bob supremacy #why do country men #if only they were all like this #never met an actual country guy so eeee #izzy talks

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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Falwell’s Fall Was Unrelated to the Anti-Science, Racism, and Patriarchy Trifecta that Built Liberty | Religion Dispatches

Four years after he played a key role in shifting white evangelical support from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump Jerry Falwell, Jr. is absent from the Republican Convention and has resigned in disgrace from his powerful position as president of Liberty University. His vertiginous fall began earlier this month with a scandalous yacht party photo posted on Instagram, which required him to take an indefinite leave, but that indiscretion has now been swamped by allegations of a tawdry adulterous affair that lasted for years and involved Falwell’s wife having sex with a pool attendant while he looked on.

Why, we might ask, did his departure take so long? Why was it kinky sex that took him down when he risked lives to reopen the university in the midst of a pandemic, offended Black alumni with his creation of a blackface face mask, and made a mockery of Christian ethics with his support for a thrice-married president who boasts of sexually predatory behavior? Because Falwell’s worst offenses didn’t violate core fundamentalist principles that define Liberty University’s understanding of the Bible: disbelief of science, racism, and male domination of women—the trifecta on which they’ve bet their future.

The first core principle was solidified in 1925 by the Scopes trial, when fundamentalist Christians opposed the teaching of evolution, which challenged the bedrock Genesis texts holding up white male supremacy. Then, after the Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of public schools in 1954, white Christians started creating thousands of private religious schools. Fundamentalist Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the whites-only Lynchburg Academy in 1967 (which later became Liberty University) to avoid desegregation. But once segregation carried serious tax penalties for these schools, racist fury was re-routed into the third principle via control of women’s reproduction. In 1980 anti-abortion politics took the trifecta lead in building a loyal Republican voting base that would advance white male supremacy.

The pressures on Falwell to shift from opposing desegregation to weaponizing abortion began in 1969, when a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, successfully sued the U.S. Treasury about three whites-only religious schools that operated tax free. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision in their favor in Green v. Coit, saying that such schools, having been founded in the wake of the desegregation mandate, “cannot demonstrate that they do not racially discriminate in admissions, employment, scholarships, loan programs, athletics, and extracurricular programs.”

The Nixon administration demanded information from schools about their race policies for hiring and admissions, using the IRS to force desegregation. Bob Jones University, originally founded to oppose evolution in 1927, remained determinedly segregationist, lost its nonprofit tax status in 1976, and had to pay a million dollars in back taxes. As Falwell himself faced IRS pressures, he furiously whined, “In some states…it’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school,” a telling comparison suggesting that racism was respectable but non-marital sex was not (which may explain his son’s fall from grace). Falwell eventually caved and shifted the rationale for his religious school from defending segregation to religious freedom, arguing that, because the school received no federal funds, federal laws did not apply, omitting the fact that it paid no taxes.

Other white supremacist leaders such as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Ralph Reed were also apoplectic about desegregation. But it took Paul Weyrich, who was described by admirers as the “Lenin of social conservatism,” to realize he could use segregationist anger as a political opportunity. Weyrich had noticed that in the 1978 election, a few legislators won in the upper Midwest, based on opposition to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

Weyrich seized on abortion as the issue to channel racist rage and reached out to leaders like Falwell while ignoring two politically inconvenient truths: 1) he blamed the last Democratic candidate to receive significant white evangelical votes, Jimmy Carter, for Bob Jones’ fate, even though the Republican Nixon administration was responsible, and 2) virtually all Protestants, including the Southern Baptists, supported Roe v. Wade.

Weyrich promised the conservative fundamentalist and evangelical groups that if they turned opposition to abortion into a moral issue, their reversal on abortion would lead to political power that “could well exceed our wildest dreams.” To achieve this, the anti-abortion agenda had to be “packaged in non-religious language, propagated throughout the country, [and] defined in moral terms.” If this was accomplished and “political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” In 1979, conservative theologian Frances A. Schaeffer teamed up with pediatrician C. Everett Koop to tour the country with a series of anti-abortion films, while Weyrich and Falwell created the “Moral Majority” to protect white male supremacy, with abortion as the flagship wedge issue.

For forty years, women have been collateral damage in a well-funded, deliberate war to return the country to the white evangelical trifecta of science-aversion, racism, and male dominance that props up the religious arm of the Trump presidency. Though evangelicals mostly avoided explicit reference to segregation as the original reason for their opposition to abortion, their bet that it would be the winner strategy has not been a secret. According to Randall Balmer’s account of a Religious Right conference in 1990:

Weyrich tried to make a point …Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision… what got us going as a political movement was … the IRS [decision] to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University [for] its racially discriminatory policies.

In the face of failed attempts to reverse the Roe decision and despite enduring majority support for it, anti-abortion white supremacists have worked to escalate their efforts using an unscientific concern for women’s safety to deny life-saving reproductive health care to women and to demonize reproductive justice advocates, despite the fact that abortion is medically safer than having a wisdom tooth pulled. They have sought to deny women our religious freedom as moral agents of our own lives and inflicted untold suffering on the colleagues, friends, and families of assassinated doctors and clinic workers, on their harassed patients, and on women without the resources to travel to states or countries that offer abortion services.

The trifecta that Weyrich, Falwell, and their allies bet on appears headed toward major stumbles this fall. Science-aversion can be fatal in the midst of a pandemic that’s now surging in states that are crucial to the aging, white evangelical Republican base. The country has a good chance of electing an administration and legislators who support reproductive justice and women’s equality. And the murder of George Floyd has convinced a white majority that racism is a serious problem. The Fall of Falwell Jr. at Liberty because of sexual misbehaviors doesn’t address the rotten moral core of their founding trifecta, but the next election may finally enable us to begin to address the decades of harm it has inflicted.

This content was originally published here.

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cksmart-world · 4 years

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The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

July 7, 2020

FAR-LEFT FASCISTS TOPPLING AMERICA

Limber up folks, this is going to take some pretty extreme stretching — even for practitioners of kundalini yoga. With the rock faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looking on from above, Donald Trump announced to the nation that we are “under siege from far-left fascists” who intend to “indoctrinate our children.” In order for your kids, or you for that matter, to become a far-left fascist you must bend over backward until the top of your head touches the bottoms of your feet. Only real twisted contortionist fascists can manage it. And that's who's tearing down monuments to America's greatest hero-traitors: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, who defended slavery and the Southern way of life — cornbread, mint juleps and white supremacy. Those monuments were erected for a very important reason — we just can't remember what it is. But never mind; back to those left-wing fascist who want Black Lives To Matter. This is so typical of fascists. Remember Mussolini and Hitler — always going around saying Black Lives Matter and demanding equal opportunities for everyone. No wonder Trump made that clarion call to us patriots to stomp out such fiendish beliefs before it's too late. Damned far-left fascists, anyway.

UTAH KILLS IT ON COVID OR VICE-VERSA

It's not what you know, it's who you know. Sadly true and when it comes to knocking off the coronavirus, the governor's people know exactly what to do — get some big contracts for your buddies. Right out of the Covid-19 gates, the Utah Division of Purchasing and General Services bought a truckload of hydroxychloroquine from Meds In Motion for a cool $800,000. You remember hydroxychloroquine — it's Trump's silver bullet cure for Covid 19. And that ain't all, some of our illustrious lawmakers were scrounging up another $8 million for the same stuff that works just great on malaria when you're in the tropics. Oops. Somewhere along the line, the state retained Goldratt Consulting (that's their real name, Gold-ratt) for several hundred thousand dollars to create a $2.75 million app meant to assist in contact tracing, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. State budget chief Kristen Cox has a close relationship with the firm. In addition, the state has paid $340,000 to Leavitt Partners, run by former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, and it wasn't for face masks. Even Wilson and the band think the state's strategy is a lot like the Hindenburg — Covid cases are exploding. Who knows what the hell else is going on behind the scenes with your tax dollars? But when Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox gets elected governor, he will surely tell us and then direct everyone to wear a mask. Sure.

THEME SONGS FOR THE DONALD

What's a political campaign without killer music? You gotta have them good vibrations to get your rallies rockin', right? That's why Donald Trump's campaign geniuses play stuff like, “Won't Back Down,” by the late Tom Petty and Neil Young's anthem, “Rockin' In Free World.” There's just one problem, Tom Petty's family won't allow his music playing for Trump. And Neil Young hates it just as much. Seems they don't like the president. So Wilson and the band got together with our crack political team here at Smart Bomb and came up with some rockin' suggestions for Team Trump:

The Pretender — Jackson Browne

Rave On — Buddy Holly & The Cricketts

Hang On To Your Ego — the Beach Boys

Make The Dirt Stick — Chris Whitley

Idiot Wind — Bob Dylan

Devil In Disguise — J.J. Cale

Making Believe — EmmyLou Harris

Helplessly Hoping — Crosby, Still and Nash

Man Out Of Time — Elvis Costello

Back In The USSR — The Beatles

Now we're just waiting to hear back from Jared Kushner. If you have suggestions, write to Donald J. Trump for President Inc., Trump Tower, 725 5th Avenue, NY,NY, 10022. They could use the Help! (The Beatles)

Post script — Well, patriots another week of American greatness is in the books and years from now middle school teachers will inform their students that the good ol' US of A was fantastic when it came to battling coronavirus. Or maybe like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 650,000 Americans when the population was only about 100 million, it will get short shrift. Covid 19? What's that? In this country, we like our greatness. And we love our Constitution that keeps us great. Yet in quality of life rankings, the U.S. does not even make the top 10. Canada, Denmark and Sweden are 1,2,3. In the ranking for happiest countries, we come in 18th — Norway is number one. In life expectancy we rate 46th. Even Cubans and Estonians can expect to live longer. In the ranking for best health care availability, the U.S. comes in 37th but we spend far more than other high-income countries. Since 1980, the GDP — the measure of our wealth — tripled. Working men and women got exactly none of it and many of us even slipped a notch. Yet almost every Congress passes legislation that gives the wealthy more breaks in ways the average American knows nothing about. It's layer upon layer of law that leaves the nation's financial burden on the working class. For example, the recent economic rescue package passed by Congress is giving $174 billion in tax breaks. Although advertised as helping small business, it's overwhelmingly going to rich individuals and large companies. In contrast, folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understand that a healthy middle class is necessary to a successful society and proud country. But the free-market conservative Republicans warn that it sounds too much like socialism, à la Norway — the happiest country in the world.

On that patriotic note, Wilson, can you ask the guys to stop waving their flags and play us a little theme music for the coming week in this great country of ours:

Born down in a dead man's town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground You end up like a dog that's been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A.

(Born In The USA — Bruce Springsteen)

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wutbju · 5 years

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Like the old racism, the new kind always uses the primacy of emotion-based politics over the rational to further an economically conservative agenda. It Is the old marriage of Neo-Kluxism and Neo-Bourbonism that originally birthed the GOP into power int he modern South. While a growing number of evangelicals struggle to make sense of economic, trade, and environmental policies that seem at odds with Christ’s message in the Gospels, there remains the flawed assumption that the apparently oxymoronic alliance between religion and right-wing economics just kind of ‘happened.’ Yet nothing just happens—especially in the world of politics. This melding—like the one in the infamous 1901 Alabama Constitution, like the 1948 Dixiecrats, like the 1964 Goldwater win in the South—happened because elite economic conservatives wanted it to happen and they worked very hard and effectively to exploit powerful emotional issues (race and white supremacy and law and order, or evangelical religion and moralism and abortion and gay marriage, or Tea Party tax revolt) to encourage plain people to forget their economic interests….In 2003 a conservative _Wall Street Journal_ editorialist publicly advised President George W. Bush and other Republicans to ‘work to retire the Southern strategy.’ “Don’t make excuses for it. Don’t euphemism it. Say it was wrong and now it’s over. End the pit stops at Bob Jones University, the strained defenses of the Confederate flag, the coded references to states’ rights.’ The advice has not exactly been heeded, nor has the modern right’s penchant for using the emotional to short-circuit the rational. But, as we have seen, this is a rather timeless story with deep southern roots.

Glenn Feldman, The Irony of the Solid South. 308-09

#Bob Jones University #Glenn Feldman #Irony of the SOlid South #Racism #Klandamentalism #Alabama

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theliberaltony · 7 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

President Trump and his backers have recently drawn a lot of attention — and outrage — by threatening something akin to a party purge: Republicans who don’t sign on to Trump’s agenda won’t be endorsed or funded. The uproar isn’t surprising in that it’s yet another violation of political norms in the Trump era. But it’s not an original tactic.

In fact, in the not-too-distant past, another Oval Office occupant tried to impose his will on his party as part of a broad-based rewriting of political norms that also saw him disregard the other branches of government, make expansive use of war powers and face accusations of being a dictator.

That president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Presidents push at the boundaries of their authority in lots of ways, and they bristle against the institutions designed to constrain them. FDR’s example shows how a president can successfully ignore political norms and break through institutional constraints, but also how institutions and citizens can check that power.

To clarify, that doesn’t mean that Trump and FDR are exactly alike, or really that they’re anything alike. There are obvious differences in demeanor, ideology, policy programs and political experience. And while we don’t have modern polling to tell us how popular Roosevelt was, we know he was elected — with healthy majorities — four times. He certainly has his detractors, but he frequently appears on expert survey lists of the greatest presidents. It’s too early to know what Trump’s legacy will be. But so far he’s less popular than any modern president has been at this point in his term, and experts expressed skepticism about his leadership from the very beginning.

Of course, FDR’s successes with the electorate and his high historical rankings don’t excuse his norm violations, nor should a review of his actions be read as a rationale for Trump to follow suit. But the extent to which Roosevelt was able to change other governing institutions and make them more responsive to his agenda demonstrates how much power the presidency really has. A leader who is determined to use it expansively will have plenty of opportunities to do so. At the same time, not all of FDR’s efforts to strengthen the presidency succeeded.

So what did Roosevelt try to do, and how did the system push back?

1. FDR tried to bring down Democrats who disagreed with him

FDR wanted to remake the Democratic Party from a patchwork party of urban machines and Southerners into a liberal, New Deal party. To that end, in the 1938 midterms, he broke with traditions separating presidents from both local party matters and congressional business: He campaigned against conservative, anti-New Deal candidates in Democratic primaries.

The New Deal had been a crucial turning point for the Democratic Party when many of its major legislative items passed in FDR’s first term.1 But many in the party had historically been suspicious of a strong federal government — after all, this was the party of the South. As Roosevelt’s presidency went on, some Democrats turned away from the president’s policies, believing they went too far. Others were never really convinced in the first place.

Roosevelt toured the country in 1938, giving speeches about the shortcomings of conservative Democrats who had opposed him and describing the virtues of their more liberal primary opponents. Newspaper editors called the effort a “purge,” trying to link it to the far more violent purges of Stalinist Russia. In the end, most of the incumbents Roosevelt campaigned against survived and kept their seats. Furthermore, the Democrats lost seats in the 1938 general elections, casting a pall over the strategy.

Roosevelt was never able to get total control of the party. He did, however, redefine what the party stood for, making it the party of strong federal involvement in the economy and support for an expanded social safety net. And he remained its standard bearer through four elections.

Trump and his advisers seem poised to try to get rid of dissenting Republicans. In October, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff indicated that party donors might participate in an effort to defeat Republicans who haven’t supported the president’s agenda. Former presidential adviser Steve Bannon declared his intention to wage war on congressional Republicans he views as “establishment.” It’s not clear how this will play out, but Trump and his team may find that there’s a reason that, since FDR’s ill-fated 1938 efforts, presidents have limited their involvement in their parties’ congressional primaries. On the other hand, as FDR showed, Trump could have a lasting effect on the GOP even if his electoral efforts fail by changing what it means to be a Republican. Indeed, we’ve already seen signs of that.

2. FDR diminished Congress’s power

Presidents haven’t always been at the center of national policymaking. For the earlier part of the nation’s history, Congress took the lead role. This began to change with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But FDR took it to a new level. After taking office amid the Great Depression, he called Congress into a special session and asked for legislation to address the economic catastrophe. Presidents had called special sessions before to deal with pressing matters, but the scope and symbolic importance of the 1933 session broke new ground.

FDR also sought opportunities to assert institutional dominance — even though Congress was controlled by his party. In one case, he asked his aides to have Congress send him “something I can veto” to “show them they were being watched,” in the telling of FDR expert William Leuchtenburg. FDR vetoed more total bills than any president before or after.2 One of these was a revenue bill, which violated the norm that Congress — not the president — controls the national purse strings.

But in the end, Congress overrode the veto of the revenue bill. And while the New Deal is most closely associated with Roosevelt, members of Congress had plenty of input into what the policies ultimately looked like.3 Indeed, FDR ran up against limits when he tried to overstep the boundaries between the branches. He did, however, set the stage for a much stronger and more activist presidency.

Roosevelt addresses a joint session of Congress in 1936 after his veto of a veterans compensation bill.

Getty Images

Trump, for his part, hasn’t shied away from confrontations with Congress. He certainly ignored norms by having public spats with Republican figures like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and blaming a body in the hands of his own party for not advancing his agenda. But members of Congress have returned fire rather than being cowed by his criticism, such as retiring GOP Sen. Bob Corker’s assertion that the president is not a truthful person. Moreover, Washington’s policy agenda in the Trump era so far hasn’t been particularly Trumpian — instead, it has mostly consisted of standard GOP fare.

FDR’s experience shows what Trump may already be finding out: The presidency’s singular nature gives it some inherent advantages in setting the agenda, but Congress isn’t called a co-equal branch for nothing.

3. FDR attacked the judicial branch

Frustrated with the Supreme Court’s decisions to strike down certain New Deal legislation (including the signature National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935), Roosevelt proposed a law that would have expanded the Supreme Court in an effort to pack the court with more friendly judges. The measure, which would have added a new justice for every person on the court over the age of 70 up to a maximum of 15 members, sparked a furious response.

Across the political spectrum, legislators and citizens worried about the concentration of power in a single person and the erosion of the separation of powers. Members of Congress received angry mail. Once again, Congress pushed back: It declined to adopt the measure as proposed, and the court remained at nine justices.

In the end, Roosevelt largely got his way as the Supreme Court eventually stopped striking down his signature policies — the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act were upheld. But his “court-packing” decision is still used in textbooks an example par excellence of executive overreach and political miscalculation.

Trump too has gone after the judicial branch, but he has used speeches and tweets rather than legislative proposals to express his disapproval. Trump’s disparaging remarks about the judiciary began on the campaign trail, when he referred to the courts as a “rigged system” and attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel over his Mexican heritage. The attacks have only continued since he became president.

Over time, these attacks could degrade public opinion toward the courts. Confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution has remained relatively stable in recent years. But as public trust in institutions falls in general, and the court becomes an increasingly partisan issue, respect for the court might be at risk, too.

This is a case where FDR’s example might not tell us much about how Trump’s attacks on the court will play out — their attacks on the judicial branch are just too different. That said, Roosevelt may have failed at packing the court, in part, because of public pushback. If Trump were to successfully erode public faith in the judiciary, it may not be able to withstand a step similar to FDR’s.

There are other, less direct echos of FDR actions in Trump’s administration. FDR tried to manipulate the media — first by cultivating the press in order to “orchestrate the headlines,” in the words of one historian, then by establishing a “voluntary censorship” office during World War II.4 Trump has also sought to control media coverage and call the shots in relationships with journalists, but he has used different tactics and taken a much more antagonistic approach. As in the judicial example above, Trump’s approach has been soft power (public relations) instead of hard power (rules or laws), compared with FDR.

Getty images

And there are FDR policies that were so thoroughly rejected afterward that they’re less likely to happen now.

Trump hasn’t done anything on the scale of one of FDR’s most controversial actions as president — Japanese internment. That said, some of Trump’s rhetoric and policies have raised fears that the factors that helped lead to internment, such as racial prejudice and “expedience,” are becoming bigger problems, and that ethnic profiling and civil rights violations will become more prevalent and more overt.

And Trump is not likely to repeat one of Roosevelt’s clearest norm violations: staying in office for more than a decade. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, passed by wide margins in Congress and ratified in 1951, assured that FDR’s tenure would not be repeated.

So what can we learn from FDR?

It tells us a lot about the presidency — and what Americans value about it — that one of our most celebrated leaders had such an aggressive view of presidential power. But just as FDR expanded the scope of the office, some of his actions also contributed to the creation of stronger constraints.

The term limits example illustrates that when presidents violate norms, political opponents — and even former allies — will push back. But this resistance depends to some degree on the health and legitimacy of other institutions in the system. Trump’s attacks on the media and the judiciary may prove to be more successful than FDR’s because they could undermine that health and legitimacy.

Sometimes pushing at the boundaries of presidential power strengthens the checks on that power. Other times, it illustrates how flimsy and porous those boundaries can be.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Julia Azari

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obscureoldguy · 7 years

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On Confederate Monuments

A friend of mine, Robert Doubek, was in charge of the committee to construct The Viet Nam War Memorial, here in Washington D.C. This morning, Bob sent me this e-mail:

Friends,

Having been responsible for building three public monuments to genuine heroes (Vietnam veterans, Woodrow Wilson, and Václav Havel), and assisting with a fourth (Tomáš Masaryk), perhaps it’s time for me to risk a comment on the current debate. I believe that the basic distinction is between whom and what we honor and whom and what we remember. So I think that public monuments shouldn’t be destroyed. Once created, they become part of history. For example, the Czechs are preserving some communist-era buildings because they are part of their history.

On the other hand, I believe that public monuments that are no longer valid (i.e. their subjects worthy of honor) should be relocated from places of honor in our cities and towns. They can be placed in dignified settings like museums and sculpture gardens, with explanatory and interpretive information.

Most Confederate monuments are no longer valid, as well explained in a recent article by a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. (The link to the article is below, but I’ve excerpted the main points here.) Note that in the early part of the 20th century, the folks that were hot about preserving “Anglo-Saxon” supremacy wanted to exclude the lessor “races” like Jews and Slavs like me.

Bob Doubek

“Almost none of the monuments were put up right after the Civil War. Some were erected during the civil rights era of the early 1960s, which coincided with the war’s centennial, but the vast majority of monuments date to between 1895 and World War I. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy. ….. The group responsible for the majority of these memorials was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), among the most influential white women’s organizations in the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Honoring Confederate heroes, generals and soldiers was one of its primary objectives, and hundreds of monuments throughout the South — and beyond — serve as testimony to the Daughters’ aggressive agenda to vindicate the Confederacy. ….. The UDC and other like-minded heritage organizations were intent on honoring the Confederate generation and establishing a revisionist history of what they called the War Between the States. According to this Lost Cause mythology, the South went to war to defend states’ rights, slavery was essentially a benevolent institution that imparted Christianity to African “savages,” and, while the Confederates were defeated, theirs was a just cause and those who fought were heroes. ….. Monument building, and the suppression of African Americans, did not occur in a Southern Jim Crow vacuum. White Northerners were complicit, either through their silence or via the process of sectional reconciliation. Many shared white Southerners’ beliefs about what was then called “Anglo Saxon” supremacy. Northerners likened immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the South’s “Negro problem” and essentially turned a blind eye to the violence used to subdue African Americans. ….. The ultimate such symbol was the Confederate memorial unveiled in Arlington National Cemetery in the summer of 1914. …..the monument itself honors a Lost Cause narrative that met the white South’s litmus test, as it contains images of heroic Confederate soldiers, faithful slaves and wording that vindicates their cause. ….. While Confederate monuments honor their white heroes, they do not always rely on the true history of what took place between 1861 and 1865. Nor was that their intent. Rather, they served to rehabilitate white men — not as the losers of a war but, as a monument in Charlotte states, preservers of ‘the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.’”

A link to the full article is below:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments-is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/?utm_term=.b26ac34fbaa1

#memorial statues

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noramoya · 7 years

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JESUS ASKED HIM , “WHAT IS YOUR NAME ? AND HE REPLIED, " MY NAME IS LEGION, BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY OF US INSIDE THIS MAN." - (Mark 5: 9) "In the wake of the murders of nine African Americans at Emanuel AME church in Charleston on June 17 by a self-proclaimed white supremacist, there was a burst of media interest in the scale and scope of white supremacist groups and networks within the U.S. What stands out in this recent media coverage, and in scholarship bearing upon both contemporary and historical trajectories of white supremacist movements, has been the tendency to view white supremacy—the idea that white people are inherently superior to people of color—as a relatively marginal or “extremist” dimension of American socio-religious culture. I argue instead that white supremacy is a much more central part of American socio-religious culture than generally acknowledged and that its investigation cannot be limited to “lone wolf” racists such as the 21 year-old in Charleston—nor confined merely to networks of explicit white supremacist organizations and activists. Rather, behind the individually embodied form of white supremacist evil in the Charleston atrocity lay a much broader malevolent network—analogous to the numerously possessed demoniac man in the Gospel of Mark. While white supremacist activity classified too broadly could result in attributing greater reach and influence to this worldview than it actually possesses within the U.S., identifying it only with a few outlier individuals and groups minimizes both the quality and the quantity of white supremacist ferment. Explicit white supremacy gained a noticeable following beginning with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the years following the Civil War. By the 1920s, as many as six million people across the U.S. were estimated to be members of the Klan and subscribers to its agenda of resisting black social progress through terror and a hate-mongering rhetoric centered upon white exceptionalism and black depravity. The American Nazi Party, birthed in the 1950s, and its various off-shoots over successive decades have also had a wide following, although their actual numbers have remained sketchy. During the post-Civil Rights Movement period, a large number and variety of U.S.-based hate groups and “patriot” groups emerged, with known hate groups numbering 537 by the mid-1990s alongside 858 “patriot” groups (including militia groups, common law courts, and political or citizens groups) totaling more than a million members. Also by the mid-1990s there were reported to be more than 2,000 hate group web sites, 150,000 to 200,000 subscribers to racist publications, approximately 100 operative telephone hate-lines, and one hundred fifty independent racist radio and television shows airing weekly to millions of sympathizers. With the dramatic expansion over the last two decades of internet coverage and of cable and satellite media outlets, electronic access to hate group and white supremacist group content has skyrocketed—even as the numbers of those groups have themselves noticeably increased. For example, the number of known hate groups is reported to have increased from roughly 600 in the year 2000 to 930 in 2014. Moreover, major television networks such as Fox TV have ushered hate content and white supremacist content into the media mainstream, featuring racialized rhetoric that ranges from disparagement of blacks to harsher forms of racist venom—as in the case of frequent guest, Ted Nugent, who said of undocumented immigrants “I’d like to shoot them dead” and who publicly proclaims “working hard, playing hard…white shit kickers” as the “real” Americans. Fox talk shows reach tens of millions of persons on a weekly if not daily basis, and while the commentary on Fox may not be always explicitly white supremacist in nature, it often embodies a cloaked racial chauvinism. It is the cloaked versions of white supremacist constructions (in the form of racially-coded hate-mongering) that must be taken into account when assessing the scale and scope of white supremacist operations within this country. These cloaked narratives are frequently rehearsed by right-leaning mainstream leaders who troll for political support from across the right-wing spectrum, emboldening the racist right in the process while signaling a willingness to provide sympathetic if not surrogate leadership on behalf of white racist objectives. These surrogates and sympathizers have included a host of contemporary Republican elected officials who have openly campaigned in white racist venues, welcomed their campaign contributions, and symbolically and sometimes substantively embraced white racial tyranny. Ronald Reagan often is cited in this regard, who, as the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, launched his general election campaign with a speech on “states rights” in Philadelphia, Miss.—the national headquarters at the time of the Ku Klux Klan and the place where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 while investigating black church burnings. The coded message could not have been clearer—“states rights” was the rallying cry of the confederacy, intent as it was on maintaining the right of whites to enslave blacks, and Philadelphia, Miss., was the infamous place where 100 years later whites provided high-profile confirmation of their ongoing willingness to shed blood to maintain brutal oppression of blacks. Beyond Reagan, other Republican presidential candidates signaled racist sympathies through, for example, routine campaign stops at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college in South Carolina that barred black enrollment until 1971. The university also prohibited interracial dating (thereby connecting itself to murderous traditions of white preservation against black defilement) and only rescinded the policy in the year 2000 when George W. Bush’s campaign visit to the university brought long-overdue national attention to this Republican callousness. More recently, three Republican senators, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum (all currently running for US president) received campaign donations during the last several years from the head of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group reported to have served as an inspiration for the 21-year-old white supremacist arrested for the nine murders at Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston. By exposing connections between explicit white supremacist views and what have been broader and often cloaked white essentialist narratives, a fuller picture emerges of white supremacist mindscapes and landscapes within the U.S. Defending Slavery with Religion These white essentialist narratives within the U.S. actually trace back to colonial New England, where Puritan colonists operated with a very narrowly construed understanding of who possessed settler and legal rights. Although this mainly took the form of religious intolerance of everyone who was not Congregationalist, the primary emphasis on religious rather than racial markers resulted from the degree to which the religious space, especially during the 1600s, was contested within New England. Race prejudice was just as real but far less contested due to the fact that it represented a struggle not between relative social equals (as in the case of religious contestation between white Protestants factions) but, rather, between white colonial forces and their subjugated African and Native American contemporaries who were considered “inferiors.” And as historian Perry Miller notes, “encroachments, especially of inferior upon superior” were “never seriously called in question” in New England before 1730. Even in 1730, if anything was called into question it was class distinction—because no serious challenges of race orthodoxies would gain strength until the onset of the abolitionist movement in the late 1700s. The combining of racially implicit Puritan essentialist doctrines with southern racial hierarchical ideas paved the way for much harder forms of race ontologies within the slave South during the 19th century. With abolitionism gaining momentum in the early 1800s, the slavocracy—with southern clergy in the forefront—responded with a variety of defenses of slavery. One of the more prevalent defenses was to argue, in characteristically Calvinistic terms, that social station is predetermined by God. According to 19th century pro-slavery advocates of this position, whites, on their part, were divinely-entrusted with superior qualities necessary for carrying out a range of Godly purposes, with the purpose most often cited being that of Christianizing and civilizing the benighted slaves. Typical of this genre were views expressed by a Methodist minister in North Carolina, Washington S. Chaffin who asserted, nature has “drawn lines of demarcation between (blacks) and (whites) that no physical, mental or religious cultivation can obliterate.” Because of what he considered to be a tendency by blacks toward “barbarism,” Chaffin believed that blacks “required the continual supervision of the white man to hold him in check.” The consequence of enslavement, he said, was that slaves were provided with conditions “more conducive to his happiness than any other the African has ever known.” The same kind of moral superiority of white slaveholders and moral deficiency of slaves was articulated in a 1978 publication by Rousas John Rushdoony, a prominent representative of the new “Christian scholarship” popular among contemporary white evangelicals. He writes: “Granted that some Negroes were mistreated as slaves, the fact still remains that nowhere in all history or in the world today has the Negro been better off. The life expectancy of the Negro increased when he was transported to America. He was not taken from freedom into slavery, but from a vicious slavery to degenerate chiefs to a generally benevolent slavery in the United States.” While clergy were among the leading proponents of 19th-century white supremacy, the 20th century witnessed the coming-of-age of an assortment of rank-and-file white supremacists. The emergence of many of these groups paralleled the galvanization of desegregationist and anti-racist forces from the mid-century forward. A group regarded by advocates and critics alike as the ideological backbone of the contemporary white supremacist movement is “Christian Identity,” which asserts “White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred people [are] God’s true, literal Children of Israel” and that all non-white peoples (with emphasis here on Jews and blacks) are part of a demonic “seed line” intent upon destroying the chosen white seed line.” Christian Identity is regarded by close observers of this activity as having revitalized and unified the far right. The condemnation publicly expressed toward the 21-year-old charged with the racially-motivated murders in Charleston, while providing reassurance about America’s growing consensus against racial tyranny, is still a far cry from condemnation of white supremacy and racial tyranny in all its explicit and implicit forms. Although the murderous actions in Charleston were committed by an individual, these actions were rooted in much broader white supremacist mindscapes and landscapes. As North Carolina NAACP President William Barber pithily observed after the arrest of the 21-year-old murderer: “The perpetrator is caught, but the killer is still at large.” By now, most Americans likely are aware of the name of the accused in the Charleston murders. I choose, however, not to speak it so as not to individualize his evil nor divert attention from the larger configuration of evil of which he is part. But if we were to call him by name—it would be “Legion.”

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