“The Bandwagon Effect”: How Trump’s Dog Whistles Work
The headline from an article by Jill Colvin and Matthew Daly caught my eye: Trump: ‘A Lot Of People’ Feel That Black Lives Matter Is ‘Inherently Racist.” Here’s the context:
Trump also had harsh words for the Black Lives Matters movement, which has organized some of the protests. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, labeled the group “inherently racist” over the weekend in an interview with CBS News.
“When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist,” Giuliani said. “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American and it’s racist.”
Asked whether he agreed with Giuliani’s assessment, Trump said the group’s name is “divisive.”
“A lot of people agree with that. A lot of people feel that it is inherently racist. And it’s a very divisive term,” he said. “Because all lives matter. It’s a very, very divisive term.”
We could talk about the racism being expressed by both Giuliani and Trump in that exchange. But the framing of Trump’s statement is something he does very often; “A lot of people agree with that. A lot of people feel…” It is a logical fallacy called argumentum ad populum.
…a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: “If many believe so, it is so.”
We sometimes call this the “bandwagon effect” captured by the Chinese proverb, “three men make a tiger.”
“Three men make a tiger” refers to an individual’s tendency to accept absurd information as long as it is repeated by enough people. It refers to the idea that if an unfounded premise or urban legend is mentioned and repeated by many individuals, the premise will be erroneously accepted as the truth.
Jenna Jones noticed Trump’s attachment to this fallacy about a month ago and documented how he used it to spread his conspiracy theories. For example, when he was asked to explain a statement about how President Obama doesn’t understand Muslim terrorists, he said this:
“Well,” Trump said on the “Today Show” Monday morning, “there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”
Here’s what he said in an attempt to insinuate that the Clintons were involved in the death of Vince Foster:
“I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it,” Trump said in an interview with The Post in May. “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
Jones points out that this is how Trump maneuvers in order to be able to backtrack when circumstances require him to do so.
Trump frequently couches his most controversial comments this way, which allows him to share a controversial idea, piece of tabloid gossip or conspiracy theory without technically embracing it. If the comment turns out to be popular, Trump will often drop the distancing qualifier — “people think” or “some say.” If the opposite happens, Trump can claim that he never said the thing he is accused of saying, equating it to retweeting someone else’s thoughts on Twitter.
What is important to remember is the part about why he does it in the first place. It is a way for Trump to give a wink and a nod to white supremacists and conspiracy theorists to say, “I hear you, I’m with you.” That is his way of doing dog whistle politics.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 12, 2016
“Let’s Look At The Crime Bill”: Doing What You Can, When You Can, While Recognizing That The Job Is Never Done
Watching Bill Clinton bickering with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia recently, I had several conflicting, and not entirely praiseworthy responses. One was that the longer an American political campaign continues, the dumber and uglier it gets.
Another was, why bother? People holding up signs saying “Hillary is a Murderer” aren’t there for dialogue. The charge is so absurd it’s self-refuting. Certainly nobody in the audience was buying.
That woman who shouted that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity? He probably should have let it go. Bickering over a 1994 crime bill has little political salience in 2016, particularly since Hillary’s opponent, the sainted Bernie Sanders, actually voted for the damn thing. She didn’t.
Instead, Clinton briefly lost his cool. The next day, he said he “almost” wanted to apologize, which strikes me as slicing the bologna awfully thin even for him.
You’ve probably seen the ten-second clip on TV. “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said angrily. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”
Many Democratic-oriented pundits found this shocking. Evidently political journalism is where Freudianism—or Maureen Dowdism anyway—has gone to die. Even as astute an observer as Slate’s Michelle Goldberg went all psychoanalytical on Clinton.
“It is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage,” she wrote. “What is needed here is probably a shrink…Either he doesn’t want her to overtake him, or he doesn’t want her to repudiate him. Regardless, Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.”
Fat chance. Anyway, who says the outburst hurt her? Sure Bill Clinton can get hot defending his wife. I suspect more voters find that admirable than not.
It’s also unclear whom Clinton’s tantrum offended. “If you read some intellectuals on the left, they’d suggest there should be a grudge against the Clintons,” Michael Fortner, a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York told the Christian Science Monitor “but I think the primary results show there isn’t a grudge at all.”
Fortner, author of the book “Black Silent Majority,” argues that contrary to Black Lives Matter, many in the African-American community understand that the tough-on-crime aspects of the 1994 law weren’t foisted upon them by white racists. Devastated by a veritable Tsunami of violence and gang warfare, “political leaders, mayors, and pastors played an important role in pushing for these policies.”
In Little Rock, where I lived, it was common to hear fusillades of gunfire in black neighborhoods at night. During Clinton’s first term, the city’s homicide rate was nearly triple today’s—the vast majority of victims young black men. Teenagers I coached on Boys Club basketball teams needed to be careful what color clothing they wore en route to practice. People got shot to death for wearing Crips blue in Bloods neighborhoods.
Businesses closed, jobs dried up; anybody with the means to get out, got out. Including, one suspects, the parents of some Black Lives Matter activists. There’s a reason two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus joined Bernie Sanders in supporting the 1994 legislation.
Clinton told them about all that, along with a recitation of the bill’s Democratic virtues: a (since rescinded) assault-weapons ban, the Violence Against Women Act, 100,000 new cops on the beat. Then he made some probably insupportable claims about the crime bill’s good effects:
“A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate—and listen to this, because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”
But then it’s also a stretch to say the bill’s responsible for America having more citizens in prison than Russia and Iran. Eighty-seven percent are in state penitentiaries, not federal lockups. Fifty-three percent of those for violent crimes. Those numbers Clinton didn’t dwell upon, although he did in a speech last year. “The bad news,” he said “is we had a lot of people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long.”
Hillary Clinton herself has regretted resorting—one time, 20 years ago—to a comic-book term like “super-predators” to describe drug gang members.
Lost in all the hubbub was Bill Clinton taking the protesters seriously enough to engage them about what the dread “triangulation” really signifies. It’s not an ideological label, but a philosophical inclination: doing what you can, when you can, while recognizing that the job is never done.
By: Gene Lyons, Featured Post, The National Memo, April 13, 2016
“Mum’s The Word From The Professional Bloviators”: Fox Newsers Suddenly Quiet When Their ‘Hero Cop’ Revealed To Be Fraudster
It was a narrative perfectly suited for Fox News’s conservative commentariat. Too bad it was total bullshit.
Three assailants allegedly shot and killed Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, a wholesome small-town cop and Army vet known locally as “GI Joe”; a 30-year veteran of the force; a married father of four; a local hero.
His death had to be part of an ominous trend of societal menaces murdering law officers in cold blood, supposedly fueled by President Obama’s “anti-cop” rhetoric and the Black Lives Matter movement. Several Fox Newsers were quick to make that connection just as Fox Lake, Illinois, police set out to find the three perpetrators Gliniewicz mentioned over the radio just before he died.
While the news of GI Joe’s death broke nationwide on Tuesday, Sept. 1, Fox’s resident quack doctor Keith Ablow sat on the set of the network’s Outnumbered show and lamented how the president has “inflamed racial discord in this country and put a target on the backs of American police officers,” using the recent murder of a Texas deputy at a gas station as a jumping-off point.
“This is not the only incident of this,” conservative firebrand Andrea Tantaros interrupted, teeing up co-host Sandra Smith to introduce the Fox Lake incident. “This is happening time and time again,” Fox & Friends First’s Ainsley Earhardt chimed in. “This is a dangerous place for the country to be,” Liz MacDonald fretted before Tantaros pivoted back to the role of Black Lives Matter rhetoric in cop slayings.
Hours later, primetime star anchor Megyn Kelly interviewed Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke—an all-too-frequent Fox guest who seems to spend more time bashing black activists on TV than actually, you know… sheriffing. Clarke willfully linked Gliniewicz’s death to how President Obama has “breathed life into this anti-cop sentiment” with his “inflammatory rhetoric.”
That same evening, a cocksure Clarke told Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs that he has been to Fox Lake and knows that Gliniewicz is one of the town’s “finest,” gunned down while “engaged in self-initiative policing, the best policing there is.” He added: “War has been declared on the American police officer.” On Twitter, the lawman continued: “Time to take to the streets to counter Black LIES Matter. Fox Lake, Illinois.”
And on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 5, Eric Bolling used his weekly Cashin’ In monologue (titled “Wake Up, America!”) to connect Gliniewicz being “blown away in cold blood” to a “crisis” of law enforcement officers being killed, in part because President Obama has failed to publicly state that “Blue Lives Matter.”
Flash-forward to this Wednesday when Fox Lake police officials revealed that Gliniewicz’s death was actually a “carefully staged suicide.” As it turns out, the longtime lieutenant had been laundering thousands of dollars from his department’s youth program for his own personal spending on gym memberships, porn websites, and mortgage payments. There were no assailants; GI Joe shot himself rather than face the consequences.
Have any of these Fox pundits corrected the record or issued mea culpas for their rush to connect this twisted story to their political narrative? Wednesday’s edition of Outnumbered, with Tantaros among its hosts, went without a single mention of the news their own network aired just an hour before. (The show did, however, spend an entire segment bashing film director Quentin Tarantino for his remarks against police brutality.)
As for Sheriff Clarke, he spent all day Wednesday tweeting not about “best policing” Gliniewicz’s complete betrayal of his peers, but instead about, yep, “cop-hating” “prick” Quentin Tarantino.
And Eric Bolling? His daily talk show The Five—which frequently gripes about Black Lives Matter—made no mention of Gliniewicz. Don’t hold your breath for a correct-the-record monologue from him this Saturday either.
Of course, it should be noted that Fox’s straight-news reporters—namely Mike Tobin, Shepard Smith, Happening Now, and the network’s cut-in anchors—reported the story, from the start, as a continuing investigation, without tying it to racial tensions or anti-police violence. The way it should be done.
And when they reported the story’s bizarre developments on Wednesday morning, they did so with entirely straight language. But mum’s the word from the professional bloviators.
By: Andrew Kirell, The Daily Beast, November 5, 2015
“How Black Lives Matter Can Really Matter”: Decentralized Structure Runs Risk Of Going The Way Of Occupy Wall Street
Ferguson is the raw, visceral, unsavory face of pure racial emotion and despair pouring into the streets. It is unpredictable, it can be frightening, but above all else it is essential. American society needs once again to see the frustration and anger that is born from racial injustice.
The original narrative of Michael Brown’s death—of a young black man who had just graduated from high school being gunned down in the street by someone who has sworn to protect him, and whose body was allowed to rot in the scorching summer heat for four hours while his friends, family, and neighbors helplessly watched—was the moment when many African Americans decided to make their pent-up frustrations known to the rest of America. Many coalesced into passionate and activist-driven peaceful protests, and a select few unfortunately resorted to violence. This is when the Black Lives Matter movement caught fire.
A year later, the movement is most certainly at a crossroads. Sunday, the peaceful protests organized by Black Lives Matter activists on the anniversary of Brown’s death were marred by violence, shootings, and arrests. That night, a black male opened fire on police officers, and by Monday a state of emergency was declared. That same day, roughly 200 activists staged a sit-in at the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis and 57 were arrested. Those arrested included Cornel West and prominent social media Black Lives Matter personalities DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie.
Additionally, last Saturday, Black Lives Matter activists interrupted and eventually shut down a Senator Bernie Sanders rally, similar to their actions at NetRoots Nation in July, demanding that he take bolder measures to confront police brutality and racial inequality.
So the movement is out there getting attention and generating press. But all of this noise needs to bring about a sustained change. A movement has to be more than merely raw emotion, and catharsis, and this is an evolution that Black Lives Matter needs to undertake.
A prime example of the movement’s organizational confusion is found in the strange interactions between Sanders and “members” of the movement over the past month or so. At the Sanders rally, it was Marissa Jenae Johnson and Mara Jacqueline who stormed the stage to confront the senator. But Johnson’s and Jacqueline’s connection to the movement appears tenuous at best. But Black Lives Matter does not have a central leadership or organizational body, so almost anyone’s official connection with Black Lives Matter can come into question.
“Black Lives Matter is a movement, but it is also a mantra,” said Jonathan Newton, the founder and president of the National Association Against Police Brutality. “It does not have a centralized structure, and that is what I think causes some confusion and also allows this movement to live on.”
But one might wonder: Why is Sanders still being targeted more than other presidential nominees when his long record of civil rights advocacy is at least now known to most? Maybe a month ago at NetRoots his positions on police brutality, inequality, and race were unknown, but they should not be now.
And why isn’t Hillary Clinton receiving an equal barrage of interruptions and demands from members of the Black Lives Matter movement? You could argue that her recent speech on criminal justice reform has shielded her from these attacks, but no one can really know for sure.
And more than that, why isn’t the GOP being bombarded with interruptions? It makes you wonder about the wrongs Sanders must have committed, but confusingly, none of these questions has a clear answer, and they cannot because there is not a central leadership to this movement to provide them. Almost all parties could be defined as rogue factions united by a similar ideology and mantra.
Sanders has most likely received more abuse than others because his events are more accessible than other candidates’ due to the large crowds they draw. The combination of easy access and sizable media coverage has made him an easy target. But the movement clearly cannot sustain itself on these predatory actions alone. These interruptions need to evolve and have a more clearly defined purpose.
“We can question the method of what these interrupters have been doing, but we cannot question the message,” said Newton. “And that method has already produced responses.” In the last week, Sanders has appointed Symone Sanders, an African-American woman, as his national press chair, and he has published a detailed outline of his stances on racial injustice on his official website, so the potential impact of these interruptions is clear.
Charting their future course is not. When will other presidential candidates get ambushed? How does the movement remain vibrant enough to ensure that the proposed changes become a reality?
On the flip side, the nearly nonexistent organizational structure has allowed numerous independent “Black Lives Matter” groups such as Newton’s NAAPB to arise and work for positive change on the racial injustice issues that the movement espouses, and this has energized and activated countless individuals who previously were passive observers.
If Black Lives Matter is to have the impact its activists demand through sit-ins, confrontational interactions with presidential candidates, peaceful protests, and sometimes volatile demonstrations, then the group needs to unite and organize to a more substantial degree than it does now.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s had many different groups, including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and more. These groups independently organized supporters and occasionally clashed, while promoting the same message of change.
Black Lives Matter could peter out similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Maybe it will organize its activists like the Tea Party has and have a noticeable impact on our government. Could Black Lives Matter Democrats become a significant force in the not too distant future?
The issues that Black Lives Matter wants to impact will not be solved overnight or in one election cycle. A sustained level of advocacy, organizing, and peaceful protesting needs to occur for a long period of time, and this cannot be achieved without BLM evolving into a more organized and focused movement.
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, August 12, 2015
“Don’t Let This Fester”: Hillary Clinton Needs To Address The Racist Undertones Of Her 2008 Campaign
Black Lives Matter, the advocacy group for black interests, has gotten the attention of the Democratic presidential candidates, who are reportedly scrambling to reach out to the movement. Even heavy favorite Hillary Clinton is getting in on it, addressing the movement in a Q&A session on Facebook, where she checked most of the right boxes.
DeRay McKesson, one of the movement’s leaders, wrote on Twitter that the post was “solid.” But he also noted that she had two days to work on it, and did not attend the liberal forum Netroots Nation, unlike her challengers Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, who flailed in front of activists from Black Lives Matter.
McKesson is right to be suspicious. Hillary Clinton’s record on race is not great. If she wishes to earn some trust on issues of racial justice, a good place to start would be with the distinctly racist undertones of her 2008 campaign against Barack Obama.
As the first primaries got underway in 2008, and Obama began to slowly pull ahead, the Clinton camp resorted to increasingly blatant race- and Muslim-baiting. It started in February, when Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama in a sermon. In a debate a couple days later, moderator Tim Russert repeatedly pressed Obama on the issue, who responded with repeated reassurances that he did not ask for the endorsement, did not accept it, and in fact was not a deranged anti-Semite. That wasn’t enough for Clinton, who demanded that Obama “denounce” Farrakhan, which he did.
About the same time, a picture of Obama in traditional Somali garb (from an official trip) then appeared on the Drudge Report, and Matt Drudge claimed he got it from the Clinton campaign. After stonewalling on the origin question, the campaign later claimed it had nothing to do with it. A Clinton flack then went on MSNBC and argued that Obama should not be ashamed to appear in “his native clothing, in the clothing of his country.”
Later, a media firestorm blew up when it was discovered that Obama’s Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright once delivered a sermon containing the words “God damn America.” In response, Obama gave a deft, nuanced speech on racial issues, but Clinton kept the issue alive by insisting she would have long ago denounced the man.
The late Michael Hastings, who covered Clinton’s campaign, described one instance of this strategy on the ground:
[Clinton supporter] Buffenbarger launched into a rant in which he compared Obama to Muhammad Ali, the best-known black American convert to Islam after Malcolm X. “But brothers and sisters,” he said, “I’ve seen Ali in action. He could rope-a-dope with Foreman inside the ring. He could go toe-to-toe with Liston inside the ring. He could get his jaw broken by Norton and keep fighting inside the ring. But Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali.” The cunning racism of the attack actually made my heart start to beat fast and my ears start to ring. For the first time on the campaign trail, I felt completely outraged. I kept thinking, “Am I misreading this?” But there was no way, if you were in that room, to think it was anything other than what it was. [GQ]
Then there was Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s campaign to that of Jesse Jackson’s unsuccessful run in 1988. The capstone came in May, when Hillary Clinton started openly boasting about her superior support from white voters.
The effort was not so blatant as George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad, but the attempt to play on racist attitudes through constant repetition and association was unmistakable — in addition to playing into right-wing conspiracy theories that Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa. It’s likely why in West Virginia — a state so racist that some guy in a Texas prison got 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2012 — Clinton won a smashing victory.
This brings us back to today’s presidential race. Many of the demands posed by activists focus on rhetorical gestures of support and solidarity (a notable feature of the Netroots confrontation last weekend). But this raises this issue of trust: A very charming, cynical person could simply promise support using the right words, win the election, then forget all about it.
Does the Hillary Clinton of 2008 sound like someone who’s genuinely committed to the cause of racial justice? If she has changed her views, now would be a good time to explain.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, July 23, 2015
Share This Blog
mykeystrokes.com- “The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton
- “Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump
- “Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter
- “We’re Not Post-Racial Yet”: The Demons Of Our Racist Past Still Haunt Us
- “Ghosts Of History”: Why America Recoils From Donald Trump
mykeystrokes.com 