“The Hypocrisy Goes Much Deeper”: As RNC Gathers, More Prominent GOP Members In Bed With Extremists
It’s only been a few weeks since we learned that majority whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) had spoken to a white supremacist group in 2002, and again the Republican Party has a scandal about race on its hands.
As the RNC gathers today in San Diego for its annual strategy meeting to draft plans for its future, particularly how it will improve its outreach to minorities, another prominent GOP lawmaker has been discovered to be a fan of white supremacist thinking.
Dave Agema, a member of the Republican National Committee from Michigan, republished an essay by the white nationalist publication American Renaissance in a New Year’s Eve Facebook post. The racist article, par for the course for American Renaissance, said “blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”
Agema reportedly found it “very enlightening.” Can that possibly be true?
Agema has since pulled the piece down, but he refuses to apologize or resign from the RNC. And this isn’t his first racist rodeo.
According to the National Journal, Agema has a well-documented history of making inflammatory and false remarks, such as that President Obama is a Muslim. The Journal points to another Agema Facebook faux pas. He apparently shared what he called an “eye opening” essay that posed the question: “Have you ever seen a Muslim do anything that contributes positively to the American way of life?”
At least in this case, some in the RNC have reacted appropriately by calling for Agema to resign or be removed. They include RNC head Reince Priebus and Michigan’s entire GOP delegation. That’s all well and very good, but where’s the outrage from Priebus or other prominent Republicans over Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to hold a prayer rally with the American Family Association (AFA)? Emails to Priebus’ and Jindal’s offices asking for comment were not returned.
On Jan. 24, Jindal, with AFA backing, will be praying at Louisiana State University in an event billed as “The Revival.” His partner, AFA, has defamed immigrants, the LGBT community and women. And just like American Renaissance, it has had horrible things to say about black people.
Let’s take a look at Jindal’s prayer partners.
- An AFA leader has said, “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.”
- The same staffer said African Americans “rut like rabbits” and women have no place in politics or the military.
- Another has argued that Hispanics are “socialists by nature” and come to the United States to “plunder” our country.
- And the group has repeatedly made the point that non-Christians are second-class citizens—“we are a Christian nation, and not a Jewish or Muslim one.” (Find a comprehensive look at AFA’s extremist statements and positions here).
Given a track record like that, I have to ask where’s the outrage from Jindal’s fellow Republicans? American Renaissance is clearly racist, but so are these statements about black people and Latinos. Shouldn’t they be condemned as well? And what about blaming gay people for the Holocaust?
So, if Agema is the big Republican elephant in the room stalking the GOP’s efforts to reach out to minorities, isn’t that true as well of any politician who is close to AFA?
Sadly the hypocrisy goes much deeper. As RNC Chair Priebus has berated Agema, rightly saying, “The tone and rhetoric from Agema is consistently offensive and has no place in politics or any rational conversation,” the chairman is also working closely with AFA.
At the end of this month, Priebus is leading an all expenses paid trip to Jerusalem for RNC members. So far, about 60 members (about 36 percent) of the RNC have accepted the offer, according to Haaretz.
And guess who is picking up the tab for this “incredible opportunity” Priebus is offering his fellow RNC members? You guessed right: the AFA.
By: Heidi Beirich, Hate Watch Blog, Southern Poverty Law Center, January 14, 2015
“This Is Progress?”: The Unbearable Whiteness Of Congress
Cue the confetti: The new Congress sworn in on Tuesday is the most diverse in our nation’s history!
That would truly be a milestone to celebrate—until you see what that record “diversity” actually means. Ready? The breakdown of the 114th Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male, and 92 percent Christian.
That’s really diverse if, say, you are comparing our new Congress to the white supremacist group House Majority Whip Steve Scalise once addressed. It’s like Congress is stuck in a time warp: While our calendars read 2015, theirs reads more like 1955.
Look, I don’t care if you are a liberal or a conservative. It’s impossible to make the claim that our Congress accurately reflects the demographics of our nation. And it’s not missing by a little but a lot. If Congress accurately reflected our nation on the basis of race, about 63 percent would be white, not 80 percent. Blacks would hold about 13 percent of the seats and Latinos 17 percent.
But what do we really see? The new Senate has only two black senators. That statistic is even more striking given that earlier this week the first black person ever elected to the Senate, Edward Brooke, was laid to rest. Brooke won his seat in 1966 and served two terms. How far has Congress really evolved on race when in 50 years it has gone from one black senator to two? (Even the arguably more democratic House is only at 10 percent black members.)
Latinos, the fastest growing minority group in America, are even more underrepresented in Congress. They hold 3 percent of the Senate and a little over 7 percent of the House.
And let’s look at religion. Congress is now 92 percent Christian, resembling more to a papal enclave than our religiously diverse nation. The latest Pew Poll found that nearly 20 percent of Americans identify as atheist, agnostic, or not being affiliated with any religion. Yet there’s only one member of Congress, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who openly acknowledges she’s not a member of any religious group.
OK, let’s put race, ethnicity, and religion aside and address the most glaring underrepresentation in Congress of any group: women. This Congress will welcome more women than ever before at 19 percent of the House and 20 percent of the Senate. So what percentage of America is female? It’s 51 percent.
Even internally in the House, women are not getting their fair shake. While 19 percent of the House is female, just one woman will get to chair one of its 20 committees.
There are various reasons—some rather complex, some rather base—why our Congress doesn’t come close to reflecting the demographics of our nation. One that affects all the groups is that Congress moves slowly, and I don’t mean just on passing legislation. Historically the reelection rate for members of Congress is in the area of 95 percent. The benefits of incumbency are quite potent, especially in the all-important area of raising campaign funds. This is likely the single biggest reason why you don’t see Congress evolve demographically more quickly. (Term limits could be a prescription to speed change along.)
Minority communities also have had to deal with the issue of “racial gerrymandering,” where congressional districts are designed either to dilute the strength of a minority community, known as “cracking,” or over-concentrate them, known as “packing.” While “packing” will lead to the guarantee of a few seats in Congress, it also can reduce the opportunities for minority candidates, says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the Latino group NALEO. Finding the “sweet spot” between packing and cracking, he says, is central to creating more districts that provide minorities the opportunity to be elected to Congress.
And then comes the issue of women in Congress. The United States now ranks 98th in the world for the percentage of women serving in its national legislature, behind Indonesia and Kenya.
Why are so few women serving in our Congress? Studies have offered us a few reasons, some contradictory. One found that women have less interest in seeking elected office, with 48 percent of the men surveyed having considered a career in politics but only 35 percent of women. Partly this was due to women receiving less encouragement to go into politics and having lower self-confidence about running for Congress.
But in the case of black women, another study found no lack of interest. Rather, black women are not recruited to run because party bigwigs view them as being less electable and less likely to raise the campaign dollars needed to mount an effective campaign than white women or men.
With all that said, representation of each of these respective communities has increased in the new Congress. But as Vargas noted, “Progress never comes fast enough.”
So what would happen if our Congress accurately, or at least more closely, reflected our nation’s demographics? Would our Congress be less dysfunctional? That feels like the old Catskills joke that ends with the punch line “It can’t get any worse!”
But people in the underrepresented groups might see Congress as truly being representative of who they are and their views, as opposed to seeing it as an institution still dominated by the old guard. That could (possibly) lead to a Congress that’s more responsive. And that’s good for all of us, regardless of our race, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 9, 2015
“Perpetuating Itself”: America’s War Machine Sells Fear And Loathing Beyond Ferguson; Black And Brown People Pay The Price
The War Machine is the violent nexus of military and economic forces that grinds us up to perpetuate itself. With politicians of all stripes in its pockets and buoyed by lobbyists, the War Machine is beyond the reach of civil government and easily tramples individual souls, especially when they inhabit bodies of color. War is a big, multi-trillion-dollar business, requiring the sales, construction and operation of guns, drones, missiles, governmental armies, private armies, public prisons, private prisons and the like.
While the War Machine has been operated most obviously overseas in places like the Middle East, and domestically behind bars, it is now increasingly clear that the War Machine is also operating on America’s streets.
The War Machine has always made for strange bedfellows. Even as the conflict in Afghanistan, America’s longest foreign war, ostensibly ends, America’s largest police department and its union are in sometimes open conflict against their civilian commander, supported by a right wing that normally hates public unions.
The NYPD’s beef with its chief? That Mayor Bill de Blasio merely said he had “the talk” about police that all parents of black boys have with their sons. My father had it with me, as did every parent of every black person I know. But the War Machine will accept no criticism, ever: not for torturing brown people overseas, nor for making brown children fear police at home.
Beware she who dares to speak out at such times. When a Fox affiliate selectively edits the words of Baltimore protester Tawanda Jones to make it sound as if she said “kill a cop” when she did not, it is an example of how the War Machine hates dissent. Speech feels as under assault now as it did after 9/11, because it’s one thing for the press to express its belief, however misguided, that the exercise of free speech isn’t warranted. But it should be another for government officials to declare if, when and how dissent is appropriate. In 2001, George W Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, once warned “all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do”; in 2014, de Blasio declared after the shooting of two police officers that it was time to “put aside political debates, put aside protests”. Protest and dissent scare the War Machine.
Moments of crisis are a prime time to sell fear, and “patriotic” policy, and guns. Demanding considerations of peace leading up to a foreign war threaten those sales. Demanding a consideration of the 1,100 people killed by American police last year, even after two police officers have been killed, may similarly threaten the standard narrative – and that’s why it’s so important for protesters to keep forcing this conversation, about real lives and real justice and real reform, right now.
Because Washington won’t. Our national consciousness may now be raised about the dangers of arming of our local police departments with military-grade weapons after citizens across the nation demanded that black lives, indeed, matter. Our eyes may have been opened to torture committed by our military. But neither the right nor the “left” in Washington have any plans to punish the torturers – nor stem the flow of military equipment intended for use against civilians into Ferguson, Brooklyn and beyond – anytime soon.
When I watched, with horror, as the mother of Antonio Martin realized live on Ustream that her son had just been shot by police, I thought to myself, “The War Machine will be gunning for her next.” It will blame her for being the cause of police violence against black bodies, and not examine the context in which that violence occurred. The War Machine does not want us as a society to ask of ourselves the difficult questions about why it is that black people, abroad and at home, have been kept in the margins and away from economic opportunity, employment, education and safety. It prefers that we maintain the status quo and uncritically support the state, no matter how violent and oppressive.
The War Machine will say, at best, that the answer to such violence against civilians is merely technological, because driving up the sale of body-cams and more guns is what it does so well. But, more likely, the War Machine will want to make an example of Antonio Martin’s mother: that she and her son are a good excuse for more surveillance of black bodies, even though we know over-policing does not reduce crime.
Of course, the War Machine doesn’t care particularly about black mothers or black women. The story of a deranged man from Georgia going on a shooting spree has been entirely about the death of two police officers in New York, and hardly at all about the shooting of Shaneka Thompson in Baltimore. Similarly, the War Machine doesn’t care especially about Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos as individuals; like Ismaaiyl Brinsley did, it just sees them as cops. To the War Machine, violence must repeat itself: that’s why those officers’ deaths are being heralded as an occasion to suspend dissent – as a moment of “grieving, not grievance” – and not as a time to question American violence overall.
The War Machine has always had an insatiable need for bodies of color from before the birth of this nation. The genocide of Native Americans, the Atlantic Slave trade of Africans, the conquest of Mexicans, the colonization of Filipinos and Hawaiians, the mass importation of Chinese workers subsequently denied citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act: the War Machine created and then expanded the size of the United States using non-white bodies, waging war against them, and making them second-class citizens (when it deigned to make them citizens at all). Though the 13th Amendment ended legal slavery, it did not end the War Machine’s assault on black people, which has simply morphed from slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, to modern day schools which are just as segregated, police violence, economic exploitation and mass incarceration. The War Machine has so effectively decimated the black community, for example, that for the few of us who do manage to get, say, an education, it is almost meaningless as a way to move up in the world.
The Black Lives Matter movement is about more than just justice for our deaths: it’s about the depreciation of black life in the service of accumulation of stuff for white people, from slavery to “security” to shopping. This status quo is protected, often violently, by police. And now as the War on Terror (allegedly) scales down, there is an oversupply of “stuff” used to commit violence in the name of quelling it – and an undersupply of violence to quell. The “ongoing slippage between policing and war that still visibly characterizes the present”, as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh recently observed, shouldn’t be seen as mere coincidence: it’s the War Machine coming home, and coming home as hungry as ever.
By: Steven W. Thrasher, The Guardian, January 5, 2014
“The Strategy Of Confederate Republicans”: I’m Glad That The GOP Has Decided To Come Out Of The Closet As Openly Racist
Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip-elect, appears to be surviving the flap over his appearance at a David Duke-organized event. It’s good to be able to welcome the New Year with a word of praise for the party I oppose. I’m glad that the GOP has decided to come out of the closet as openly racist.
The event itself has been misdescribed in the press as “white supremacist;” in fact, David Duke’s keynote speech didn’t even mention black-white issues, instead focusing on anti-Jewish themes. “Neo-Nazi” would give a much clearer picture of what EURO was really about.
Still – as even Erick Erickson has pointed out – there was never any doubt of what David Duke, the Klan Wizard, was about. He’s the kind of batsh*t-crazy racist who isn’t sure Jews are actually “white” (and, a generation or two ago, would have had the same doubts about the Irish and the Italians).
So what did Steve Scalise, aspiring Louisiana politician, have to say about David Duke?
The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.
Well, that couldn’t be clearer, could it? “The first and most important thing” is to get elected. Politicians who frankly campaign on their hatred of blacks and Jews can’t get elected. So voters who “care about” hating blacks and Jews need to find politicians like Steve Scalise, who “believes in” Duke’s message but won’t say so explicitly, because such politicians can get elected.
That sums up the current strategy of the Confederate Republicans about as clearly as I’ve ever heard it summed up: seek the votes of bigots by winking at them, and by pursuing policies that are hostile to African-American interests without being explicitly racist. So it’s entirely appropriate that Scalise should have been chosen for, and remain in, the House Republican leadership.
It’s also entirely appropriate, of course, for those who don’t approve of bigotry not to be taken in. Somebody needs to explain that slowly to the ADL.
By: Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at The University of California Los Angeles; Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, January 2, 2014
“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round”: Beyond Selma – Writing The Next Chapter In American Civil Rights History
In November 2012, I worked with the Obama campaign’s anti-voter suppression efforts in Florida. I was shocked when I saw that voters in largely Hispanic and African-American areas were forced to wait hours and hours to vote by design. The state had cut early voting from 14 to 6 days and added 11 constitutional amendments to the ballot (some written out in full) to make it more time consuming to vote such that one legislator compared the ballot to the Book of Leviticus. I also was told authorities did not deploy all available ballot boxes.
Tasked with encouraging voters to wait for over 3 hours until 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday, I was struck with how little needed to be done. They knew why they were waiting and that only made them more determined to vote. I was reminded of the song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round” and the voting rights marches in Selma during the Civil Rights era and thought how sad it is that here we stand nearly 50 years after Selma and African-Americans still had to fight for their right to vote.
The next year, the Supreme Court gutted the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act that enabled the Justice Department to block discriminatory voting restrictions in Shelby County v Holder. The Act had been reauthorized in 2006 without a single vote of opposition in the Senate, but in the Obama-era a bill to revive the provisions got nowhere last year despite bipartisan support.
The struggle in Selma is now on movie screens across America for viewers to relive the brutality of Bloody Sunday and the ultimate triumphant march that drew Americans from all races and faiths from across the nation to take a stand for freedom and against bigotry and hate.
In March, however, the world’s attention will once again return to the Edmond Pettus Bridge for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. It will be a tempered celebration because it has been a difficult two years for race relations in America. Obama’s reelection victory unleashed a torrent of racist hate across social media, then came the killings of Treyvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York and the divisions their cases brought.
More importantly, throughout the period we have steadily moved backwards on voting rights as states across the south and elsewhere took advantage of the Shelby County decision to enact a number of restrictive voting measures that are designed to suppress the African-American vote.
I have one resolution for 2015 — I’m going to Selma.
As a child of Generation Jones, we always looked up to our Baby Boomer brethren who marched for civil rights when we had no need to for the victory had been won. That victory is in jeopardy. I’m going to Selma.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner among others were killed for this most fundamental right — the right to vote. They cannot cry for justice, instead it is the duty of the living to do so for them. I’m going to Selma.
I do not expect a House of Representatives that has no shame over having a white supremacist in its leadership to listen to our pleas for action on voting rights legislation. I’m going to Selma.
Martin Luther King once said, “[h]istory will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” Similarly, Benjamin Franklin said that “[j]ustice will not be served until those who are as unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” I’m outraged and I’m going to Selma.
We are a generous nation that has come together to help those in need as we did after Katrina or to take a stand that we are one as we did after 9/11. The story of civil rights in America is not relegated to our history books or a movie but is still being written today. It is time to write the next chapter for civil rights in America. Once again we are called to take a stand for freedom and against bigotry and hate. I’m going to Selma.
By: Bennet Kelley, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 31, 2014
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