“The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.” - Gloria Steinem pic.twitter.com/1sfXRed4QQ
— Arielle Scarcella (@ArielleScarcell) July 8, 2020
Truth is the new ‘hate speech’ pic.twitter.com/6MoY1PcsEz
— Arielle Scarcella (@ArielleScarcell) July 14, 2020
They're allowed to celebrate this, but if I talk about it, I'm a racist conspiracy theorist...
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 16, 2020
#BlackLivesMatter is a racial hate movement promoted by Democrats who believe that it will help them win elections. The essential message of the movement’s propaganda is that all white people are evil racist oppressors. If any white person dares object to this hateful message, his objection will be cited as proof that he is a racist. The wave of criminal violence inspired by #BlackLivesMatter is not an accidental consequence of this propaganda; violent crime is the desired result because Democrats have embraced a radical “worse is better” mentality. The worse conditions become in the black community, the more motivativation there will be for black voters to go to the polls in November, and (because Democrats always get about 95% of the black vote) this increase in turnout will mean that Democrats win more elections...Still more.
Dishness lives. All we’re waiting for is you.https://t.co/X02Q5258iA— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 17, 2020
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here...RTWT and stay tuned!
President Trump’s faltering reelection campaign is dragging the Republican Senate down with him, giving Democrats their best hope in more than a decade of winning control of both houses of Congress and the presidency https://t.co/MhKKWEgiZy
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 18, 2020
CRANBERRY ISLES, Maine — President Trump’s faltering reelection campaign increasingly is dragging on the Republican Senate, giving Democrats their best hope in more than a decade of winning control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House.
Democrats now threaten Republican Senate incumbents in Georgia, Iowa and Montana — states that had seemed reliably red — in addition to Colorado and Arizona, where Democrats have had the advantage for months, and Maine, where GOP Sen. Susan Collins is facing the toughest election in her long career.
The challengers have been swamping Republican rivals in fundraising and moving ahead in polls, leading independent analysts to dial up their assessment of the Democrats’ chances.
“After Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, there’s a temptation to avoid making political projections,” wrote Nathan Gonzales, a nonpartisan analyst and editor of Inside Elections. “But one election result shouldn’t cause us to ignore the data. And right now, the preponderance of data points to a great election for Democrats, including taking control of the Senate.”
New campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission this week show that most Democratic Senate challengers out-raised their GOP rivals in the last three months — some by as much as 3 to 1.
In Georgia, where both Senate seats are up, polls have tightened so much that the Trump campaign and other GOP committees have begun advertising in a state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president or Senate in more than 20 years.
Even worse for incumbent Republicans: Their fate is largely in the president’s hands. The Trump-dominated political environment, turned sour for his party by his handling of the coronavirus crisis and the nationwide protests over racism, has essentially made the Senate’s state-by-state contests a single, nationalized campaign.
Republicans currently control the Senate 53 to 47. Democrats need a net gain of four seats for a majority, or three if Joe Biden wins the presidency. When the Senate is split 50-50, the vice president is the tiebreaker.
But Democratic ambitions have grown larger: Biden said this week he could see his party winning 55 seats. Many Republicans fear that could happen.
“Panic is gripping the Senate races,” said Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political strategist who is a vocal Trump critic. “A lot of candidates are in a really, really tough spot.”
One sign of how nationalized the Senate races have become: An analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics finds that a record 69% of money contributed to Senate candidates now comes from outside their states. That’s up from 59% in 2018, as donors across the country are treating individual races as a referendum on Trump and GOP control of the Senate.
Nowhere is the national profile of a race as high as here in Maine. Sara Gideon, the speaker of the state House who won the Democratic primary Tuesday, stands to gain about $4 million raised in a national fundraising drive for the benefit of whichever Democrat won the nomination to challenge Collins.
The incumbent is a rare Republican with a record of supporting abortion rights, but her vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite his opposition to abortion rights has drawn donations and attention to her race from coast to coast.
“We are following all the campaigns where there is a chance of tipping a seat to Democrats,” said Sonia Cairns, an 80-year-old Minneapolis retiree who is planning to donate to Gideon. “Of course I need to know more about Sara Gideon, but I want a Democrat to win that Senate seat.”
A Center for Responsive Politics analysis by senior researcher Doug Weber found that both parties saw a surge in out-of-state giving, but it was more pronounced for Democrats. Republicans pulled in 64% of their contributions from out of state; for Democrats it was 72%.
A big money advantage built on out-of-state support can be a shaky political foundation, warned Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the center.
“It’s great to raise money, but only voters can cast ballots,” she said...
Once a Virgo always a Virgo 😝🤘🏼
— Rhian Sugden (@Rhianmarie) July 16, 2020
(Pic is for @maycontaingirl ) pic.twitter.com/9mwkzONfyR
15 years ago this week a GOP chairman apologized for the party's role in racial polarization. There were many exit ramps on the road to Trump. https://t.co/dLZIJJ3Bsb via @bopinion— Francis Wilkinson (@fdwilkinson) July 15, 2020
It was 15 years ago this week that the Republican Party almost took an exit ramp on the long, dark highway from Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy to Donald Trump’s white nationalism.Still more, FWIW.
On July 14, 2005, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and issued a mea culpa. “By the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out,” Mehlman said. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
Mehlman went on to make a case that Democrats were taking Black voters for granted and that Republicans offered policies, on school choice and more, that could help Black families. As President George W. Bush’s emissary, he had some credibility. Bush had won about 4 in 10 Hispanic votes and had recently appointed Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, succeeding Colin Powell. After Barack Obama, they remain the two highest-ranking Blacks in federal government history.
Weeks later, the exit ramp that Bush and Mehlman had envisioned was washed away by Hurricane Katrina. Government incompetence and inaction (sound familiar?) led to harrowing results for hundreds of thousands along the Gulf Coast. New Orleans was the epicenter of failure, neglect and suffering. The federal abandonment of a majority-Black city made a travesty of Republican political outreach.
Yet even that wasn’t the last chance. In 2008, the party nominated Senator John McCain for president. McCain, like Bush, represented a heavily Hispanic state in the Southwest. In a 2002 memoir, McCain had excoriated himself for pretending, while campaigning in South Carolina in 2000, that he didn’t consider the Confederate flag offensive.
Given the fallout from Bush’s cataclysmic failures, McCain didn’t have much of a chance. But he made things worse — subverting his campaign by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. By 2010, the Palinized GOP was waging a race-based culture war while its congressional leaders indulged racist tropes about the first Black president.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the Republican Party seemed eager to shed its racist baggage. By the second decade, it was adding to its stock.
John Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College, has examples of Republican National Committee “outreach” to Blacks going back four decades. “When I was working at the RNC, Lee Atwater established an Outreach Division,” said Pitney, referring to the legendary South Carolina political operative who had helped George H.W. Bush win the White House. “It was an expensive flop. Among other things, African-American activists remembered the 1988 campaign and blamed him for exploiting racial fears over the crime issue.”
Despite decades of failure, the exit ramp seems always there for the taking. In 2013, the RNC produced an “autopsy” of the party’s loss in 2012, which called for the GOP to become more inclusive. “The pervasive mentality of writing off blocks of states or demographic votes for the Republican Party must be completely forgotten,” it stated. The Tea Party wing of the party rebelled; the report was denounced.
In 2016, Republican voters got yet another chance. They could’ve voted for Jeb Bush, John Kasich or Marco Rubio, each of whom offered a vision of a party capable of growing beyond its white nationalist base. Instead, they chose a candidate enthusiastically endorsed by former Klansman David Duke. “Smart GOP politicians have longed for the exit ramps, but GOP primary voters always insist that they stay on the road to perdition,” Pitney said.
How many more exit ramps do Republicans get? As Ronald Brownstein points out in a data-driven essay on Trump’s “neo-Nixonian” 2020 campaign: “Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls, they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.”
What Brownstein describes is an American enlightenment that viscerally rejects Republican resentment and chauvinism. The GOP embrace of Trump has further narrowed the party’s already restricted access to the growing segments of the American electorate. It is deeply unpopular among voters under 40 who will determine the future of the U.S. ...
Delayed by the virus, tax day is almost here. This is what you need to know. And be prepared to wait if you're owed a refund. The I.R.S. has a huge backlog. https://t.co/lSEgYrBE7M
— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) July 10, 2020
OAKLAND, Calif. — When California shut down its economy in March, it became a model for painful but aggressive action to counter the new coronavirus. The implicit trade-off was that a lot of upfront pain would help slow the spread, allowing the state to reopen sooner and more triumphantly than places that failed to act as decisively.Still more.
But the virus had other plans, and now the state’s economy is in retrenchment mode again. For the nation, this means that an important center of its output — a magnet of summer tourism and home to the technology and entertainment industries along with the world’s busiest port operation — is unlikely to regain momentum soon when growth is needed most
For the state, it means a progressive agenda predicated on the continuation of good times will be hampered as governments move from expansion to cuts. Voters had mostly been open to paying for expanding services and priorities like affordable housing, but they seem to be turning wary of new taxes.
California has always been a boom-and-bust economy, so while nobody was predicting a global pandemic that would tear through the service sector, the prospect of struggle was not unforeseen. Jerry Brown, the four-term governor, left office in 2018 with a multibillion-dollar state surplus and unemployment headed to a record low. But instead of departing on a triumphant high note, he said after his final budget presentation, “What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline and recession.”
His more upbeat successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, came in promising to expand health care and tackle the state’s homeless problem. Yet in his inaugural speech, Mr. Newsom warned, “Even in a booming economy, there is a sense that things are not as predictable as they once were.”
Indeed. Unemployment, which was 3.9 percent in February, the lowest on record, shot up to 16.3 percent by May, compared with 13.3 percent nationwide. Container traffic at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is down about a third from a year ago, while many beaches and attractions like Disneyland were closed on July Fourth and are delaying their reopening plans. Most dispiriting is the sense that even after politicians made tough calls that Californians largely supported, the economy seems no better off.
Andrew Snow was supposed to be ramping up by now. Mr. Snow, who owns the Golden Squirrel, a restaurant and bar in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, cut his staff of 28 people to two after the pandemic hit. But thanks to takeout orders, a new line of business selling groceries and the resumption of outdoor service, he recently brought two back, and was set to bump that figure to six or eight by the July Fourth weekend.
A few weeks ago, those plans seemed sound. Back then, on the sunny Friday afternoon when outdoor dining in Alameda County was allowed to resume, the Golden Squirrel’s patio tables, about eight feet apart, were full of patrons enjoying their first trip out for a drink since shelter-in-place orders took effect. That weekend the surrounding College Avenue retail strip was busy with masked, distanced, Purell-doused dining that to many felt borderline decadent after months of being cooped up.
Now business is slowing again, as California is averaging about 8,000 new cases a day, about triple the level a month ago. Mr. Snow’s plans to bring back workers over the holiday weekend didn’t come to pass, and he has put further hiring on hold.
“People are scared,” he said in an interview. “The math for having more people doesn’t work out anymore.”
Exactly how and how quickly the state should have reopened, and who is to blame for the backslide, are unlikely to ever be resolved. What the result means for the economy is more time in the dark, more need among the poorest citizens and more drain on the taxes required to support them.
The U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast, which has been prognosticating California’s economic trajectory since 1952, expects that the state and national economies won’t fully recover until “well past 2022.” In the state as in the nation, the worst declines will be in the leisure and hospitality industries, while higher-wage areas like technology will be better off, a dynamic that will make financial inequality worse.
Even if the country avoids a second wave of infections in the fall, and a vaccine is made and distributed relatively quickly, that won’t keep many businesses from failing. Others will shift from investing in new equipment and employees to paying debt and shoring reserves. State and local budgets could take years to recover their pre-coronavirus levels of spending, even with federal help.
“The impacts will disproportionately affect lower-income Californians, while the more rapid growth will be happening in technology and construction, which are higher income,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast.
The longer the pandemic’s disruption, the more likely it is that some jobs will never come back. For instance, a number of restaurants had already switched to counter service, even for fairly high-end meals, to avoid the need for servers who have a hard time affording housing in big cities. Now virtually every restaurant in California is operating around counter service or delivery, and some may not change back...
Trump at Mount Rushmore: Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles. https://t.co/kp0dgTD7wJ via @WSJ
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) July 6, 2020
Keep reading."At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war."President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.
— Los Angeles Times
"Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message."
— New York Times
"Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore."
— Associated Press
"At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day."
— Washington Post
Dark? In most respects Mr. Trump’s speech was a familiar Fourth of July ode to liberty and U.S. achievement that any President might have delivered in front of an American landmark. “No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation,” he said.
Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central ideal of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” As he rightly put it, “these immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom” that included the abolition of slavery more than a half century later.
Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. also believed this to be true, and Mr. Trump cited them both, as he did other American notables black and white, historic and more recent. There was not a hint of racial division in his words except for those who want to distort their meaning for their own political purposes. In any other time this paean to American exceptionalism would have been unexceptional.
But this year even Mr. Trump’s speech backdrop, Mount Rushmore with its four presidential faces, is politically charged. Each of those Presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt—is under assault for ancient sins against modern values, as progressives seek to expunge their statues and even their names from American life. Mr. Trump’s great offense against the culturally ascendant progressives was to defend these presidential legacies.
Divisive? Mr. Trump’s speech was certainly direct, in his typical style. But it was only divisive if you haven’t been paying attention to the divisions now being stoked on the political left across American institutions. Mr. Trump had the temerity to point out that the last few weeks have seen an explosion of “cancel culture—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”
Describing this statement of fact as “divisive” proves his point. Newspaper editors are being fired over headlines and op-eds after millennial staff revolts. Boeing CEO David Calhoun last week welcomed the resignation of a communications executive for opposing—33 years ago when he was in the military—women in combat. The Washington Post ran an op-ed this weekend urging that the name of America’s first President be struck from Washington and Lee University.
Any one of these events would be remarkable, but together with literally thousands of others around the country they represent precisely what Mr. Trump describes—a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance. And he called for Americans not to cower but to oppose this assault...
Great piece by Wilfred McClay in @FDRLST. It is impossible to see how truly exceptional this country is without learning about the history we rose above.. https://t.co/rJlwzB1pL9
— Emily Domenech (@ehdomenech) July 6, 2020
Blonde-rata! Are you loving @emrata's new look as much as we are? pic.twitter.com/WqQQLzYdIR
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) July 1, 2020
Emrata is a work of art in BODY PAINT. 😍 https://t.co/Z0R8j8pI58 pic.twitter.com/gBhTX5uVkJ
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) May 30, 2020
The police killing of George Floyd and resulting protests have led white Americans to reckon with racism more vigorously than at any moment in recent history. https://t.co/tpRqGetRha
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 28, 2020
GUALALA, Calif. — Mike Sexton is white and a Republican who lives in an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, where many neighbors back President Trump and some work in law enforcement. Rage wells up in his voice as he says that George Floyd, a Black man, was “basically lynched.”
Shawn Ashmore is an independent who lives nearby in east Dallas. He’s using Floyd’s killing to teach his young sons uncomfortable lessons about the privileges their family enjoys because they’re white — how, for instance, they’ll never fear for their lives during an encounter with the police the way some Black men do.Still more.
Lisa Joakimides lives in rural Northern California and considers herself a well-meaning Democrat. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Joakimides, who is white, convinced herself that America was finally making amends for its history of mistreating Black people.
As Joakimides got down on both knees to honor Floyd at a roadside demonstration in early June, she wondered how she could have been so naive.
Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, captured in witness videos showing then-Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, has led white Americans to call out racism against Black Americans more vigorously than at any moment in recent memory. And it’s prompting many white people to think more deeply about the color of their own skin.
Why now? Chicago-based sociology professor Jacqueline Battalora believes that after three wearying months of social isolation and economic upheaval brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Floyd’s killing was yet another blow to the illusions of safety, security and equality that many white people harbor about America.
“The police are fair; institutions are fair — white people have been so happy to believe those things,” said Battalora, a former police officer and author of “Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today.” “What this signals is that a good chunk of white people now have some recognition that something’s not right.”
For Sexton, Ashmore and Joakimides, the killing of Floyd and outpourings of rage have forced them to see that expressions of sympathy and displays of solidarity with Black people are only the beginning. America won’t change its racist ways, they say, unless white people use this period of protest and reflection to change, too.
What’s different this time, Sexton said, is that white people have gained a better sense of where that outrage comes from, and how insulated they are from the racial injustices that provoke it.
Sexton, 45, said he can’t sit on the sidelines of the protest movement, or shy away from the national conversation about racism and police brutality, simply because he votes red instead of blue.
“It’s not right versus left,” he said. “It’s right versus wrong.”
Sexton said he wasn’t oblivious to racial discrimination. Every Black person he knows has shared stories of being followed and stopped for no reason by police.
But the video of Floyd’s killing, which captured him crying out “I can’t breathe” and calling out for his dead mother, made Sexton realize the powerlessness and sheer panic that Black people often experience in the presence of officers.
He said it’s crazy that it took so long for him and other white people to fully grasp that horror of police brutality, “but for us, we wouldn’t have understood were it not for the video.”
“Now,” he said, “we’re listening.”
Sexton, a salesman, recently organized a rally for police accountability in a high school parking lot near where he lives in Grapevine, Texas. It drew about 200 demonstrators, most of them white.
Members of the clergy and Grapevine Police Chief Mike Hamlin attended. One of the speakers was a Trump supporter.
A Black teen told the crowd that she was afraid to bring children into the world because she feared she wouldn’t be able to protect them from law enforcement or the country’s racism.
“That broke my heart into a thousand pieces,” Sexton said.
After weeks of protest, opinions about police violence appear to be shifting, but there’s still a large gap between white and Black people about whether it represents a national crisis.
In an AP-NORC poll taken in mid-June, fewer than half of white respondents — 39% — believe that police violence against the public is either an extreme or very serious problem, compared with 80% of Black respondents.
Those numbers did show a shrinking of the gulf between the way white and Black Americans view the issue. The same poll was taken in the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, and then only 19% of white people said police violence was an extreme or serious problem, compared with 73% of Black people.
“It created this opening for white people,” Battalora said of Floyd‘s killing. “But that’s different from saying we ‘get it.’ That will be more of a process.”
It remains to be seen whether the spectacle in recent days of white people locking hands to protect Black demonstrators from riot police, or taking part in the toppling of monuments to Confederate soldiers and slaveholders, represents a turning point...
The Editorial Board: If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party. https://t.co/O0A91qmF9f
— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) June 23, 2020
Anger at the killing of George Floyd has spurred useful reflection about race and perhaps some important police reform. But the political and cultural forces have transformed in recent weeks into something far less healthy—a ferocious campaign of political conformity sweeping across American artistic, educational, business and entertainment institutions.RTWT.
This coercive cultural turn threatens to devour what remains of America’s civic comity and push durable social progress on race and politics out of reach.
***
We describe this as a Jacobin moment because it has the fervor and indiscriminate judgment of the revolutionary mind. The guillotine isn’t in use, but the impulse is the same to destroy careers, livelihoods and reputations. The wave of resignations, firings, disavowals and forced apologies at institutions large and small is moving so fast it is difficult to keep track...
Social comity in a polarized society will not be achieved through coercion and struggle sessions. If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party.
