Put down that ‘woke’ hammer; blaming whitey for everything isn’t the solution

If all that you have is a “woke” hammer, then everything looks like a fucking nail. And if you hate whitey enough, you can blame whitey for everything — even five black cops murdering a young black man in a city run largely by black people.

As I indicated in my last post, a central problem that I have with “woke”-ism is that not only does it reduce all of our sociological problems to race and racism, but it also simply reverses the racism of the past; in the past, it was white people good and black people bad, and in today’s topsy-turvy, “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s black people good and white people bad.

We’re not going by character or conduct — but only by race. Which is — I can’t say it enough — racist.

Even though Tyre Nichols was murdered by five black cops, the “woke” media are falling over each other and twisting themselves into fucking pretzels to find a way to blame Nichols’ murder on anti-black white racism nonethefuckingless.

To be clear, anti-black white racism is indeed the background in which the United States of America was founded, and of course it remains as part of the American backdrop. (Also, of course, there is an ugly history of white racism against Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, et. al. Historically in the United States, whites even have hated other whites, such as how the Irish were discriminated against by other, non-Irish whites.)

However, try using this background racism as your criminal “defense” in a court of law. (Seriously, good luck with that.)

No, in a court of law, you are responsible for your own fucking conduct. The law does not even attempt to sort out how much of your criminal behavior is or is not because of systemic racism.*

An example of the “woke” media that I mentioned above is The Washington Post piece titled “Black Memphis Police Spark Dialogue on Systemic Racism in the U.S.”

If you click on the links naming the three authors of the piece, you’ll see from their photos that all of them look like they just crawled out from their collegiate “safe space” yesterday.

Not to side too much with the Repugnican-fascists, but methinks that today’s young “reporters” indeed have been indoctrinated with “woke”-ism.

To be clear, we need to talk about systemic racism. It’s a thing. It’s been with us Americans for a very long time and it will remain with us for some time to come.

But it’s intellectually lazy, if not also intentionally intellectually dishonest, to think that we can ascribe everything to systemic racism. Again, when all that you have is a “woke” hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Not to pick on The Washington Post; for the most part I think that their reporting and analysis are fairly solid, but can we please please please have some older people — you know, people with some actual life experience — doing more of the reporting than newly minted college grads? (I get it that younger people will work for a lot less money than older people who know when they’re not being paid what they’re worth, but Jesus fuck.)

The aforementioned Post article does contain some useful information — information that contradicts its own headline, actually.

It quotes an Ayanna Robinson saying that “one of the major reasons she thought many people seemed more subdued in response to the Nichols death was that the five officers charged in beating him are Black. If the officers had been White, [she said,] ‘All hell would have broken loose. The city would have been in war.'”

Yup. That’s pretty much what I said yesterday.

The aforementioned Post article also notes:

The Memphis Police Department, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is 58 percent Black, the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64 percent Black population. Unlike in several recent high-profile police brutality cases, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is Black, and other officials acted swiftly in firing, arresting and charging the Memphis officers in advance of the release of video footage.

So the Memphis Police Department is led by a black woman and 58 percent of its officers are black. It sounds to me like blacks pretty much run the Memphis Police Department.

And that’s fine by me, since the city is 64 percent black; a police department should resemble the city in which it operates.

But how in the fucking fuck can we contort ourselves enough to assert, with straight faces, that even though five black cops in a majority-black police department in a majority-black city led by a black police chief brutally murdered a young black man, it nonetheless was because of whitey?

How about addressing toxic masculinity? How about addressing authoritarianism? How about addressing police brutality?

Oh, we can (and probably will) continue to ignore those problems and still find interesting ways to make everything all about and only about race and racism (which, usually under “woke”-ism, can be perpetrated only by white people, of course — by definition).

But if we do that — if we don’t put down our hammer that’s only in search of “racist” nails and pick up some other tools for fucking once — it’s clear that only more black people are going to die at the hands of cops (cops of all races).

What does it say about us that rather than seek real solutions, we’d rather just knee-jerkingly, “woke”-ly label everything “white racism” — and just be done with it already?

P.S. Also, of course, the “woke” “argument” that the five black cops who killed Tyre Nichols all were just more or less hypnotized by systemic anti-black white racism strips them of their agency. Do we think so lowly of black men that we believe that they have no agency, no free will, but that they are mere puppets of their societal background?

Is that really our “argument”? Because that sounds not only incredibly condescending, but also ironically racist, to me.

—

*I know this firsthand; I was an alternate juror on a murder trial in which the defense attorney, who was incredibly lame, tried to claim that his black defendant, on trial for the murder of another black man, was there in the courtroom, being tried for murder, because of racism.

The tactic failed spectacularly. (The defendant was found guilty and is now in prison, by the way; as an alternate juror I didn’t get to weigh in on the verdict, as no regular juror had to drop out, but had I participated in the verdict, I’d have deemed him guilty, as the state’s case against him was strong.)

Why Memphis REALLY is different

Street surveillance video captured the savage beating death of a young black man, Tyre Nichols, by five black cops earlier this month in Memphis, Tennessee. The young black man had tried to flee from the police after they had stopped him for alleged reckless driving, but the information that we have thus far indicates that he posed no serious physical threat to them.

The Atlantic recently ran a commentary by Juliette Kayyem, who worked in the Barack Obama administration, titled “Why Memphis Is Different.”

And while I don’t disagree with most of her arguments — she correctly cites some of the smaller factors as to “why Memphis is different” — there is a glaring omission in her piece.

Kayyem writes:

… But as Friday night [the night of the day that the police videos of the killing of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols were released] unfolded, the protests remained peaceful; news reports showed Americans in various cities righteously and nonviolently demanding justice. We have witnessed many peaceful protests in response to police violence before, but there was one noticeable difference this time around: Rollout of the video footage seemed highly choreographed.

By the time protesters were chanting in the streets, the five officers who had beaten Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, had already been charged with second-degree murder. By the time the video footage of the attack was released, the anger and dismay had already been predicted; law-enforcement and political leaders had issued statements preparing the public for some of the worst police violence this nation has seen. The Memphis police chief likened Nichols’s beating to that of Rodney King in 1991. These officials were right: The footage was brutal, at times unbearable, with Nichols appearing not to resist the officers as they repeatedly struck him. All of this reveals the sad fact that, because of the sheer number of times Americans have now confronted videos of police officers killing Black citizens, public officials have gotten better at managing the shock. …

Again, I agree with most of this, and I agree with Kayyem’s assertion that “the quick firing of the five police officers involved, even before criminal charges were filed, and before the videos were made public … rarely happens, but it is the correct response when the facts are impossible to defend.”

But what Kayyem and others who are “woke” don’t want to talk about is that in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, the race of the cop or cops is what matters most when a black person is killed by a cop or cops.

Indeed, take the seminal case of Michael Brown.

The blatant lie quickly spread that in August 2014, young black man Michael Brown had just been walking in his neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, minding his own business, when a white cop accosted Brown only because of Brown’s race.

The big lie was that Brown put his hands up in surrender, and the white cop just shot him anyway — because Brown was black.*

The Eric Holder U.S. Department of Justice report on the Michael Brown case, which was released in March 2015, tells a whole different story: “Gentle giant” Michael Brown, in actuality, had stolen cigarillos from a storekeeper and also had physically roughed up the storekeeper (this was caught on the store’s surveillance camera).

It was these criminal actions of Brown that drew the police presence to him in the first place.

When the cop — who was (and probably still is…) white — responded to the report of a black male who had stolen cigarillos and saw Brown walking with cigarillos in his hand, he then of course confronted Brown.

Brown responded not by cooperating with the cop — but by trying to take the cop’s gun from him. (Because that always ends well…) And that is why Brown was shot to death by the white cop.

These actual events are quite a different story from the “Hands up — don’t shoot!” myth and meme that immediately came out of the Brown episode. (Repeat a lie early and often, and it easily can become “history.”)

Why do I rehash the myth of Michael Brown?

To prove a point: It was so fucking important to the black community of Ferguson and elsewhere within the United States to turn the Brown case into yet another “example” of white-on-black persecution that the fucking facts of what actually had happened on that fateful day that Michael Brown, who was 18 years old, made a series of poor decisions that ultimately led to his own death, were wholly dispensable.

Making Michael Brown a proxy-martyr in the war between whites and blacks trumped all else.

Tyre Nichols’ death is much more horrific than Brown’s. Why? Because while Nichols had the shit beaten out of him by five cops, there is no report or evidence that Nichols did anything like Brown did, such as to try to relieve a police officer of his gun. If I tried to relieve a cop of his or her gun, I wouldn’t expect it to end well. I wouldn’t expect, however, to be beaten to death by five cops when I posed no actual serious harm to them.

So why no rioting, looting, vandalism, etc. in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death?

Easy answer: Because the five cops who participated in his death are all black. (And also, of course, because the police chief of Memphis is a black woman.)

Nichols’ death by cop doesn’t have the crucial element in it for “woke”sters to be able to exploit it: white cop(s) kill(s) black man.

If just one of the five cops who participated in Nichols’ slow murder had been white, I’m pretty sure that the outcome would have been different.

And that’s because of racism.

Yup — when it’s not what one does, but when it’s what one’s race is, that matters, there is a word for that: racism.

A white cop shoots a black man to death right as the black man is trying to take the cop’s gun away from him: We must act out on that!

Five black cops slowly kill a black man by beating him savagely. Well, the cops were black… We’re not going to act out on that…

Not just to pick on black Americans: Two older Asian men (not the usual suspects) recently committed two separate mass shootings of mostly Asian individuals in California. Eighteen people were killed in the two mass shootings, some of them Latino, but most of them Asian.

Has the Asian American community expressed outrage over these mass killings? No — because they were committed by members of their own racial group.

Hey, don’t fucking attack me for stating what is obvious but unpleasant; instead, ask why all that we really care about in these killings is the race of the perpetrators.

Ask why we turn interracial killings into proxy battles in our ongoing “woke” race wars — and why we so easily shrug off intraracial killings. Ask why we think that it’s A-OK to be killed by a member of our own race, but that it’s an unfathomable injustice to be killed by a member of another race.

This is the central problem that I have with “woke”-ism: It used to be that, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, the ideal sociopolitical situation is that we’re all judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. (And I’d include our conduct as a part of our character, as our character — or lack thereof — dictates our conduct.)

Under “woke”-ism, the snake is devouring its own tail; under “woke”-ism, things have gone so ridiculously far that things have returned to what we were trying to avoid in the first place: in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s not character or conduct that matters — it’s only race that matters.

This was something that we’d more or less collectively decided decades ago is wrong — yet incredibly dystopianly, it’s A-OK today.

P.S. No, I haven’t forgotten George Floyd. As I wrote at the time of his murder, he was murdered by a cop — a white cop (to the extent that that matters, and in this case it more likely than not matters to some degree) — and I supported the protestors, even when some of their tactics would be deemed by “polite” society to be “extreme.” (This is not to say that I agree with everything that every protestor or “protestor” did anywhere in the nation using George Floyd’s murder as the pretext.)

I long have believed that you have to take every killing of a civilian by a police officer on a case-by-case basis, based upon the facts (as best as we can ascertain them; video surveillance certainly helps when it exists).

It’s mentally easier, I suppose, to just look at the race of those involved in each police incident, and make a snap judgment based primarily or even solely on the race(s) of the individuals involved. Which is, of course, racist.

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*I don’t capitalize “black” or “white”; that’s another smug, “woke” contrivance, like “Latinx,” that I’m not on board with. Words aren’t actually magic, and we don’t actually help anyone merely by using magic words; we only feel more smug and sanctimonious when we use magic, “woke” words. (Virtue signaling is fun! Actually doing anything for anyone else is not!)

Will the ‘docu-drama’ harm Biden?

One of these two things is different from the other…

It is politically unfortunate for President Joe Biden that he has had classified documents all the way from his vice presidency in his possession, especially when Biden, according to The Washington Post, “voiced disbelief during an interview with CBS News’ ’60 Minutes’ about how something like that [former “President” Pussygrabber’s unlawful possession of classified documents] could happen — how anyone, in [Biden’s] words, ‘could be that irresponsible.'”

The special counsels who have been appointed to separately investigate former “President” Pussygrabber’s refusal to return classified documents (and his lying about no longer possessing classified documents) — which resulted in the wholly appropriate little FBI visit to his gaudy stucco fortress in Florida in August — and President Biden’s stupid possession of classified documents, which he ‘fessed up to, need to do their work.

In the meantime, will this “docu-drama,” as I saw one website put it, hurt Biden politically?

I don’t think so.

Of course the mouth-breathing knuckle draggers were going to falsely equate Pussygrabber’s criminal refusal to return classified documents and his criminal lying (perjury) about no longer possessing classified documents to Biden’s apparent negligence in returning classified documents.

There is no evidence thus far that Biden committed anything other than negligence, which still is punishable under the law where it comes to the possession and safekeeping of classified documents — but there is, as the editorial cartoonist suggests above, a mountain of evidence that Pussygrabber criminally possessed classified documents that he not only knew he had, but that he staunchly refused to return and lied to the federal government that he no longer possessed. (We know that he was lying, of course, because the FBI found the classified documents that he had claimed that he didn’t still have in his tacky little castle.)

Thing is, those making a mountain out of Biden’s classified-documents brouhaha never were going to vote for Biden or for any other Democrat for president anyway.

Those of us who are sane know that while of course Biden never should have possessed any classified documents — and that he should face any legal consequences for that apparent negligence — what Pussygrabber did concerning the possession of classified documents was, as his usual acts always have been, criminal. (Indeed, it’s quite unusual for the FBI to come a-callin’ if you truly have done nothing illegal.)

The House Repugnicans of course are going to add this latest docu-drama to their pile-on of Joe Biden, but, again, none of the Repugnicans’ supporters ever were going to vote for Biden should he run again in 2024 anyway (or for any other Democrat for president), and I think that the truly independent voters (voters who aren’t actually Repugnican at heart but who call themselves “independent”), come time to vote for president in November 2024, are going to be thinking about their personal socioeconomic situations, and not about the fact that Biden once had classified documents in his possession and voluntarily returned them.

And actually, the House Repugnicans’ fervent “work” in “investigating” (that is, relentlessly attacking and smearing) the Biden administration for the next two years — instead of lifting a fucking finger to substantively help the average American — should ensure that they lose the House come January 2025.

Indeed, the Repugnican-fascists attacked President Bill Clinton relentlessly in 1998, trying to destroy his presidency (this was over a blowjob that he had lied about, a “crime” that pales by comparison to the multiple crimes of Pussygrabber, who as “president” was a fucking mob boss).

The House Repugnicans impeached Clinton, but the U.S. Senate acquitted him, and because the American voters were so put off by the Repugnicans’ wholly political, bullshit, self-serving attack on Clinton, the House Repugnicans lost five seats in the November 1998 election.

I fully expect that for the next two years, the House Repugnicans will have those coke-filled orgies that former Repugnican U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn spoke about — only those orgies will happen right out in the open, right on the House floor, and they’ll be fueled by ignorance and hatred and spite and rank political opportunism rather than by coke (although maybe by actual coke as well…).

And, again, I fully expect that as a result of this, the Repugnicans will lose control of the House come January 2025. I mean, the American voters just fucking told the Repugnicans in November that they — we — are beyond sick and tired of the cray-cray, the self-serving politicking and the mean-spiritedness; as a result of their toxic politics, in the November elections the Repugnicans got only a bare majority in the House — nothing like a “red wave” — and the Democrats got one more senator in the U.S. Senate.

As for President Biden, if you loathe Pussygrabber, as I do, as I loathe all fascists, people think that you must adore Biden.

Anyone who has read me for the past several years knows that I’ve never been big on Biden. I accept him as the duly elected president, unlike Pussygrabber, who not only lost the popular vote in 2020, but who had lost it also in 2016, and who thus never was a legitimate president to me, since a majority of the American voters never fucking voted for him.

But Biden wouldn’t have become president had his DINO establishment buddies, including Pete Buttiboy and Amy “Voice Like Fingernails Across a Chalkboard” Klobuchar and fossil Jim “Kingmaker” Clyburn, not helped him to torpedo Bernie Sanders’ 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, so do I much care whether the House Repugnicans now successfully torpedo Biden?

No; it would feel an awful lot like Biden’s karmic return.

And I’d be fine with another viable Democrat running for president in 2024 instead of Biden; if Biden doesn’t run and Bernie Sanders runs again (Bernie has said that he wouldn’t rule out running again in 2024 if Biden doesn’t run), I’d support Bernie again (the third time might be the charm!)

So no, were the Biden docu-drama actually to induce Biden not to seek re-election, that wouldn’t necessarily be a win for the Repugnicans; in the end, that might actually ultimately be a good thing for the Democrats and for the nation.

But the House Repugnicans are too fucktarded, I think, to be able to bring down Biden over the next two years.

Oh, of course they’ll try — and they’ll fail spectacularly, only further harming their own “party” in the process, because, being fucktards, they never fucking learn from their own mistakes.

This is the Repugnicans’ problem

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California has the right idea: Kick back and enjoy this shit show.

It’s hard to keep up, but thus far it’s been three days of voting and 11 votes in which Repugnican U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy has not been selected as the new House speaker.

Again, I’d known that there were five Repugnican holdouts, but in the 11th vote today, 20 House Repugnicans voted for someone other than McCarthy and one House Repugnican voted “present,” essentially voting against McCarthy for a total of 21 anti-McCarthy votes.

Even if McCarthy manages to temporarily satisfy these savages with some deal to ultimately become speaker, the next two years in the House are going to be nothing but chaos and gridlock — as was entirely predictable even before the circus of the last few days.

In a nutshell: The Repugnicans cannot govern. Or won’t. Can’t and/or won’t, though, the result is the same.

I expect the Repugnicans to continue to implode over the next two years, and although I’ve never been excited over Joe Biden — I’m still a Berniecrat — if Biden runs for a second term, it’s all his, and the Democrats will take back the House come January 2025, too.

In the meantime, the Repugnicans’ meltdown, if it is protracted, as it easily could be, might spill over into other elements and functions of our nation’s governance, but first and foremost, this is a Repugnican Party problem. This is not our problem. The extinction of the Repugnican Party would be best for the nation anyway, so there is no good reason to try to prevent it.

The Repugnicans invited in the cray-cray, and now they have to deal with the cray-cray. The crazy chickens have come home to roost, and they only want to burn the henhouse down.

In a word, this is karma.

P.S. Even former “President” Pussygrabber has lost control of his zombies; he has asked them to vote for McCarthy, but they’re not listening to him, yet another sign that Pussygrabber has lost his power — which you tend to do when you lost your last election.

The circus in the House begins

ABC News image

If Repugnican U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy looks like he’s lost among his fellow stupid white men, it probably is because he is. Today was the first time in 100 years that the new House speaker was not chosen on the first vote, and the House cannot conduct any business until after a speaker is chosen.

It widely had been reported that five Repugnican U.S. representatives were dead-set against voting for Kevin McCarthy as the new House speaker, yet thus far today, McCarthy lost the first two votes for speaker — with 19 House Repugnicans defecting both times.

McCarthy always has struck me as a big-enough asshole to “lead” the Repugnicans, but apparently, many Repugnicans want someone even dumber, even crazier and even more mean-spirited than McCarthy.

What we are seeing among the House Repugnicans right now I think is representative of the larger schism within the party: the more establishmentarian, Repugnican Classic wing (the wing that still cares about actually winning elections and rejects the “plan” to lose elections but just claim that you actually won them) — and the bat-shit cray-cray wing that doesn’t mind losing winnable general elections by fronting bat-shit cray-cray candidates (and just claiming “fraud” after these candidates lose to the saner judgment of the American electorate).

The bat-shit Repugnicans are fantastically aspirational — that is, they’re quite willing to turn off the average American voter if their hellscape of a vision for the United States of America has even the tiniest chance of ever coming to fruition. After all, better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, no?

Today was the first time since 1923 that the House failed to elect a speaker on the first vote.

If the clowns that comprise the House Repugnican caucus manage to hold on to power for a full two years, I don’t see them holding on to the House come January 2025.

What happened to the Repugnicans?

The “leaders” of the Repugnican Party, having realized some time ago that there aren’t enough rich people to keep their party afloat, decided to appeal to the worst elements in the nation to bolster their party at the ballot box.

It started, methinks, no later than with Sarah Palin in 2008, and then became the “tea party” (which started, out of opposition to the nation’s first black president, in 2009), and then became the Pussygrabberian, a.k.a. the MAGA, (bowel) “movement.”

The chickens have come home to roost; make a deal with the devil — and some day, the devil will demand his due.

P.S. While the Repugnicans deal with the satanic chickens that have come home to roost, the House Democrats unanimously voted for Hakeem Jeffries as their new leader.

Jeffries is the first black leader of either party in the House or the Senate, and at 52 years old, he gives my generation some long-past-due representation in a Congress long dominated by baby boomers and other old fucks.

Clearly, one party is forward-looking and seeks to be more representative of all of the people — and the other party seeks to keep stupid white men in power in perpetuity, just as in “the good ol’ days.”