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.

—

*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!)

We already have an Anglo-Saxon caucus: the Repugnican Party

Associated Press news photo

This single image alone lays waste to the entire idea of white “supremacy.”

Sadly, it’s not shocking to me that at least two U.S. “representatives,” far-right-wing nut jobs Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (pictured above) and Paul Gosar of Arizona, reportedly are trying to start an “America First Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This proposed new caucus widely is being called the “Anglo-Saxon caucus,” since “America First” means white first, of course — even though the first Americans were not white, but were Native American and later, Mexican (indeed, Mexicans don’t cross the southern border; the southern border crossed them).

For the record, I am Anglo-Saxon. I even did DNA testing some years ago that showed my DNA most closely matching the DNA of the predominant populations of Britain and of Germany (not shocking, since more white Americans are of German descent than of any other, closely followed by those of Irish descent and then those of British descent, although the latter are considered to be under-counted).

I am not “proud” to be white any more than I am “proud” to be gay. I am what I am and others are what they are, and that’s all that it is. (To me you can be proud of an accomplishment or an achievement, perhaps, but of your DNA? I don’t fucking think so.)

White “supremacy” always has eluded me, in no small part because those who espouse it, such as Taylor Greene and Gosar, hardly are exemplars of their race. Being “supreme” would necessitate that you’re also not an abject fucktard with apparent mental illness.

And to assert that whites deserve even more representation in Congress is beyond ludicrous, of course.

Per the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Latino whites make up 60 percent of the U.S. population — yet per the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of those in Congress are not white, meaning that whites, at 77 percent of those in Congress, are significantly over-represented in Congress according to their makeup of the U.S. population. Today’s Congress is the most diverse Congress ever, and Congress keeps getting more diverse, per Pew, but whites still are over-represented in it.

Of course, Taylor Greene, Gosar & Co. haven’t broken with their party as much as they are just breaking the Repugnican Party’s long-standing unspoken rule: be racist, of course, but don’t ever openly, publicly admit it.

Indeed, per Pew, “Among today’s [U.S.] senators and representatives, the overwhelming majority of racial and ethnic minority members are Democrats (83%), while 17% are Republicans.”

That statistic alone speaks volumes about how serious the Repugnican Party is about representing non-whites in the halls of power.

An “America First Caucus” or “Anglo-Saxon Caucus” in the House would be pretty fucking redundant. We already have one: they’re called the Repugnicans.

But I wholeheartedly encourage the Repugnicans to continue along these sick and twisted lines; anything to speed up the approaching extinction of the backasswards Repugnican Party is a wonderful fucking thing.

In the meantime, the rest of us need to continue the ongoing work of making the United States of America a more perfect union — which would mean, among many other things, that “America” or “American” doesn’t mean white, but means only the geographic area of the United States or a person residing in or having come from the United States of America.*

E pluribus unum, bitches.

—

*I’m not big on dividing ourselves by nationality, and/or by citizenship status either, but, you know, baby steps…

Pussygrabber kills again

European Pressphoto Agency news photo

Officials with a county medical examiner’s office remove a body from one of three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a young white man shot and killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, on Tuesday. Former “President” Pussygrabber, seeking to scapegoat Asians for his own stunning failure to effectively deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic, contributed heavily to the anti-Asian sentiment that is taking lives.

Admittedly, when word first started coming out that Asian Americans and others of Asian descent were being victimized in racist attacks within the U.S., I was a bit dubious. In my everyday life I don’t hear anti-Asian sentiment expressed — per the U.S. Census Bureau, 19 percent of those who live in the California city where I live are of Asian descent, compared to only 6 percent of all people nationwide — and the anecdotal stories just didn’t jibe with my own observations.

Of course, I wouldn’t associate with someone who expressed anti-Asian sentiment. We do, over time, cultivate our own personal social environments; it’s kind of like the idiots who claim that of course former “President” Pussygrabber actually won “re”-election in 2020 — because they don’t know anyone who voted for Joe Biden!

Attacks on Asian Americans and others of Asian descent on U.S. soil are quite undeniable now, however. We have video. (In the case of the video that I just linked to, in San Francisco recently, an elderly woman of Asian descent fought back against her 39-year-old white-male accused attacker, who apparently quite karmically actually was taken away in a stretcher.)

And the “woke” war on whitey is ongoing, I know fully well, but know that not all of the attacks on Asian Americans are committed by stupid white men; a 28-year-old black man has been charged with attacking elderly Asian Americans in Oakland’s Chinatown. And also in Oakland, a 26-year-old black man has been charged with the murder of an elderly man of Asian descent; police say that the murder defendant “has a history of victimizing elderly Asian people.”

To my knowledge it hasn’t been determined whether the black men’s immediate motive was race-based hatred or robbery (perhaps seeing elderly Asian individuals as easy pickings).

But racism has to play a role in many if not most (if not almost all) assaults on those of Asian descent; it’s in the background if it’s not also in the foreground.

Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old and white, will live in infamy for having gunned down eight people in three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday. Six of his eight gun-murder victims were women of Asian descent.

Long has claimed that he perpetrated his massacre not out of race-based hatred, but out of the pain and suffering stemming from his “sexual addiction.” (Women always are to blame for heterosexual men’s horniness, aren’t they?)

Clearly, to Long, the lives of women of Asian descent were disposable (or he wouldn’t have disposed of them), and that’s because in the conservative white-male culture, women aren’t full human beings, and Asian women are even less so. Asian women — many of whom are demure and submissive (or who at least are perceived as such) — are here for our use, after all!

In the background of all of this is the fact that former “President” Pussygrabber frequently spouted off racist, xenophobic words that of course his mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging followers (and even just some dull-minded people listening to him) were going to take as carte blanche to attack those of Asian descent.

As I noted on December 31, I tried to watch then-“President” Pussygrabber’s New Year’s address, but I could not, as I immediately was turned off by his sickening use of the phrase “the China virus.” I wrote:

I came across a YouTube video of Pussygrabber’s New Year message. I wanted to know how much of it I could stomach. I mustered up my courage and started to watch the video.

The results of my experiment? I literally couldn’t stomach even a full 15 seconds of it.

By 15 seconds in, Pussygrabber uses the phrase “the China virus” to refer to the novel coronavirus/COVID-19.

Seriously, after I heard “the China virus,” I’d had more than enough already; I was done, sick to my stomach already, and I clicked out of the video and I don’t intend to ever watch any more of it.

So much is propagandistically packed into those three “little” words: “the China virus.” …

So [the ignorant mangling of the English language to use the noun “China” as an adjective] hits me immediately with “the China virus,” but then, secondly, there is the xenophobia and the racism that “the China virus” is supposed to evoke. That’s some sick fucking shit. Adolf Hitler had his Jews. Coming into the White House, “President” Pussygrabber had Mexican immigrants as his own personal Jews; leaving the White House, Pussygrabber has Asians as his own personal Jews.

Scapegoating is a hallmark of fascism. This is why Pussygrabber makes me sick to my stomach: because fucking fascists make me sick to my stomach.…

And, I noted then, “it’s far from definitively scientifically concluded that the novel coronavirus actually originated in China. Maybe it did; maybe it did not.”

Even if it did, however, of course there is no link between the original nation of the novel coronavirus and the people of Asian descent whom you see on the street.

But, of course, those who are going to verbally and physically attack innocent others aren’t known for their intellect.

Still, it’s up to all of us to change the environment in which some people believe it’s OK to attack a person of Asian descent — just for being a person of Asian descent.

I should have registered my December 31 objection to Pussygrabber’s use of “the China virus” (and “the kung flu”) more forcefully, and as a nation, we collectively should have called Pussygrabber out, loudly, back then. Instead, we fairly allowed ourselves to become inured to his casual fascism and racism.*

Shame on Pussygrabber, shame on his fascist, fucktarded followers (redundant), and shame on all of us for not doing more to protect every individual from being attacked because of his or her or their very being.

We’re not a free nation until all of us are free.

—

*Well, in fairness to all of us, in November we did vote the piece of shit out of office by more than 7 million votes…

Minneapolis burning

Associated Press news photo

I can’t find it within myself to criticize what the protesters are doing in Minneapolis in reaction to yet another murder of an unarmed black man by a white cop (see example photo above).

Human life is far, far more valuable than is property (and money), and the powers that be are fucking lucky if mere property destruction is all that happens to them after what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday (and after what happens to the perpetually downtrodden people of this “Christian,” capitalist nation every fucking day*).

I mean, we’re way past guillotine time.

The video is chilling (another video is here): George Floyd (pictured above), who was 46 years old and whose alleged crime was trying to pass counterfeit currency (which, it seems to me, you could do quite unknowingly), pleads that he cannot breathe as a white thug-cop has his knee planted firmly on Floyd’s neck, pinning Floyd to the ground.

Bystanders are loudly voicing their concern for Floyd’s medical well-being to the cops, but the cops ignore them. (You’d think that the cops had fucking learned something after the 2014 murder of 43-year-old black man Eric Garner, who also pleaded “I can’t breathe” as he was choked to death by a white thug-cop — for allegedly having illegally sold cigarettes on the street.) Before long, Floyd’s body is lifeless and then put on a gurney, and in the video footage it appears to me that perhaps his bladder apparently had emptied itself involuntarily because of the trauma.

Here is a screen grab from the video footage of Floyd’s murder:

Getty Images news image

The murderer, one 44-year-old Derek Chauvin (who certainly puts the Chauvin in chauvinist), who is white (of course), obviously is a bad cop — who was aided and abetted by his cop colleagues who could have prevented Floyd’s murder but who did not and who thus are accessories to his murder.

Look how casual and comfortable Chauvin appears to be as he snuffs the life out of Floyd, and please give me some credible evidence that it’s ever OK for a cop to restrain someone like this, especially when the individual is unarmed and, as the video footage shows, already handcuffed.

Some of the images coming out of Minneapolis in reaction to Floyd’s sickening murder by bad cop are great.

Here is what happened to a police station:

Reuters news photo

And here, cops protect the home of Chauvin, who is the “man” who is the least worth protecting on the entire fucking planet:

New York Times news photo

Look at the resources that the fascist, mostly white and mostly white-supremacist cops (all of them in the photo above appear to be white) will use to protect one of their own, even if he’s a fucking murderer.

So much for “law and order” and “to protect and to serve.” Law and order is something that only we serfs are supposed to respect — the elites and their protectors, including the cops — are exempt from the law and from order, and the cops protect and serve only each other and their plutocratic overlords.

All of the fallout from Floyd’s murder is the fault of corrupt cops who are drunk on their own power, enabled by the elite and even egged on by our fascist, white-supremacist “president” (after all, he thinks that the fascist cops will protect him if he tries to remain in the White House after it’s time for him to fucking leave).

If the cops didn’t routinely murder people, especially unarmed black men who pose no real danger to them, these protests wouldn’t happen. So shut the fuck up about property damage while you don’t give a fuck how many people, mostly people of color and poor people, the cops physically abuse and even murder.

Clearly, previous protests over murders by cops haven’t worked, so don’t claim that the people just need to protest peacefully and things then magically will improve.

No, not until the powers that be finally are rattled to their core — not until they get a big taste of the horrors that they routinely inflict upon others without a second thought — can real, lasting change ever occur.

At this point, there’s really only one thing left to say:

Burn. It. Down.

—

*The novel coronavirus pandemic has revealed so much about the United States of America, not just how its for-profit health-care wealth-care system is entirely unequipped to deal with a nationwide public-health crisis because it’s only been geared toward profiteering, and how working-class Americans intentionally are kept only one paycheck away from destitution in order to keep us in line, but also how casually Americans are willing to sacrifice the lives of their fellow Americans to the golden calf of capitalism by demanding that we reopen everything and go back to what we call “normal” — the consequences of a potentially lethal virus be damned.

Similarly, look at how so many Americans, most of whom claim to be “Christians,” pathologically see nothing wrong with black men being essentially summarily executed for such relatively minor alleged crimes as passing a counterfeit bill and unlawfully selling cigarettes. This is way beyond sick.

Say his name: Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in Georgia in February

Photo published by The New York Times

Ahmaud Arbery, 25 years old, was lynched in Georgia in February, and we might never have heard of his lynching if some video footage of it had not emerged.

I don’t believe in using inflammatory racial language, such as the word “lynching,” lightly.

For example, in late January 2019 my U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris referred to the then-fresh Jussie Smollett case as “an attempted modern-day lynching.” She might have waited a bit before she made that proclamation, which very apparently turned out to be very much not the case.

There is no other word that I can think of, though, for what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old black man who was shot down in the street in broad daylight by a white man and his white son in Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23, which we apparently are hearing about now only because some video taken by a witness of the incident has emerged.

It is not clear to me which one or if both of the men arrested for the crime, 64-year-old Gregory McMichael and his 34-year-old son Travis McMichael, shot and killed Arbery, but their story, even if true, is bullshit.

The McMichaels’ story is that they believed that Arbery was the suspect in neighborhood burglaries. Therefore, they pursued him, with firearms in their possession.

How the fuck does this story exculpate them in any way?

Even if Arbery were indeed a neighborhood burglar — it is believed that he was simply jogging in the neighborhood, not running away because he was a criminal — you don’t get to chase down someone you believe committed or might have committed a crime (or was about to commit a crime or might do so in the future) and then execute him or her on the fucking spot. You call the fucking police.

Because Arbery was black and very apparently unarmed and had not threatened anyone with any harm, and because he was killed by vigilantes who did not kill him in anything remotely like self-defense, he was killed primary because of his race — he was, in a word, lynched.

This is what happened in the “good old days” in the South (and elsewhere within the U.S., but mostly in the South): Whites would accuse a black person, usually a male, of some crime, and then apprehend and publicly kill him. Maybe the individual had committed a crime or not; that didn’t matter. What mattered most was that the victim was black.

Ahmaud Arbery was not hanged from a tree while the white denizens of the Georgia neighborhood enjoyed the display as a form of entertainment, as they did back in the day.

But Arbery was lynched, regardless.

Kamala Harris had it wrong in the Smollett case, but I guess that I stand corrected on her attempt to get federal anti-lynching legislation passed. She started this effort, with Cory Booker and Tim Scott, back in 2018, with the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, and while at the time that struck me as a purely political, identity-politics move — a “solution” looking for a problem that no longer even existed — I am sad to apparently have to stand corrected.

Wikipedia describes the anti-lynching act as “a proposed bill that would classify lynching, defined as bodily injury on the basis of perceived race, color, religion or nationality, a federal hate crime in the United States. The bill, largely symbolic, aims to recognize and apologize for historical governmental failures to prevent lynching in the U.S.”

Yes, but apparently it’s not only symbolic anymore.

Wikipedia also notes that “On February 26, 2020, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, a revised version of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 410-4.” (This was just three days after the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.)

To my knowledge, this federal anti-lynching legislation remains unpassed by the Senate and not signed into law by the “president.”

This federal law needs to be enacted, and we could call it the Ahmaud Arbery Anti-Lynching Act just as well.

And while I’m generally opposed to the death penalty, I can’t say that the likes of Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael deserve to still draw breath.

The death penalty is an egregious penalty, but lynching — actual lynching, not Jussie Smollett-style “lynching” — is an egregious crime that calls for an egregious punishment.

My take: Jussie Smollett made it all up

Actor Jussie Smollett cried during his first television interview after allegedly having been the victim of a hate crime on January 29. Meh. He very most likely was crying wolf. (He appears to me to be acting — fairly poorly — in that interview, by the way.)

I’ve been quiet on the alleged hate crime against TV show “Empire” star Jussie Smollett on January 29 in Chicago.

My inclination is to believe the victim, or at least to give the alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, anyway, but Smollett’s story was a bit over the top from the get-go: two male attackers, he claimed, poured bleach on him and put a noose around his neck and yelled, “This is MAGA country!” as well as racist and homophobic slurs.

Smollett initially reported that his attackers wore ski masks, but presumably they were white, since allegedly they had perpetrated a race-based hate crime against him and yelled “This is MAGA country!” (Indeed, in the TV interview mentioned above, by elimination he pretty much claims that his attackers were indeed white, which he apparently could see even though they were wearing ski masks.)

The details of the alleged hate crime against Smollett and its subsequent investigation are convoluted and go back and forth, with ample yes-but-no-but-no-but-yes. (You can read them here and here and in many other places on the Internet.) I won’t rehash all of them here.

But CNN reports today:

Two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation tell CNN that Chicago Police believe actor Jussie Smollett paid two men to orchestrate an assault on him that he reported late last month.

The men, who are brothers, were arrested Wednesday but released without charges Friday after Chicago police cited the discovery of “new evidence.

“The sources told CNN the two men are now cooperating fully with law enforcement.

Smollett told authorities he was attacked early January 29 by two men who were “yelling out racial and homophobic slurs.” He said one attacker put a rope around his neck and poured an unknown chemical substance on him.

The sources told CNN there are records that show the two brothers purchased the rope found around Smollett’s neck at a hardware store in Chicago.

CNN’s attempts Saturday to reach both Smollett’s representative and attorney were unsuccessful.

Smollett identifies as gay and since 2015 has played the gay character of Jamal on the Fox TV drama “Empire.”

According to Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, the actor told detectives he was attacked by two men near the lower entrance of a Loews hotel in Chicago. Police were told the two men yelled “‘Empire’ fa***t” and “‘Empire’ n***er'” while striking him.

The day after the incident, police released surveillance images that showed two silhouetted individuals walking down a sidewalk, and police said they were wanted for questioning.

The two men were arrested Wednesday. Police on Friday said the men were being viewed as “potential suspects” and that detectives had “probable cause that they may have been involved in an alleged crime.” [Note that that crime was not specified…]

But by Friday night they had been released, Guglielmi said, “due to new evidence as a result of today’s investigations.”

“And detectives have additional investigative work to complete,” he added.

One of the men has appeared on “Empire,” Guglielmi said. A police source also told CNN on Friday night that the men had a previous affiliation with Smollett, but did not provide additional details. …

It was reported that Smollett might have made up the attack because he feared that he was about to be written out of “Empire” — and presumably, the show-runners then would be hesitant to do so after he’d been attacked in a hate crime — but the show-runners have denied that Smollett’s role ever was in jeopardy. (Of course, for public relations reasons — to keep their target audience — they could be lying about that…)

In any event, if I had to put money on it, for whatever reason, I surmise, Smollett indeed made the whole thing up.

Not only was his initial report over the top — it would be rare for hate-crime attackers, who don’t tend to be all that smart or creative, to do all of the things that he alleged — and certainly they would have had to have been stalking him already, since they allegedly came prepared with props (bleach and a noose). And further, somehow they knew exactly when to bring those props with them: when the “Empire” star just happened to be going to Subway for food around 2 a.m.

Really?

Also, would real attackers really call Smollett “‘Empire’ faggot” and “‘Empire’ nigger”? Plain-old “faggot” and/or “nigger” I could see, but I rather doubt that they would mention the show in which he stars. Again: over the top. It’s bad writing because it beggars belief.

If Smollett actually is found to not have made the whole thing up, then I’d be the first to say so (and update this post accordingly) and offer and apology, but yeah, I very much doubt that Smollett’s story, in the end, will be corroborated.

If he lied — and he wouldn’t be the first to have lied about having been the victim of a hate crime — of course he has made it worse for those who come after him who actually are the victims of hate crimes, and of course he should be prosecuted for having lied to the police.

And I’ll come out and say it: the black community hasn’t been big on defending gay people, to put it quite mildly and charitably, so it seems to me that in this case they have responded more to the alleged racist hate crime against Smollett than to the alleged homophobic hate crime against him.

Just sayin’: The Smollett case apparently not only says a lot about Smollett and what apparent bullshit story he believed would fly in this age of toxic identity politics, but says a lot about those who were so quick to claim that he had to be telling the truth — before the details of the investigation ever even came out. It’s been quite the Rorschach test. (See: confirmation bias.)

P.S. Smollett apparently even fooled “President” Pussygrabber, who called that the alleged attack on Smollett “horrible,” adding, “It doesn’t get worse.” Actually, it does get worse, sometimes a lot worse; Smollett had only superficial (self-inflicted?) skin wounds, no broken bones, no damage to any organs, and he’s still very much alive.

On that note, Kamala Harris rather dramatically called Smollett’s account “an attempted modern day lynching.”

Again, two words: confirmation bias. Harris desperately wants that black base, I know, but she might show some, um, presidential caution before commenting next time. There has been no evidence presented thus far that anyone actually was trying to lynch Smollett, for fuck’s sake.

This woman was a prosecutor? Scary…

P.P.S. Cory Booker also called the Smollett account “an attempted modern-day lynching.” Of course. Jesus fuck.

I’m not sure who tweeted that bullshit first, Harris or Booker (tweets are given time stamps, but from which time zone[s]?), but it’s hard to believe that both would use the exact same phrase without knowledge that the other had done so first.

And, again, to stoke interracial strife before the facts of an alleged incident are even established — again, hardly what I would call presidential.

P.P.P.S. It’s being reported that Smollett has hired Michael Cohen’s criminal defense attorney.

To be abundantly fair, hiring a criminal defense attorney doesn’t necessarily mean that you are guilty of a crime, but, um…

For too many, their main problem with Bernie Sanders remains that he is white

Updated below (on Monday, November 12, 2018)

Associated Press photo

Bernie Sanders campaigned relentlessly for Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, but for too many, Bernie remains unacceptable as a Democratic Party presidential nominee because he is a white man, whether they’ll come out and say that or not.

The 2020 Democratic Party primary fight has begun, because already it’s being declared yet once again that Bernie Sanders isn’t good enough on black issues.

Before I delve into that, let me make a point: We’ve never had a Latino U.S. president (and Latinos comprise the largest non-white racial group in the United States). Or a Native American president. Or an Asian president. Or an openly non-heterosexual and/or non-gender-conforming president. Or, for fuck’s sake, even a biologically female president. We haven’t even had an openly non-“Christian” U.S. president; claiming to be a Christian, as even Pussygrabber has, always has been a prerequisite to sit in the Oval Office.

Yet many so-called Democratic voters, if the next Democratic Party presidential nominee isn’t black, are going to scoop up their marbles and go home. (Not that that is racist or black supremacist or anything…)

So the latest “controversy” that “proves” that Bernie Sanders actually is a crypto-white supremacist is a recent remark attributed to him by The Daily Beast, which reported three days ago:

Democratic officials woke Wednesday morning searching for answers as to why the party was unable to win several marquee Senate and gubernatorial races the night before.

But for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the explanation was simple. The candidates who under-performed weren’t progressive enough; those who didn’t shy away from progressivism were undone, in part, by “racist” attacks.

“I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” Sanders told The Daily Beast, referencing the close contests involving Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia and ads run against the two. “I think next time around, by the way, it will be a lot easier for them to do that.”

Sanders wasn’t speaking as a mere observer but, rather, as someone who had invested time and reputation on many of the midterm contests. The Vermonter, who is potentially considering another bid for the presidency in 2020, mounted an aggressive campaign travel schedule over the past few months and endorsed both Abrams and Gillum. He also has a personal political investment in the notion that unapologetic, authentic progressive populism can be sold throughout the country and not just in states and districts that lean left.

Surveying the victories and the carnage of Tuesday’s results, Sanders framed it as a vindication of that vision. The candidates who performed well even though they lost, he said, offered positive progressive views for the future of their states, including Gillum, Abrams, and Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke. Those who were heavily defeated, Sanders said, didn’t galvanize young voters, people of color, and typically non-active voters.

“I think you got to contrast that to the votes of conservative Democrats who did not generate a great deal of excitement within the Democratic Party,” Sanders said, alluding to a host of Senate Democrats who lost re-election on Tuesday night. “[They] did not bring the kind of new people, new energy that they needed and ended up doing quite poorly. In admittedly difficult states. Missouri and Indiana are not easy states, but neither is Florida or Georgia or Texas.” …

Sanders … credited Abrams with a “brilliant campaign” for her efforts to bring non-active Democratic voters into the electoral process. He marveled at O’Rourke’s fundraising prowess, which allowed the Texas Democrat to raise $38 million in the third quarter of this year — the largest of any Senate candidate in history — and earn more than 48 percent of the vote against incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). And he noted that Gillum helped generate turnout that led to the successful passing of Amendment 4, which will restore voting rights to 1.5 million convicted felons in Florida. [This is great news that would warrant a blog post on its own, but I can do only so much…]

“I think he’s a fantastic politician in the best sense of the word,” Sanders said of Gillum. “He stuck to his guns in terms of a progressive agenda. I think he ran a great campaign. And he had to take on some of the most blatant and ugly racism that we have seen in many, many years. And yet he came within a whisker of winning.” …

Of course the anti-Berners ignore the second paragraph (and, well, every other paragraph as well) and focus like a laser on the third, which contains the juicy quote, “I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.”

On the bare face of that, of course I disagree with it. If you are a white voter who feels uncomfortable voting for a candidate primarily or solely because the candidate is not white, then you are racist, whether you’re fully conscious of it or not. Even just an “innocent” belief that elected officials “should” be white because that’s what you are accustomed to is, of course, deeply rooted in racism.

But I don’t know exactly what Bernie meant by his statement, and therefore I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Did Bernie mean that some white Democratic primary voters, knowing how racist their states are, hesitated to vote for black candidates because they figured that they’d only lose in the general election because of the racism in their states? Not wanting to lose an election because of racism doesn’t make you racist yourself, and it seems to me that there is a good chance that this is what Bernie was trying to say, albeit woefully inartfully.

What about white voters in Georgia and Florida who didn’t vote for either Abrams or Gillum primarily because they believe that Abrams and Gillum are “socialist” and they won’t vote for a “socialist”? Or primarily because their political tribalism precludes them from voting for anyone outside of the Repugnican Party (even if they wouldn’t brand Abrams or Gillum a “socialist,” although they probably would)?

“Socialist” Bernie Sanders campaigned for Abrams and Gillum relentlessly, not just in person, but in many, many e-mails (including, of course, fundraising e-mails for them) that I received myself over the course of months. Wouldn’t that be enough to brand Abrams and Gillum “socialist” at least by association?

Is it always simply about race? Always?

It’s also possible, it seems to me, that Bernie Sanders, if he was quoted accurately by The Daily Beast, was trying to be overly diplomatic in trying to win over some white voters who tend to vote only for whites by giving them an out on the charge that they are racist — believing that if you label them as racists, of course they’ll never consider voting for you.

That’s certainly not a tack that I would take, but if that’s what Bernie was trying to do (not likely but not impossible, from what I can tell), was it unforgivable? No. I’d call it rather stupid and inadvisable, as well as unnecessary (I don’t believe in coddling racists, or that it’s politically necessary to do so), but not evil. 

Full disclosure: I am a gay white male progressive and I have given both Abrams and Gillum campaign contributions ($30 each, if you must know; how much did you give to either of them?), and I hope that they ultimately win; Florida started a recount of its gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and some other races yesterday, and in Georgia, if the finalized vote count puts Abrams’ despicable Repugnican opponent below 50.0 percent, then there will be a runoff election early next month.

I gave to Abrams and Gillum in part because they’re black in that I believe in a truly representative democracy. How soul-crushing it must be to live in Georgia, for instance, which is about a third black, and never see yourself represented in the governor’s mansion or in the U.S. Senate for your state. That’s some fucked-up shit.

But I wouldn’t have given a penny to Gillum or Abrams if they were Repugnicans (I judge you by the company that you keep!) or if they didn’t espouse progressivism but instead espoused the stand-for-nothing, do-nothing, pro-corporate centrism that the likes of DINO Claire McCaskill still espouses even though her sorry arse just got tossed from the U.S. Senate for being a worthless, milquetoast piece of shit.

I have supported Abrams and Gillum primarily because they are progressive; that they have stood a chance of making our democracy (what’s left of it, anyway) more representative of all of the people has been the icing on the cake, but not the cake itself.

That’s why I find it disturbing that so many so-called Democrats don’t care how progressive a (so-called) Democratic candidate is or is not; all that they care about is that he or she is black and calls him- or herself a Democrat.

I don’t support Kamala Harris for the White House for 2020 because as attorney general of California she was rather unremarkable and because she hasn’t been in the U.S. Senate for even two full years yet. Her getting cheeky in some Senate hearings, while laudable (and at least somewhat entertaining or at least gratifying if not entertaining), is not enough to vote for her for president in 2020.

And Cory “I Am Spartacus” Booker is just another corporate whore. As one black commentator put it early last year:

… The Democrats leading the charge against Trump must meet exacting qualifications. They have to be loyal servants of the one-percenters, of banksters, hedge funds, charter school sugar daddies and privatizers of all kinds. They must be dependable supporters of apartheid Israel, of military contractors, drone warfare and U.S. military interventions of all kinds around the world.

To boost their party’s fortunes in this new era, Democratic party spokespeople need to be gifted hypocrites willing to pose as advocates of immigrants and champions of civil liberties going forward, even though they unflinchingly supported the biggest deportation and mass surveillance regimes in history implemented by the Democrat who just left the White House. They must focus narrowly on the handful of issues on which corporate Dems actually disagree with Republicans like abortion rights, and not stray to areas which might indict their own party along with Republicans.

And they must absolve their party of responsibility for running an incompetent campaign by blaming the Russians. Hillary is history, but her big stinking tent is still there, and Democrats are crying for a “united front” against Trump, led by spokespeople who can stick to the corporate script.

Cory Booker is a great fit. …

Yup. We were punk’d by Barack Obama, who barely lifted a finger to push through a progressive agenda and who accomplished little outside of some spiffy speeches. He was dignified, sure, but he actually did next to nothing. Shame on us if we’re punk’d again by an Obama 2.0, such as Cory Booker and probably such as Kamala Harris.

On that note, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake is out with his quasi-quarterly rankings of the competitors for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates. Here are his top five now, from one to five: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Cory Booker.

I find Harris’ spot at No. 3 inexplicable. She hasn’t even been well known here in my home state of California, so how she could win a presidential election eludes me entirely. I did vote in November 2016 to send her to the U.S. Senate, but she hasn’t proven herself there, as it hasn’t even been two fucking years yet.

Obama had been in the U.S. Senate for only four years of his first six-year term before he ascended to the White House (his naivete of the “Game of Thrones”-like workings of D.C. was glaring) and that was a huge mistake, one in which I won’t participate again.

For a long time, if not always, Aaron Blake had put Bernie Sanders at No. 1, so Bernie’s slippage to No. 2 on Blake’s rankings to me indicates that perhaps Warren is seen by the Beltway establishment as the perfect fusion/hybrid of an establishment candidate like Billary Clinton and a populist candidate like Bernie Sanders; she’s to be a parting gift for us Berners. But that’s the coward’s way out.

I can support Warren if she fairly and democratically emerges as the presidential nominee, as she is my second choice behind Bernie, but I still have serious concerns about her ability to win a presidential election. I’ve said it a million times before, but I’ll say it again: I would expect her to get labeled as just another weak egghead from Massachusetts; I would expect her to get Michael Dukakis’d or John Kerry’d. (You heard it here, perhaps first.)

In the meantime, I expect Bernie Sanders to continue to be attacked as not good enough for blacks, even though as president the black front runners Kamala Harris and Cory Booker probably would do no more for black Americans than Obama did, but would be, like Obama was, mostly just symbolic — and even though it would be great, if we must apply affirmative action to our electoral politics, that we don’t demand only a white or a black president and continue to shut out all of the other groups that never have been represented in the White House.

And I expect Bernie’s continued support for black progressives like Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum to be dismissed cynically as just Bernie’s dishonest attempt to shore up his pro-black bona fides — this from actual racists and racial supremacists whose main problem with Bernie Sanders, today as it was the case in 2016, is that he is white (and of Jewish heritage).

These hypocrites must continue to call Bernie Sanders a racist in order to try to obscure their own racism and racial supremacism and their own rank, racist political motivations.

P.S. This is interesting: The Washington Post reports that just more than 2,000 voters (Democrats, Repugnicans and independents) in 69 battleground U.S. House districts were polled on November 5 and 6, and that those who reported that they supported a Democratic candidate (33 percent of the total number of those polled) were asked to give their preferences for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee.

The poll found that Joe Biden was their No. 1 choice, with 35 percent; Bernie Sanders was at No. 2, with 15 percent; Kamala Harris at No. 3, with 12 percent; Elizabeth Warren at No. 4, with 10 percent; and Cory Booker at No. 5, with 7 percent.

I don’t see Cory Booker winning (the vice presidential slot maybe), that’s for sure, and while I think that Aaron Blake probably accurately captured the top five candidates, I don’t agree with the order in which he ranked them.

For instance, while he put Warren at No. 1, the poll put her at No. 4.

Also, while Biden looks strong in the poll, what really matters to me, it seems, is which candidate, Biden or Bernie, if both of them run, inherits most of the support of the other candidates who drop out over time. For instance, if Warren were to drop out while Bernie and Biden were still in the running, I do believe that Bernie would inherit most of her supporters.

Also, of course, if Biden doesn’t run and Bernie does, I have to wonder how much of Biden’s support Bernie would get. (My best guess is that most of Biden’s support would go to the other much more establishmentarian candidates rather than to Bernie.)

All of that said, I’m not sure if polling voters in certain battleground districts is reflective of the field of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters as a whole, but, again, I do believe that with a high degree of accuracy, we can state that the top five contenders for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination (alphabetically) are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

I am a little tempted by such dark-horse candidates as California U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell or lawyer Michael Avenatti, but if you haven’t been at least a governor or a U.S. senator, you’re probably never going to make it to the White House. I can’t say that I want to support a presidential candidate who has little to no chance of winning.

Bernie Sanders, as long as he runs, of course, remains and probably will remain my No. 1 choice until the final nominee emerges.

And yes, while I could not bring myself to vote for Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton in 2016, I’m most likely to vote for the Democratic nominee, even if it is not Bernie, over Pussygrabber in November 2020.

P.P.S. OK, I just stumbled upon a CNN poll taken early last month. The poll of Dems and Dem leaners put Biden at 33 percent, Bernie at 13 percent, and Harris at 9 percent. (Warren comes in just behind Harris, with 8 percent, and behind Warren comes Cory Booker, tied with John Kerry at 5 percent.)

I’m thinking that it’s probably safe to say that the top three are Biden, Bernie and Harris.

Biden, methinks, would represent the old-guard/establishmentarian vote (as well as a good chunk of the Obama-by-association/black vote, from which Billary benefited in 2016), Bernie would represent the progressive-regardless-of-race-or-sex vote, and Harris mostly would represent the non-white/identity-politics vote, and it might also help her that she’s a woman (speaking of identity politics, as taboo as that might be [rank tribalism over ideology in electoral politics is a fact]).

I don’t put Warren in the top three. In the top five, yes, but not in the top three. I think that the Beltway pundits overestimate her popularity among actual Dems and Dem leaners, many of whom, myself included, like her enough as an individual but just don’t see her beating Pussygrabber in 2020.

Update (Monday, November 12, 2018): I don’t want to do another P.S., so here’s some more discussion on this topic:

CNN inexplicably puts Kamala Harris at the front-runner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, as though Beltway wishful thinking were fact (maybe there is something to that “fake news” charge…).

Seriously, though, here is CNN’s Beltway-wishful-thinking-filled ranking, in this order: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar(!), Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders (at No. 6!), et. al.

Right.

The polls — you know, surveys of the voters who actually will decide this thing (not CNN’s “analysts”) — show something quite different. Another poll, this one from Politico/Morning Consult of 733 Dem and Dem-leaning registered voters taken from Wednesday through Friday, shows Joe Biden with 26 percent, Bernie with 19 percent, Beto O’Rourke with 8 percent, Elizabeth Warren with 5 percent, Kamala Harris with only 4 percent, and Cory Booker with only 3 percent.

So while CNN dreams of Kamala Harris — its “analysts” fantasize that the “2018 election convinced us that Harris seems to be exactly what Democratic voters are telling the party and its politicians they want representing them going forward,” Politico reports something else:

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) enter the 2020 election cycle as the leaders for the Democratic presidential nomination to take on President Donald Trump, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in the immediate aftermath of last week’s midterms.

More than a quarter of Democratic voters, 26 percent, say Biden is their first choice to be the Democratic nominee. Another one-in-five, 19 percent, would pick Sanders, the runner-up for the nomination in 2016.

The two septuagenarians — Biden will be 77 on Election Day, 2020, and Sanders will be 79 — are the only two prospective candidates to garner double-digit support. The third-place candidate is Rep. Beto O’Rourke (R-Texas), who built national name-recognition through his losing Senate bid last week, with 8 percent. …

I surmise that O’Rourke will flame out as a presidential contender for 2020, and that he came in at third place in the poll only because of the immediacy of the midterm election (and he did do well for Texas), but all (or at least almost all) of the reputable recent nationwide polls consistently put Biden at No. 1 and Bernie at No. 2.

Because CNN puts Bernie at a laughable No. 6, I surmise that we can expect CNN to attack Bernie throughout the entire process, because CNN’s “woke” “analysts” don’t want Bernie to win. 

Don’t get me wrong; I certainly right now don’t count Kamala Harris out (I pretty much count Booker out, and I’m on the verge of counting Warren out if her polling doesn’t improve), but, again, the polls of Dem and Dem-leaning voters thus far show that the top two front-runners are Biden and Bernie, whether the identity politicians like it or not.

Bad news cycle? Hey, look at the ‘illegal alien’ who killed a white woman!

At least one member of slain 20-year-old University of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts’ family has proclaimed that she doesn’t want Tibbetts’ tragic death to be politicized and to sow further racial division and xenophobia. Tibbetts’ aunt wrote on Facebook:

Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color. Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

But that kind of message isn’t useful for the unelected, illegitimate, craven — and yes, treasonous — Pussygrabber regime, which, after yesterday’s bam-bam-bam news (of former Pussygrabber campaign chairman Paul Manafort being convicted of multiple finance-related felonies; of former Pussygrabber personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleading guilty to multiple felonies, including campaign-finance-related felonies; and of current Repugnican U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, the second supporter of Pussygrabber’s “presidential” campaign in the House, being indicted for financial fraud [Pussygrabber’s first supporter in the House, Rep. Chris Collins, also has been indicted for financial fraud]), truly needed a diversion.

Team Pussygrabber was, I am certain, delighted to learn that the accused killer of Mollie Tibbetts, who disappeared on July 18, is a 24-year-old apparently undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Cristhian Bahena Rivera. Here is his booking photo:

Rivera’s employer, a dairy farm, reported that he was a good employee for years who never was suspected of being capable of something like murder.

But that’s not a politically useful narrative, either, so the occupied White House tweeted this today:

For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found. The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone.

The nauseatingly shameless tweet — only further tarnishing the name of the White House and the office of the presidency — is accompanied by a lovely, even more nauseatingly shameless video in which all white people claim that their loved ones were killed by “illegal aliens,” causing them to be “permanently separated” from them. Subtle!

This Goebbels-level propaganda accomplishes several things at once. There is the offensive, dehumanizing use of the hateful term “illegal alien.” No one is “illegal” and no one is an “alien.” You are a human being or you are not a human being. You may or may not have broken a law, but you are not “illegal” or “an illegal,” and only to a xenophobe and/or a white supremacist are you an “alien.”

Then there is the sick attempt, in one fell swoop, to try to wholly discount the detrimental affect that inhumanely — and, per our federal court system, illegally — separating families at the border has had on thousands of human beings by pointing out that the relative handful of those white American citizens who have had family members killed (unintentionally or intentionally) by undocumented immigrants are “permanently separated” from their family members (Oh, snap!).

It’s comparing apples to oranges (picked only by “illegal aliens,” of course), but it’s not like Pussygrabber’s mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing, Tiki-torch-carrying followers make such distinctions.

Most of all, of course, is the blatant, hit-you-in-the-face-like-with-a-fucking-shovel appeal to white supremacism and racism.

How about Chris Watts, the white American citizen in Colorado who is accused of just having killed his pregnant wife and his two young daughters and disposing of their bodies rather unceremoniously, as Rivera is accused of having done with Tibbetts’ body? Is the Pussygrabber regime going to emphasize this crime and tragedy?

Of course not — because an “illegal alien” (of the brown-skinned type, of course) wasn’t accused of having committed it, and it’s perfectly OK to murder even your entire family — if you’re a white guy and a U.S. citizen. (Well, at least we won’t draw any attention to it, but will ignore it until it goes away…)

The Washington Post today notes:

Immigrants do not commit violent crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans, according to federal and state crime statistics. A study published in February by the libertarian Cato Institute examining 2015 criminal data in Texas found native-born residents were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country legally or illegally.

More information (you know, actual facts to counter the “alternative facts”) on this topic was posted by Vox.com as well.

So, you (a U.S. citizen) are much more likely ever to be killed by a fellow U.S. citizen than by a non-citizen, but, again, that’s not convenient to the fascist Pussygrabber regime’s Nazi-like message that the “illegal aliens” are the new Jews.

Mollie Tibbetts’ murder is tragic. Her family must be reeling, and it’s spine-chilling to imagine what she went through in her last moments of life, and it’s a supreme injustice that anyone should have his or her life taken from him or her, perhaps especially when that young.

But for a bunch of neo-Nazis to cravenly use the occasion of Tibbetts’ death as an opportunity to try to score more Brownie points with their base of white-supremacist Neanderthals only adds to the tragedy all around.

Thankfully, just as has happened here in California, where Repugnicans are an endangered species in no tiny part because of their sustained racist and xenophobic attacks upon Latinos, we can expect to see this effect grow on the nationwide level in the years to come as more and more Latinos exercise their right to vote — and they don’t tend to vote for the Repugnicans who savage them as an entire group of human beings because the Repugnicans need an endless supply of convenient scapegoats for their own endless crimes.

Good riddance to the MAGA-cap-wearing Neanderthals. Evolve or disappear.

We — those of us who reject your hatred, your racism, your xenophobia, your bigotry, your ignorance, your selfish divisiveness — will replace you. We already are replacing you.

Pussygrabber regime issues ‘biblical’ fatwa on the breaking up of families

Updated below (on Friday, June 15, 2018)

Because Jesus Christ was all about breaking up families.

It is ironic that the “Christians” among us are so fucking evil. It’s not what Jesus Christ would do; it’s what “President” Pussygrabber would do.

I can’t believe that we even have to discuss whether or not separating children from their parents is acceptable. Of course it’s not acceptable.

Yet Nazi elf Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III said today that the unelected Pussygrabber regime’s cruel policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their undocumented immigrant parents is — wait for it — biblically sanctioned.

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said today. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

Protecting the weak is the goal of the Pussygrabber regime’s constant attacks on undocumented immigrants — and even on U.S. citizens, such as the citizens of Puerto Rico who continue to be ignored because they aren’t white?

Pussygrabber regime spokesnake Sarah Huckabee Sanders backed the Nazi elf up; The Associated Press reports today that she “said [today] that she hadn’t seen Sessions’ comments but affirmed that the Bible did back up the administration’s actions.

“‘I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,’ she said. ‘It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.'”

If a government’s laws are so fucking sacrosanct, then what about the ancient Roman Empire’s laws to persecute the early Christians? Were those laws OK? Or are we going to pick and choose among the laws that we use to justify our evil against others?

If you call yourself a Christian, there is only one law above all others that you should follow. This iteration of it comes from John 13:34-35: “‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’”

Another iteration of this supreme law — which, in a word, boils down to “love” — comes from Luke 6:31: “‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’”

If you call yourself a Christian, these aren’t helpful hints or suggestions. These are commands from Jesus Christ recorded in the New Testament.

You cannot call yourself a Christian if you refuse to obey the commands of Jesus Christ.

Trying to fall back on “orderliness” and “lawfulness” to justify knowingly causing pain and suffering to others that you would not want visited upon yourself is evil. It is anti-Christian. It is satanic.

Don’t get me wrong; I get it that U.S. citizens who are incarcerated for serious crimes are separated from their children, and that there is no general outcry against this practice, which widely is considered to be a part of the price that one pays for having been convicted of having committed a serious crime.

But undocumented immigrants’ “crime” is wanting a better life. For that “crime” alone, families should not be separated.

The Associated Press notes:

… Last month, [Sessions] announced a “zero tolerance” policy that any adult who enters the country illegally is criminally prosecuted. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 650 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during a two-week period in May. …

and

… In an unusually tense series of exchanges in the White House briefing room [today], [Sarah Huckabee] Sanders wrongly blamed Democrats for the policy separating children from parents and insisted the administration had made no changes in increasing the use.

[But] Until the policy was announced in April, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation. … [Emphasis mine.]

Again, only if an undocumented immigrant has been charged with having committed a serious crime — a felony — should he or she possibly be separated from his or her children. Simply being where you’re “not supposed” to be is not a serious crime.

Shame on us, the American people, if we continue to allow “our” government to continue to perpetrate pain and suffering on those who only want a better life for themselves and their families — and to claim ludicrously (and yes, satanically) that the Bible backs them up in their commission of their evil.

Update (Friday, June 15, 2018): I just wanted to add a few more points.

First, another quote — and commandment — of Jesus Christ: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That comes from Mark 12:31. Is Mexico and the rest of Latin America our neighbor? If so, shouldn’t we love those from Mexico and the rest of Latin America?

It’s quite rare that a right-wing “Christian” (such as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III) quotes Jesus Christ himself. Instead, these “Christians” usually opt for the authoritarian, pro-institution-over-the-individual later books of the New Testament, the cold, detached, churchy ones that talk about so-called law and order, not about love from one human being to another.

Secondly, here is a wonderful editorial cartoon that was killed by editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers’ newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which apparently fired him because of his unflattering editorial cartoons about Der Pussygrabber:

More of his suppressed work is here, and I have to include this one, too:

OK, and this one:

I love a good editorial cartoon and I should include a lot more of them here…

Finally, today The Associated Press explains the scope of this family-separation bullshit:

Washington — Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their families at the [southern] U.S. border over a six-week period during a crackdown on illegal entries, according to Department of Homeland Security figures obtained [today] by The Associated Press.

The figures show that 1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31. The separations were not broken down by age, and included separations for illegal entry, immigration violations or possible criminal conduct by the adult.

Under a “zero tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Department of Homeland Security officials are now referring all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are.

Sessions announced the effort April 6, and Homeland Security began stepping up referrals in early May, effectively putting the policy into action.

Since then, stories of weeping children torn from the arms of their frightened parents have flooded the media and the policy has been widely criticized by church groups, politicians and children’s advocates who say it is inhumane. A battle in Congress is brewing in part over the issue.

Some immigrant advocates have said women were being separated from their infants — a charge Homeland Security and Justice officials flatly denied. They also said the children were being well cared for and disputed reports of disorder and mistreatment at the border. …

The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group, released a statement [today] saying, “A policy of willing cruelty to those people, and using young sons and daughters as pawns, shatters America’s strong foundation of humanitarian sensibility and family values.”

The new figures are for people who tried to enter the U.S. between official border crossings. Asylum seekers who go directly to official crossings are not separated from their families, except in specific circumstances — such as if officials can’t confirm the relationship between the minors and adults, if the safety of the children is in question, or if the adult is being prosecuted. …

Finally finally, today the pathologically lying “President” Pussygrabber repeated the fucking lie that the Democrats are the ones who put the separation policy into place. “I hate the children being taken away,” he huffed and puffed. “The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law.”

“This is false,” counters The Washington Post, adding: “As part of its border crackdown, the Trump administration is separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents largely due to a ‘zero tolerance’ policy implemented by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. No law requires these separations. [Link is WaPo’s.] …”

That the unelected, fascistic, xenophobic, cruel Pussygrabber regime continues to lie blatantly that the Democrats are responsible for the separation of families at the southern border at least is an indirect acknowledgment that what the Pussygrabber regime is doing is evil.

But in the meantime, people are suffering because we, the American people, have not stopped “our” government from perpetrating evil — in this case, a form of ethnic cleansing — in our name.

Waiting for President Bernie Sanders (and/or a rematch of the Civil War…)

New York Times news photo

Last week illegitimate U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had the fucking gall to come to my city of Sacramento and proclaim that California may not “secede,” actually comparing California’s intent and desire to protect the most vulnerable among us to the South’s attempt to preserve the slavery of black people. (In his hateful little lecture-speech to California, the most populous state of the nation by a margin of more than 10 million people over the next-most-populous state, the Nazi elf brought up the pro-slavery John C. Calhoun but for some reason didn’t remind us that his first and middle names have very special meaning in the South.)

My regular readers (there are at least a handful of them) will have noticed that during the illegitimate reign of the unelected Pussygrabber regime* my blogging has dropped off considerably.

It’s that I can’t blog on every outrage. There are far too many of them these days (and weeks and months).

I will comment on one recent outrage, however: the Pussygrabber Department of “Justice” suing my state of California over its being, by state law since January 1, a “sanctuary state” and Pussygrabber regime Attorney General Jeff Sessions proclaiming that California may not “secede.”

(Specifically, Sessions proclaimed that “There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg or to the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled.” Yes, he went there.)

Funny: Nazi elf Sessions’ Southern ilk wanted to secede — and did secede, even before President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated after his first election, for fuck’s sake — in order to be able to continue to mistreat human beings abhorrently (indeed, the pro-slavery white Southerners didn’t consider the black slaves to even be human beings).

Yet when California wishes to protect human rights, human dignity and human well-being, Jeff Fucking Sessions, a treasonous piss-ant piece of shit, has the fucking gall to actually liken California to the slave-owning Southern states that had their asses handed to them on a silver platter by us slave-liberating Northerners. (Yes, of course, California was a Union state, unlike Jeffy’s backasswards, treasonous state of Alabama.)

Here’s the deal on “sanctuary cities” in California (and the fact that by state law the entire state is a “sanctuary state”): One, these “sanctuary” jurisdictions have been around in California for decades now and so aren’t new. And two, no California elected official, whether on the city, county, state or any other level, wants to just allow violently felonious “illegals” (a.k.a. “bad hombres”) to murder and rape fine white California citizens on his or her watch. That’s what you call bad politics.

Therefore, no, “sanctuary” jurisdictions do not protect violent felons who are in the country illegally. (As the Los Angeles Times notes, “The [“sanctuary state”] law prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from using personnel or funds to hold or question people, or share information about them with federal immigration agents, unless they have been convicted of one or more offenses from a list of 800 crimes.” [Emphasis mine.])

No, the idea of “sanctuary” jurisdictions is that law-abiding residents (those who haven’t committed serious crimes, anyway; almost all of us in the U.S., citizen or not, have committed at least misdemeanors during our lifetimes, whether we’re ever charged with those misdemeanors or not), whether they are here legally or not, don’t have to feel terrorized by storm troopers from ICE — a bunch of mostly right-wing, authoritarian, hypocritical white men with fascist tendencies if they’re not already full-blown fascists who get off on terrorizing others even for nonviolent legal infractions (such as merely existing where they’re “not supposed to” exist). This makes their fucking fascist day, you see.

And the idea of “sanctuary” jurisdictions also is that no resident in California, whether here legally or not, is too afraid to report a crime committed against him or her and/or against others because of his or her and/or the others’ citizenship status. Or is too afraid to testify or otherwise appear in a court of law. Or too afraid to seek medical care for himself or herself or another because of his or her citizenship status. Or to even to just go to school or to just take his or her child or children to school.

And the idea of “sanctuary” jurisdictions is that families (chosen families as well as biological families, in my book) aren’t ripped apart. It’s in society’s interests that that doesn’t happen. (The Repugnican Party is supposed to be all about the family, but of course that’s only white, Repugnican-voting families.)

Still, even being a “sanctuary state,” as Vox.com notes, “California, like any other ‘sanctuary’ jurisdiction, isn’t stopping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from being able to arrest, detain, or deport immigrants. In fact, ICE has already responded to the 2017 laws in its own way — by escalating raids in California and claiming that the state’s sanctuary laws force ICE to get more aggressive in its tactics.”

Indeed, the unelected and thus illegitimate Pussygrabber regime’s acting head of ICE, Thomas Homan — of course yet another stupid, fascist white man — in January proclaimed (of course) on Faux “News”/state television, “California better hold on tight. They are about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation officers.”

This moronic fascist who heads ICE demonstrates the need for California to protect its most politically vulnerable residents. And I’d gladly trade one stupid white man like Homan for 1,000 “illegals,” the vast majority of whom are hard-working and law-abiding.

(Indeed, non-citizens are less likely to commit crimes in the U.S. than are U.S. citizens. This isn’t shocking, as the vast majority of those who are not here legally quite obviously don’t have the strong desire to draw negative attention to themselves, be that by voting illegally or murdering and raping and pillaging and plundering, although it’s awfully interesting that the traitors on the right proclaim that the “illegals” are interested in both murdering and raping and in voting, because, you know, our prisons are filled with felons — bad hombres — who put voting illegally at the top of their lists of their favorite crimes to commit. [“You just raped and murdered a beautiful young white woman! What are you going to do now?” “I’m going to go vote!”])

Since Nazi elf Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III went there first, I’ll say it again: The North acted to stop the South’s terrorizing of brown-skinned human beings there. Now, the South thinks that it’s going to invade the North to terrorize the brown-skinned human beings here.

A second fight with California and the rest of the North** is not a fight that the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving fascists want to pick.

But, alas, as much as I often think that Abraham Lincoln’s No. 1 mistake is that he didn’t destroy the South entirely, but let way too many of the inbred traitors there live only to continue to drag down the entire nation to today, it most likely won’t come to that.

What’s more likely to happen is that the Repugnican traitors lose the U.S. House of Representatives in November. Then, “President” Pussygrabber is neutered. (True, expect him and his band of fellow traitors and criminals to do as much damage as they possibly can until then and even afterwards.)

Then, after November 2020, ideally we’ll have both houses of Congress controlled by the Democratic Party, as woefully imperfect as the Democratic Party is, and we’ll have President Bernie Sanders in the Oval Office.***

Maybe the red states will try to secede again between Bernie’s election and his inauguration, and they’ll get that rematch of the Civil War that they — and many of us on the other side — are itching for.

—

*Again, to me, if you did not win the popular vote, then you are not legitimately the president, as the majority of the American people did not select you. This is the case with “President” Pussygrabber as it was the case with “President” George W. Bush (whose “re”-“election” also was bullshit, since you can’t legitimately be elected again if you never were elected legitimately in the first fucking place). 

**By “North” and “South” and “Northern” and “Southern,” I sometimes refer not (only) to the regions (the blue states and the red states), but (also) to the fascist/anti-democratic/treasonous and non-fascist/democratic/patriotic mindsets of the South and the North respectively; of course a person could be in the North but be a Southerner at heart and vice-versa.

***PredictIt.org, as I type this sentence, has the Democrats more likely to take over the White House in November 2020 than Pussygrabber is likely to keep his job, and has Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden tied for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I am not at all on Team Biden. I see him as a male Billary Clinton, a Democrat in name only (well, maybe he’s a little to the left of Billary, but she’s so far to the right that it’s a pretty insignificant distinction), and I don’t think that has-been, faux-progressive populist Biden will be able to overcome the enthusiasm that Bernie, a genuine progressive populist, generates.

Biden has, after all, run for the White House twice already. His plagiarism scandal of 1987 (which apparently wasn’t an isolated incident of plagiarism) speaks to his character, methinks, as does his mistreatment of Anita Hill in 1991.

Hopefully the changes that supposedly are being made within the Democratic National Committee after the fucking fiasco that was 2016 will mean that Biden won’t simply be coronated, like Queen Billary was.

Should anything like what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016 repeat itself in 2020, what’s left of the Democratic Party can count the number of days that it has left; the Democratic Party already is on life support right now.

What support the party has now comes more from fear and loathing of the fascists who comprise the Repugnican Party than from real love and respect for the Dem Party, which lost its spine and veered away from progressivism no later than in the 1990s.