A Window Into the Hateful Minds of Canada's Far Right

The Globe & Mail has got its hands on what they were never supposed to see - 150,000 chat room messages exchanged among Canadian rightwing extremists.

They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. 

They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada. 

The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.

The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.

The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.

Our "friend" may run cover for Andrew Scheer and his dog-whistle messaging but the Tories and their leader are not on the side of the angels.

The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.

EXPLORING CONSERVATIVE PARTY INROADS 

In early 2017, members of the Canadian Super Players chat group set out to make their mark on mainstream politics. Their vehicle for doing so: the leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The first candidate they rallied behind was Kellie Leitch, who was proposing screening immigrants for cultural values. When her leadership campaign stalled, they moved en masse to support Maxime Bernier. 

One person in the chat room, who went by the name of Cyrus online and who described himself as a law student, said he attended a Bernier event in March, 2017, and described the politician “dog whistling pretty hard. He mentioned western values and western civilization a lot.” But Cyrus was less persuaded by Mr. Bernier’s libertarian policies and was unhappy that he did not take a stronger stance against asylum seekers crossing the border on foot. 

A few other chat-room participants praised Andrew Scheer, but the consensus was that Mr. Bernier was the better bet. Dank, the student teacher, even expressed dismay that he couldn’t cast more than one ballot for Mr. Bernier.

It's a pretty dark look into these groups and it's pretty obvious they're not supporting the Liberals or the New Dems or the Greens. It deserves to be read in its entirety. Check out the link at the top.

The Whiny Man Baby President Goes After Theresa May

With a skin as thin as Donald Trump's it is not surprising that the Great Orange Bloat took to twitter to fire back at Theresa May for her stiff rebuke this morning. The British prime minister took Trump to task for retweeting three videos put out by the racist, anti-Muslim group, "Britain First."

A statement from No 10 said: “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.

“British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right which is the antithesis of the values this country represents, decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the president to have done this.”

Decency, tolerance and respect, why the nerve of that Limey.

Donald Trump has publicly rebuked Theresa May over her criticism of anti-Muslim propaganda, opening an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the transatlantic allies.

“Theresa @theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted on Wednesday evening. “We are doing just fine!”

The angry tirade, crowning one of the most wayward days yet of Trump’s presidency, earned a swift putdown from the US senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who met May at Downing Street last week to discuss terrorism threats to both countries. He tweeted: “PM @theresa_may is one of the great world leaders, I have incredible love and respect for her and for the way she leads the United Kingdom, especially in the face of turbulence.”

Pile On

The Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, described the retweets as “abhorrent, dangerous and a threat to our society.” He and several other members of parliament called for the state visit to be cancelled.

The Labour MP David Lammy posted: “Trump sharing Britain First. Let that sink in. The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours. @realDonaldTrump you are not welcome in my country and my city.”

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, urged Trump to remove the retweets. And Brendan Cox, widow of Jo Cox, an MP murdered last year by a man reportedly shouting “Britain first” as she shot and stabbed her, told CNN: “I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order.

“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of an organization that is a hate-driven organization on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics. This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”

Trump does indeed seem to be in some free fall mental meltdown. The guy is unhinged. When you couple his mental instability with his astonishing ignorance and impulsiveness, we, the world, have got a very dangerous loose cannon on the deck.

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.

Let's Not Be Under any Illusions. Alt.Right Lives and It Will Have a Voice in Trump's White House.

I've been using the word "AmeriKa" to refer to Trumpland. Now it seems I might be infringing on somebody else's intellectual property rights.

Kinsella found this handbill plastered on what appears to be a light post near his neighbourhood.

I was a bit surprised to see the URL for amerika.org. I was drawn to explore the website. I wasn't totally surprised by what I found but it is troubling. We all need to take a hard look at this contagion now that Trump has appointed Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his political strategist. Take a look.

America's Racist Revolution

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Those thoughts from the US president who launched postwar America on the path to building the greatest middle class the world has ever known, the same president whose parting words were a chilling warning about the ascendancy of a malignant threat to democracy, the "military-industrial complex," Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Who could have foreseen back then that the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower would, under Ronald Reagan, begin a turn to the dark side transforming America into a corporatist, illiberal democracy and leaving the once vaunted middle class a pile of bleached bones?

Salon.com's Conor Lynch writes that, along with the dismemberment of American democracy, the Republicans also ushered in a revolution of racism.

1964 was a pivotal year for the rise of modern conservatism. This was, of course, when the Civil Rights Act passed, and outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and ended the racial segregation that had existed for so long in the South. To southerners, this was an enormous betrayal by the Democratic party, especially from President Lyndon Johnson, who was himself a Southern Democrat. The federal government had overstepped in many minds, and this was an opening for the small government conservatives to once again capture the minds of common working class people.

In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.

Reagan followed similar dog-whistle strategies when he ran, preaching states’ rights at the Neshoba County Fair, just miles from where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964, and declaring a rhetorical war on the safety net, adding “welfare queen” to the American lexicon. Today, many benefactors of social welfare programs protest those same programs, some unaware of the racial dynamic that has influenced the current animosity.

Of course, this racial force is more unconscious today than it was when the Southern Strategy began, just as the language has changed over the years. In a candid and originally anonymous interview, Reagan’s 1984 campaign director Lee Atwater described how racial language became more coded over the years:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “n***er, n***er, n***er,” Said Atwater, “[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘n***er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The Southern Strategy lives on as never before.  It has lost none of its utility as it continues to serve the interests of the plutocracy, who benefit enormously from a deeply divided, distrustful and powerless society - the precariat - and, of course, today's military-industrial-neoconservative-evangelical-commercial warfighting complex.

As a kid of the 60s, the blatant expression of racism even in America's media is jarring.  It's hard to imagine what's left except to reinstate slavery although they'll probably find a better name for it next time.

And then there's this.  The head of America's Federal Election Commission has all but thrown in the towel on regulating the 2016 elections.

You need to know this. The person in charge of our Federal Election Commission (FEC) says she has pretty much given up hope of regulating the 2016 election. That agency has been unable to reach a conclusion on any key vote, because they are perpetually locked in a 3-to-3 tie along party lines. In an interview with the New York Times, FEC Chairwoman Ann M. Ravel said, "The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim." She's not even talking about dealing with new rules to address the massive level of corruption in our political system. She's saying that they can't even hold anyone accountable for violating the inadequate rules that are already on the books. According to that recent piece in the Times, "Some commissioners are barely on speaking terms, cross-aisle negotiations are infrequent, and with no consensus on which rules to enforce, the caseload against violators has plummeted.

So, with the US Supreme Court in the bag to corporatism with the Citizens United decision and American mega billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers intent on buying the election, supported by state administrations working tirelessly to suppress minority voting, and the election regulator, the Federal Election Commission gridlocked, 2016 is shaping up to be the year America's oligarchs cement their control over the nation and the American people.

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

Ask anyone in the Third World where, if they had their druthers, they would choose to live and their top choice, hands down, would be the United States. Ask those same people which nation is the greatest threat to world peace and they say, you guessed it, the United States.

That may sound contradictory but it's not.  It's the United States that's contradictory.  It's this great nation of wealth, comfort and ease that never seems to get its fill of raining death from above on other lands, especially the weakest ones.

The world doesn't look like us or like our southern cousins.  We're mainly white people but today white people make up just 16% of the world population.  That's just shy of one out of six.  People of colour make up the other 84%.  To them, "rich white guy" has a special meaning.

Now imagine you're one of them, the 84%, and you keep reading about the killings in Ferguson or Baltimore or New York City or any of the other American cities where white cops are blowing away their own people of colour who are usually underprivileged and poor.  Which one of those do you identify with?  The poor person of colour or the white cop in combat gear with military-grade firepower and a fiercely itchy trigger finger?

If you're one of the 84% these are not events that make you really comfortable with white folks, especially when they come to your homeland looking for something or someone - to buy or to kill - or when you hear those drones buzzing overhead carving circles in the sky.

I cringed when Ignatieff lauded America's "muscular foreign policy" and supported Canada implementing the same (as though with Harper at the helm there was any need for encouragement).  The thing with a muscular foreign policy is that it's like Christmas.  Far better to give than to receive. It's one thing in a unipolar world but it can be enormously corrosive of superpowerdom when other nations are ascendant, especially when they're nations "of colour."

In Foreign Policy, Chandran Nair writes that this spate of white cop on black killings is exposing the hypocrisy of American foreign policy:

A recent report states that in March 2014 alone, police encounters in the United States resulted in 111 killings, twice as many as were killed by British police in the entire 20th century. U.S. police disproportionately and excessively target minorities at traffic stops, and U.S. courts disproportionately and excessively convict minorities of crimes. “African American and Hispanics comprised 58 percent of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population,” according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — and the percentages of minorities in American prisons appear to be growing.

Until recently, many people around the world had believed that the United States had put its troubled history with race behind it. But how thin that veneer is became evident in August 2014, after the police shooting of a black teenager in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.The city’s chief of police resigned following a string of outrages, including the discovery of racist emails circulated within his police department that suggested Barack Obama “would not be president for very long because what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

This concerns more than just Americans. After all, what does it mean for the rest of the world when its most powerful nation struggles mightily with racism in its midst? For one, it contextualizes the often-heralded notion of American “exceptionalism.” At its core, that idea is an incredibly arrogant notion. It hints of racism and a barely concealed contempt of others, especially the non-Western world. But it is a doctrine that is still ruthlessly enforced in the carnival that is American politics.

...At a time when the United States has become the de-facto policeman of the world and a self-appointed arbitrator of peace, Asians have watched with concern — especially with elections looming in 2016 — at how the Republican Party has even swung further to the right. The GOP has stopped even pretending to concern itself with the welfare of non-white Americans. Many of its most prominent members display a very shallow understanding of the world and thus a lack of appreciation of the complex histories of other nations, yet seem itching to intervene on the slightest pretext. Worse, they would have the United States do so based on their prejudices and ideological fixations — some of which are likely framed by their fear of those unlike themselves.

...In Asia, many have not forgotten that the United States remains the only nation to ever deploy a nuclear weapon (twice), and did so on an Asian nation towards which many in the American leadership had deeply racist attitudes. They recall that Franklin D. Roosevelt interned roughly 90 percent of the continental Japanese-American population in prison camps during the war. His successor, Harry Truman, the man who ultimately pushed the nuclear button that brought World War II to an end, wrote to his wife: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.”

All of which makes it not unbelievable to think that an irrational fear of Islam — and denigration of Muslims — may also be the primary factor behind the fanatical determination of many in Washington to keep Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Fear and distrust of others can be found lurking in almost every corridor of power that influences U.S. foreign policy.

The rest of the world sees this. It smells the hypocrisy in Washington when leaders resort to the old saw that America “is a nation of immigrants” while kicking unaccompanied children out of the country en masse.

Unfortunately America has allowed itself to become the Plantation State of the 21st century.  As a developed nation it has no equal when it comes to inequality especially when put through the filter of white versus non-white.  FOX News and odious types like Rush Limbaugh reveal how expressions of overt racism are yet again in vogue in the US.  The face of America has turned very ugly to that 84%. This not only opens doors it paves entire roads for America's ascendant rivals, especially China.

There was a post-Civil War saying popular in the slave states, "the South shall rise again."  Too few Americans were smart enough to understand that as a warning.

Okay you Liberal Bastards, What Now?

Trudeau the Lesser's Liberals did backflips to support Israel's brutal outrage against Gaza's civilian population this summer.  It was as though no one had ever heard the Israeli military's term, Dahiyeh.  Of course you didn't need any fancy terms to see that Israel was brutally - and quite illegally - targeting Gaza's Palestinian population completely in flagrant violation of human rights laws and the laws of war.  That much is obvious when the side with strike jets takes down the public's water and sewage plants and then moves on to hit schools and hospitals, even clearly designated UN refuge sites.  I was never so disgusted with the Liberal Party, not even under Ignatieff.

The Dippers worked off the same page until Mulcair woke up and realized he was bound to piss off some old school progressives in the NDP ranks.  Then he hemmed and hawed and - waffled.

Well now your boy - and he is your boy - Benny Netanyahu has let his other fascist shoe drop.  This time it's not Palestinians under Israeli occupation but Arab and Christian Israelis who are Netanyahu's target.  The Israeli prime minister and his cabinet by a 2-1 margin have passed a bill that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Critics, including cabinet opponents, say the new law reserved "national rights" for Jews only and also delisted Arabic as Israel's second official language.

So Justin - and Tommy - now you're backing a country that's both fascist and racist.  Is there any principle you won't compromise in your bootlicking pursuit of votes?

What Lurks Down Under

By some accounts Australians have become the wealthiest people on earth, largely from flogging massive quantities to coal to China.   Yet not all Australians are well off, especially not the first Australians, the aborigines.

Asia Times brings to light the little town of Wilcannia, winner of the national Tidy Town award, where the indigenous townfolk usually die by the age 35 and where the Cuban government operates a literacy programme.

Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens. Their self-endowment is legendary. Last year, the then minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of $331,144.

Macklin recently claimed that, in government, she had made a "huge difference". This is true. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third, and more than half the money spent on indigenous housing was pocketed by white contractors and a bureaucracy for which she was largely responsible. A typical, dilapidated house in an outback indigenous community must accommodate as many as 25 people. Families, the elderly and the disabled wait years for sanitation that works.

In 2009, Professor James Anaya, the respected UN Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described as racist a "state of emergency" that stripped indigenous communities of their tenuous rights and services on the pretext that pedophile gangs were present in "unthinkable" numbers - a claim dismissed as false by police and the Australian Crime Commission.

The then opposition spokesman on indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to "get a life" and not "just listen to the old victim brigade". Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.
It's a compelling article, well worth reading.   Canada's treatment of our First Nations has been shameful enough but at least most of us are coming to recognize what we have done.  In Australia, the white establishment institutionalize it.

Post-Election Racism Tracked

The re-election of Barack Obama triggered a flood of truly ugly, racist tweets.

A group of geography academics calling themselves the "Floating Sheep" scoured Twitter for the racist tweets and tracked them down by state of origin.   Voila.

Yellow states had relatively low levels of racist tweets.  Green states were found to be the source of high levels of racist tweets.

"Alabama and Mississippi have the highest LQ measures: They have scores of 8.1 and 7.4, respectively. And the states surrounding these two core states -- Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee -- also have very high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast."

The article, from Atlantic, gives examples of some of these tweets.  If you feel the need, you can read them there.

Sununu Can't Walk this One Back.

Romney campaign co-chair, John Sununu, is scrambling to get out from under his imprudent but pretty obviously heartfelt racist comments.

When former Bush state secretary and former US chairman of the joint chiefs Colin Powell endorsed Obama for a second term as president, he gave clear and convincing reasons for his choice.   Among them, he described Romney's vacillating foreign policy as a "moving target."  That speaks volumes for Powell's distrust of the Republican contender.

With that, former New Hampshire governor Sununu, threw out the race card.

''Frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell you have to wonder whether that's an endorsement based on issues or whether he's got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama,'' Mr Sununu told CNN.

 "A slightly different reason" is obviously code for here's one black guy siding with another black guy.   The Romney campaign felt the sting, causing Sununu to slither out an apology.

''Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the President's policies,'' he said.

It is not the first time Mr Sununu has been accused of injecting the issue of race into the presidential election. In July he told reporters on a conference call that he wished Mr Obama ''would learn how to be an American'' and was forced to apologise.

 

Sorry, governor, but you're just another hairy racist asshole.   Even once prominent Republicans were motivated to come out and denounce Republican racism.

From the "He Said WHAT?" File

A Florida fire department Captain knows who's to blame for the killing of Trayvon Martin.   In Miami-Dade Captain Brian Beckmann's mind, it's all the fault of "shitbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent parents" of urban youth.

I guess Cap'n Beckmann wasn't aware that Martin's mother works for the same Miami-Dade government that writes his cheques or that the boy's father is a truck driver.

All those years we thought and hoped that racism was dying out in the States.   Now, on an almost daily basis, we find that it's not just back, it never went away.

Federal Judge E-mails Racist Joke About Obama

When it comes to racist, this rings all the bells:

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?' His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'

US District Judge Richard Cebull sent that in an e-mail entitled "A Mom's Memory."   The joke was prefaced with this line:  "I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine."

When confronted with the e-mail by a local Montana newspaper, Judge Ceball admitted the joke was racist but maintained he wasn't.

Only in America.

America's Disgusting Descent into Its Darkest Past

It's happening again. America's radical right is on a racist rampage that could, unless it is checked forcefully and rapidly by their own side, usher in a return to the vilest side of America of the past.

Color of Change is sounding the warning about Tea Party racism reaching into the top echelons of the movement:

"...yesterday, one of the Tea Party's biggest leaders proved the NAACP's point. Mark Williams, the public face of the Tea Party Express, attacked the NAACP as a "racist" organization, and said "they make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever."3,4 He went on to write a blog post implying that Black people don't like to work or think for themselves, that we depend on welfare, and that we want to benefit from White people's tax dollars so we can have a widescreen TV in every room.5 Sadly, we're not exaggerating.

If Tea Party leaders want to have any credibility on race, they need to start by kicking Mark Williams out of their movement. If they refuse, it will be clearer than ever that Tea Party leaders accept and rely on racism as an integral part of their approach to politics.

You can help us take the first step. Please join us in challenging Tea Party leaders to reject Williams' statements and remove him from his position at the Tea Party Express. And please ask your friends and family to do the same. It takes just a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/teaparty/?id=1846-947344

The NAACP was absolutely right in calling out the tea party, and we applaud them for doing so. The NAACP has a history of combating racism and seeking a more just country for all Americans, and their action was a demonstration of that commitment.

While some of us want to brush the Tea Party off as fringe, the reality is that they are attempting to build political power, and it's important that they not embrace the kind of racism that Mark Williams represents. Of course, if they choose to do so, then it's important to make clear to all Americans that they are a home for racism and bigotry.

The racism we've seen within the Tea Party movement is dangerous — it's the promotion of a hateful agenda under the guise of political empowerment. Forcing the hand of Tea Party leaders is important if we want to prevent bigotry and hate from driving mainstream political conversations, and worse, public policy."

What begins in America oozes north soon enough and with Harper's fundamentalist radical rightwing there'll be plenty of Tea Party sympathizers. There's no room in my Canada, none at all, for this sort of scum.

And our increasingly idiotic cousins south of the line seem startled at the return of the Black Panthers.

Only in America, "The Rebirth of a Nation"

Racism has been restored to its pride of place in today's America with its less than white president. Call it "freedom of speech" I guess but the most vile, rank racism is even found on America's airwaves coming from scum like Republican mouth hero, Rush Limbaugh and others.

In case you missed it, here's one from South Carolina Republican state senator Jake Knotts on his party's leading gubernatorial candidate, Nikki Haley.

"We already got one raghead in the White House,

we don't need a raghead in the governor’s mansion."

Haley was born in India and came to the US as a child. She converted to Methodism, from Sikhism.

There was a time, however brief, when Americans would find the likes of Jake Knotts shameful, even repugnant. At least in America's Cracker south that times seems to have passed.

Are Religious Fundamentalists Inherently Bigoted?

Researchers from Duke, USC and Augsburg College have published a study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review that finds the more tightly fundamentalist a person is, the greater the likelihood that person is racist. From the online journal, Miller-McCune.com:

In a new study drawing on nearly a half century of data, a team of researchers report that religious adherents in the United States — especially fundamentalist Christians — are more inclined than agnostics to harbor racist attitudes toward blacks and other minorities.

This “religion-racism paradox,” as University of Southern California social psychologist Wendy Wood explains it, is deeply embedded in organized religion which, by its very nature, encourages people to accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward anyone perceived as different. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism,” appeared in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

“Religion creates a very strong sense of a moral right and wrong within the group,” says Wood. “When you do that, members of the group will be more likely to derogate anyone who is not part of it.” And because religion in America is practiced largely along segregated lines (just 12 percent of U.S. congregations report even a moderate level of diversity, one study shows) that derogation, and the sense of superiority that drives such diminishment of others, can extend beyond religious differences to race, class and ethnicity.

Compounding the effect, the study’s authors explain, are similarities in the moral makeup of people drawn to religion and of people who exhibit racist attitudes and behavior. Previous studies have shown that religious adherents are more likely than agnostics and atheists to rate conservative “life values” as the most important principles underlying their belief systems.

Get Over It - Electing Obama Ended Racism in the US

Really, that's the gist of Raphael Alexander's piece in today's National Toast defending the New York Post cartoon depicting a monkey, lying on the sidewalk dead from gunshot wounds, as President Obama. Raphe says it's time to get over that silly old racism nonsense;

...they can unify in enough numbers to elect a black President [or half-black, or whatever you wish to call him], but they can’t let go of the racial sensitivity that has marked their long history of friction between whites and blacks. The best example of sensitivity turned to insanity has been during this whole “chimp cartoon” flap, and the resultant fallout that is reminiscent of the prophet Muhammad cartoons.

I guess from his perch in comfy Vancouver, Alexander hasn't noticed what's still going on in the American south. Maybe he didn't hear about New Orleans or its black communities. There was an article on the weekend about a resurgence of the KKK.

Alexander betrays his abject ignorance of the condition of many African Americans in not grasping that the term "monkey" is a racial perjorative used to denigrate blacks in today's America. Instead he dismisses this as an historical anecdote. Besides, aren't we all descended from apes?

There’s even an evolutionary correlation that is even more apparent, and important here. Most adults who aren’t devout in their faith will probably admit to the fact that humans evolved from hominids, and our closest genetic ancestors are chimpanzees [96% similar actually] so there is a cultural paradigm to referencing lower primates and human beings. Nobody wants to be seen as a lower primate, which is primarily why George W Bush was referred to as the “smirking chimp”. Calling a black person a chimp is seen as more offensive only because of the historical associations of racism.

Raphael, stick to something you understand, at least even vaguely. There must be something else you can mine out of the Vancouver olympics.

Who Said Racism Isn't Alive & Well in America?

I realize this is from al Jazeera but you can find plenty of similar stuff from concerned Americans on the web. This one shows a segment of the crowd that's flocking to Sarah Palin.

"It's Our Time"

"It's Our Time" may be the meme of the Democratic presidential runoff. Obama used it to powerful effect in his speech last night. Hillary supporters have been using it constantly to bolster their claim that Mrs. Clinton deserves the throne.

To all you rabid Hillary supporters - it's your time when your candidate wins and, please, make sure I'm the first to know just when that happens. Until your candidate wins, it's not your time. Obama didn't deserve to win because he's black anymore than Hillary deserved to win because she's female. So, cut the crap.

Here's another thought. No genuine feminist can also be a racist. Sexism is bigotry and so is racism. You can't fight one form of bigotry and freely embrace another. And there's plenty of bigotry to be found among Hillary supporters.

It's difficult to read too much into blog comments but I'll give you a few examples of what Hillary supporters have been saying:

"the little sooty tan man"

" it was our time little man, not a token black man"

"the flushing sound? thats your buddy husseins chances of becoming prez"

Hillary enjoyed the support of rank bigots of both genders but it was the depth of bigotry among women that took me by surprise. Now I'm not naive. I studied in the states and I've seen, first hand, more than enough racism among American women. What troubles me is how the feminist leaders didn't step forward to denounce this sort of thing during the nomination campaign. Certainly they ought to have been fighting misogyny but also speaking out against the tide of racism that surfaced from their own gender. Instead they sat on their hands.

Genuine feminism cannot tolerate racism. So, what happened?

The Hate Vote

Americans have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money over the past half century to convince themselves that they had finally left behind their nation's horrible racist history.

Even if Barack Obama should lose to McCain in November, he'll have done his country an invaluable service by exposing just how alive and well racism is in today's America, among Democrats as well as Republicans, even among some feminists who ought to be the last to tolerate much less embrace racial bigotry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls it "A Campaign to Hate."

"Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

...So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. "