As Went Blackness So Went America's Elites

unherd |  The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.

Consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement began as an attack on the injustice of double standards; it was a patriotic appeal to the common birthright of citizenship, as against the local sham democracy of the South. Notably, the civil rights activists of this time wore suits and ties, the costume of adult obligations and standards of comportment. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such standards were said to have no other purpose than keeping black people in their place. This shift was fundamental, for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.

For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.

But the black experience retains a special role as the template that must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.

 

Adolph Reed: Elite Ratification Of Managerial "Authoriteh" Over The American Negroe Problem

thebaffler  |  The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.

The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel, warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all.

In this context the pronounced animus trained on the figure of the “white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial gatekeeper in respectable political discourse. The gatekeeping question has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans and determines the “black agenda.” And the status of black leader, spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested class prerogative, dating back a century and more to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Specifically, the gatekeeping function is the obsession of the professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington in the 1890s; recognition as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,” requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and individuals.

Gatekeeping hasn’t been the exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists and racial separatists like Marcus Garvey and the leaders of the Nation of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white elites to support programs of racial “self-help” or uplift. From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race have courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and NGOs. And the emergence of cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the number and types of entities that can anoint race leaders and representative voices.

This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and validate the acceptable terms of black leadership has made the category seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all over the place all the time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots Presidential Town Hall featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and central to progressive strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to prevent Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally in Seattle—as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not a black issue. The instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of pundits and bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not pertinent to black Americans.

 

 

Negroes With Guns Out'Chere LARPing....,

blackenterprise  |   Previously, BLACK ENTERPRISE reported that an all-Black armed group was marching through Stone Mountain Park in Georiga in July for the removal of a Confederate monument honoring Jefferson Davis. Since then, a video of the large group marching with their guns in hand has gone viral on social media.

The group has become more active within the last couple of months leading up to the election, along with recent police shootings of unarmed Black civilians, and they are ready to let the country know who they are: Meet the NFAC.

The heavily-armed NFAC, or Not F*cking Around Coalition, is led by John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay, who started the group in 2017 in Atlanta. Johnson has said that the group marches for racial equality and ending police brutality in response to white-armed militias that have come out in light of the heightened racial tension.

 “We’re not ‘effing’ around anymore with the continued abuses within our community and the lack of respect for our men, women, and children,” Johnson said in an interview with CNN. Johnson has posted more about the trauma Black people have endured and how important it is for those in the Black community to arm themselves.

“It ain’t never been grateful Black people in this country,” said Johnson at one of the group marches in a video he posted on his Twitter account. “You can’t fix 400 years of f*cking people over in 150 years!”

The group has also been able to avoid any conflicts with law enforcement usually coordinating with local officers on the scene to peacefully march. While many have compared the group to the Black Panther Party who formed a similar militia to protect Black neighborhoods, the group sets itself apart by avoiding violence and working with police officers. Johnson says it is important for the Black community to exercise their Second Amendment right, touching on the double standard between Black and white gun ownership within the United States.

Contrary To The Mainstream Media Narrative 93% Of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful

Black Lives Matter has no concrete specific policy, statutory, or legislative agenda - which is how you know it's a symbolic "stir the pot" and "get out the black vote" initiative. (as if you didn't gather as much from the fact that it's a Warren Buffett production)

The problem with this is that the MSM and social media have amplified the already popular and political cultural influence of selected "woke" sock puppets who have leveraged the disproportionate social, cultural and political capital of American negroes and applied this appropriated clout the exceedingly pedestrian objective of re-aquiring partisan control of the presidency, period. (and that control won't be used to satisfy any concrete-specific political-economic priorities or needs of Black Americans.

Once it was known that Negroes boycotted the 2016 election, the obvious marketing strategy became to create racial appeals that boosted the Democrat’s ‘brand’ and diminished their competitor’s. In fact, leading Democratic strategists who had spent storied careers crafting cynical dog whistle campaigns, began shouting racist! to shut down any challenge to their campaign.

By election eve 2016, Clinton campaign officials had decided on the ‘Russia stole the election’ storyline. Additionally, Democratic strategists were most certainly aware that blacks stayed home en masse in 2016. This made Donald Trump, with his nativist chatter and typical Republican deference to repressive authority, the perfect foil to retroactively portray the election as about race and foreign intrigue. 

When the Democratic-leaning press began (falsely) reporting on rising hate and racial backlash, and the CEOs of large banks and tech companies began stating publicly that white supremacy is the only problem in need of solving, the havoc that neoliberal policies have wrought quickly disappeared as a topic of polite conversation.

This elite pot-stirring and color-revolution antic is an exceedingly dangerous gambit. Since it wasn't done for Black people in America, but was instead something done to Black people in America - I gots to say the nayno...,

Right-wingers come from somewhere other than thin air. There’s at least a germ of truth in their beliefs. Fortunately, the rest of their beliefs are so abhorrent they’re dismissed out of hand. Nevertheless, I believe the day of another European holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the parlance of the day, has moved a step closer with this weeks display of barbarism in France. Cutting off a single French head doesn't really hold a candle to the pain and suffering and self-serving pot-stirring implemented this year in the U.S.  Does this sound familiar?

For a start, this is a murder that has nothing to do with immigration from the Maghreb, unemployment, discrimination, neo-colonialism or anything similar. The assailant was white, and came from a refugee family that had been settled in France, looked after and educated. The town where it happened, Conflans Sainte-Honorine, is a quiet, dull, middle-class community about thirty-five kilometres west of Paris at the end of the high-speed Metro. (I passed through there once: it was closed). “Nothing ever happens here” said one shocked resident this morning. The killer was not a native of the town, but travelled there to do the killing. Moreover, this is one of a series of murders since 2015 – the body count is nearly 300 – carried out for explicitly political and religious reasons by radicalised young men, who believe, as do a significant proportion of French Muslims, that the Koran takes precedence over any secular laws. Thus, laws conflicting with Islam must not be obeyed, but equally it is the responsibility of all Muslims to punish anyone who violates the injunctions of the Koran. hence the present killing. This would be problematic in any modern state, but especially so in France, with its history of bitter struggle against the Church to establish a secular republic.

The problem has been building in schools for decades now, but has been ignored by successive governments, worried about upsetting the professional anti-racist lobby. Teachers have been threatened and physically attacked for giving lessons on secularism, for teaching the theory of Evolution or discussing non-Islamic religions. Militant parents, egged-on by fundamentalist Imams mostly sent from Qatar, have pressured schools to stop serving pork, or to excuse their daughters from mixed swimming classes or class photographs where non-muslim pupils are not veiled. Little by little, such tactics have undermined the educational system, as local mayors, always in search of votes, have made accommodations with local religious leaders. (Ironically, French schools only went co-educational in 1969, after generations of bitter opposition from the Church). This horrific incident at last seems to have brought home to French elites that uncontrolled immigration has produced communities in the country which do not believe that they have to obey the law, and consider themselves justified in using violence to enforce their religious principles. Macron seemed genuinely shocked when he spoke yesterday . Of course doing something about it is another matter.

Finally, the fact that the victim was a teacher doing his job has stunned people. Partly this is because so many French people are parents of school-age children or have a teacher in the family. But partly also the teacher is a traditional mythic figure of Republican Virtue, a kind of secular priest promoting the virtues of equality and secularism. Not for nothing were teachers known as “the hussars of the Republic”, and the bitter opposition between the local priest and the schoolteacher was a feature of French life until quite recently. As a number of politicians have said, to strike at a teacher is to strike at the very foundation of secular and republican French values. Unlike many countries who witter on about “values” the French do actually have them written down and seek to adhere to them: hence the shock and dismay.

 

Ice Cube Is A Real One - Woke Weak And Elderly Negroes Just Won't Understand...,

medium  |  As sick as I am of Donald Trump, I am no match for my mama — and based on recent observations, probably not for yours either.

Whenever my mom is about to say something that might be considered impolite, she prefaces her comments with “Lord forgive me.” I question whether God takes offense to criticism of someone that’s the seven deadly sins rolled up into a stupid man who acts as if he’s the omnipotent one, but I don’t tell her how to be a good Christian and she lets me be a heathen who elects to speak to God without an intermediary.

Where we differ on how to practice our faith, we align in tone whenever discussing the demon in the White House. That’s why more often than not, what follows “Lord forgive me” is something that recalls the Old Testament.

I love that my mom aims to be polite even if the person she’s talking about is spiritually something akin to a boil on the left ass cheek of Satan, but Black elders have earned the right to be especially venomous, given what his victory in the 2016 presidential election signified.

In an Undefeated article about Black voters’ reactions published soon after the election, Melvin Steals, a retired educator and school administrator living in western Pennsylvania, said of Trump’s victory, “Now we see what was hidden.” Steals, 70 at the time, went on to compare the outcome to the Great Redemption, the period after Reconstruction “when they wanted to eradicate all of the gains made by Blacks after the Civil War.”

“I’m working the voter protection hotlines and I’ve had some conversations with older voters that made me blush.”

“This is another opportunity to reassert their authority,” Steals added. “At the core there is something nefarious about it. It’s tied into White supremacy, that it’s their way or the highway.”

In America's Softest Heads, Obama Ranks Between MLK And Jesus Christ...,

President Obama had the house and a supermajority in the senate. He passed an insurance giveaway health care bill w no public option, failed to break up the banks, failed to rescue homeowners, and then has the audacity to blame progressives for his administration’s failures. Wow. https://t.co/QRZH9jzbHP

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) October 15, 2020

Obama's The Poster Child And His Cousin Warren Buffet's The Money Behind Black Lives Matter

tabletmag  |  Tides was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a California real estate investor who named the entity after a Bay Area bookstore popular among left-leaning activists. From the beginning, according to their own documents, Tides was designed unlike most other nonprofit institutions. Rather than building up or spending down an endowment, it sought to become more like a sophisticated piece of software—a financial instrument that would allow wealthy individuals and donors to contribute to the causes of their choosing with more anonymity than is generally allowed by the laws governing ordinary nonprofits.

Recently, after Pike stepped away, the Tides network has taken on a distinctly political role, whose guiding star appears to be Barack Obama. The secretary of the Tides board is Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration; board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to the advisory committee of the federal pension program. Peter Buttenwieser, the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune who passed away in 2018, financed a fund in his own name which is administered and distributed entirely by the Tides Foundation. A “major behind-the-scenes supporter of Democratic candidates,” Buttenwieser was one of President Obama’s earliest high profile backers, helping the then-senator organize his bid for the White House.

Moreover, Atlantic Philanthropies, a nonprofit created by billionaire retailer Chuck Feeney in the 1980s, has directed more than $42 million in grants through the Tides network since 2000. Based in Bermuda, Atlantic Philanthropies was able to participate in political lobbying efforts in ways that continental United States nonprofits cannot. Atlantic became increasingly aggressive under the Obama administration. As Gara LaMarche, Atlantic’s president, said in one think tank address, when Obama was elected “we saw opportunities to assist our grantees in moving forward more rapidly and broadly in a number of areas central to our mission.” In return, Atlantic dispensed $27 million to help push Obamacare through Congress. At the ceremony to sign Obamacare into law, LaMarche stood beside President Obama in the East Room of the White House.

In any case, what’s clear is that there is now a sophisticated and complex structure underneath what many assume to be an organic and spontaneous social movement, one with deep pockets and ambitious goals. “After over fourteen years of learning and over 700 million dollars invested ... the collapse we have been expecting is surely underway,” reads the NoVo Foundation’s website. Right now there’s only this one statement on the site, which is under construction as noted: “Working on solutions now so old patterns of power can’t, once again, re-form to rebuild and continue to repress.”

I Was Unaware That Diversity/Sensitivity Training Is A CIA Invention...,

newyorker  |   The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left, a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity “training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine. His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential spies.

The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or directives.

It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know how one was really perceived.

the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,” to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied, twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.” Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared, “George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”

Cobbs’s career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,” for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from 2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”

In her provocative history “Race Experts,” from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.

Democrat Monopoly Power Over The Black Vote

BAR  |  The Biden-Trump confrontation revealed, with crystalline clarity, that the real “genius” of the American electoral process is its total imperviousness to popular demands for a healthier, more just and less economically precarious society and a peaceful, ecologically stable world. Instead, the Democratic alternative to the white supremacist Republican in the White House is — another lifelong racist, mass-incarcerating, corporate-serving, warmongering old white man. 

“The party is me, right now. I am the Democratic Party,” Joe Biden shot back at the “clown” Donald Trump, who repeatedly tried to associate the former vice president with the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and Black Lives Matter demands to rein in the police — all issues supported by super-majorities of Democrats, and even large chunks of Republican voters, but opposed by the candidate now representing the Party. 

“You just lost the left,” Trump twice hollered, wishfully. In an actual democracy the Democrats would, indeed, have committed political suicide by nominating a corporate hack and career race-baiter like Biden as their standard-bearer. But the U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none. 

The voters that Trump referred to in the debate as “the left,” are actually at the center of the U.S. political spectrum, where super-majorities favor the positions taken by Bernie Sanders during the primaries. Exit polls in South Carolina and on “Super Tuesday” showed that the same Democrats that voted for Joe Biden nevertheless favored Sanders’ positions on the issues, but opted for Biden in fear of Trump and his rabid White Man’s Party. It’s a simple formula that allows Democrats to promise their base nothing — except that they are not Trump or some other flagrant racist.

“The U.S. is a corporate dictatorship where the rich have two parties and the rest of us effectively have none.”

The trick will continue to work until voters, especially Blacks, stop rewarding Democrats for their serial betrayals. There is nothing smart or “strategic” about falling for the same trick every election cycle – and anybody that tells you different is in on the con game.

Why Are "Woke" Corporations Cancelling Negroes From Food Brands?

rollingstone  |  Following Wednesday’s announcements that Quaker Oats would discontinue the Aunt Jemima brand and Mars would “evolve” its Uncle Ben image, B&G Foods, the parent company of Cream of Wheat, said it will launch an “immediate review of the Cream of Wheat brand packaging.”

The breakfast food — first manufactured in 1893 — has long been criticized for its use of Rastus, a smiling African-American chef whose name has been shorthand for a derogatory slur against African-American men and whose visage has been criticized for being stereotypically subservient. The character of Rastus has appeared in numerous minstrel shows dating back to the 1800s. Rastus was removed from the packaging in 1925, but the company replaced it with a similar image that remains today. Calls to remove the character altogether have grown louder as brands have reconsidered their packaging and marketing in recent weeks.

“B&G Foods, Inc. today announced that we are initiating an immediate review of the Cream of Wheat brand packaging. We understand there are concerns regarding the chef image, and we are committed to evaluating our packaging and will proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism,” a rep for B&G said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “B&G Foods unequivocally stands against prejudice and injustice of any kind.”

In a statement Wednesday, Quaker Oats — who purchased the Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mixes in 1926 — admitted the racial history of the brand, which was named after the minstrel song “Old Aunt Jemima” and has drawn controversy for its racial insensitivity and stereotyping.

“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” a Quaker Oats rep said in a statement. “As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations.”

Quaker Oats also announced a $5 million donation over the next five years in order “to create meaningful, ongoing support and engagement in the Black community.”

 

Lil'Mike Bloomberg Buying Black And Brown Former Felon Votes For Biden In Florida

NYPost |  Rep. Matt Gaetz warned billionaire Michael Bloomberg that he may be facing a criminal probe for paying the outstanding fines and fees of 32,000 convicted felons in Florida so they could regain their right to vote ahead of the November election.

Speaking to Fox News’ “Hannity” Tuesday evening, Gaetz (R-Fla.) said he had spoken to Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody prior to his appearance on the show about Bloomberg’s voter effort in the Sunshine State.

On Tuesday, it was reported that the former NYC mayor had raised over $16 million for, and donated $5 million to, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

Bloomberg’s push would benefit ex-cons as part of a 2018 state constitutional amendment allowing felons who have served their time to regain their right to vote.

Before they can regain that right, however, they need to pay any fines, fees or restitution.

In a statement to Axios, a representative for Bloomberg said, “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy and no American should be denied that right. Working together with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, we are determined to end disenfranchisement and the discrimination that has always driven it.”

To Gaetz and Moody, however, there are legal concerns regarding Bloomberg’s political spending in this specific case.

“I believe there may be a criminal investigation already underway of the Bloomberg-connected activities in Florida,” Gaetz told Sean Hannity.

“[Under Florida law] it’s a third-degree felony for someone to either directly or indirectly provide something of value to impact whether or not someone votes. So the question is whether or not paying off someone’s fines and legal obligations counts as something of value, and it clearly does. If Michael Bloomberg was offering to pay off people’s credit card debts, you would obviously see the value in that.

“When you improve someone’s net worth by eliminating their financial liabilities, that’s something of value. Normally, it would be very difficult to prove that that was directly linked to impacting whether or not someone was going to vote. But they literally wrote their own admission,” the Florida Republican argued, referencing a Washington Post report.

Fsck The DNC!!! Why Not Offer Kneegrows Some Fried Chicken And Watermelon?

getyourbootytothepoll |  REGISTER. RESEARCH. VOTE. 

How do you get your booty to the poll? It’s easy as 1-2-3!

REGISTER TO VOTE.

Deadlines vary depending on the state, so just register now bruh. It literally takes like 2 minutes. You can register to vote here: Register to Vote Online
There is some shady mess going on out there, so even if you think you are registered, double check it. You can do that here: Am I Registered to Vote?

RESEARCH - DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE BALLOT AND LEARN ABOUT WHAT’S ON IT.

There is a lot more than the president on the ballot, and you need to know who cares about the stuff that will help you and yours and who DGAF. A lot of polls won’t let you take out your phone when voting, so print your sample ballot or write down your choices. You can download a sample ballot here: Personalized Ballot | VOTE411

If you’re looking at your sample ballot thinking, “WTF do these folks even do?” you are not alone. You can find information on candidates, referendums and what the various political offices are responsible for here: BallotReady: Vote Informed on the Entire Ballot

Still not sure who to vote for? This website tells you what candidates have the same beliefs as you. https://www.isidewith.com

Vote Early.

Most states have early voting. Vote early and avoid the lines. And yeah, you still get the sticker. There is some shady mess happening with the post office, so if you don’t have a completed mail-in ballot mailed by Oct 3rd, just plan to vote in person. Check how early you can vote in your state here: Early Voting Calendar

Savage Foreign Scum Working To ReOpen The Bronx Slave Market...,

NYTimes |   This underclass status can be traced as far back as the 1800s, historians say, and is squarely rooted in racism. Domestic work was then one of the few ways that Black women could earn money, and well into the 20th century, most of those women lived in the South. During the Jim Crow era, they were powerless and exploited. Far from the happy “mammy” found in popular culture like “Gone With the Wind,” these women were mistreated and overworked. In 1912, a publication called The Independent ran an essay by a woman identified only as a “Negro Nurse,” who described 14-hour workdays, seven days a week, for $10 a month.

“I live a treadmill life,” she wrote. “I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets.”

In 1935, the federal government all but codified the grim conditions of domestic work with the passage of the Social Security Act. The law was the crowning achievement of the New Deal, providing retirement benefits as well as the country’s first national unemployment compensation program — a safety net that was invaluable during the Depression. But the act excluded two categories of employment: domestic workers and agricultural laborers, jobs that were most essential to Black women and Black men, respectively.

The few Black people invited to weigh in on the bill pointed out the obvious. In February 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston, then special counsel to the N.A.A.C.P., testified before the Senate Finance Committee and said that from the viewpoint of Black people, the bill “looks like a sieve with the holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”

The historian Mary Poole, author of “The Segregated Origins of Social Security,” sifted through notes, diaries and transcripts created during the passage of the act and found that Black people were excluded not because white Southerners in control of Congress at the time insisted on it. The truth was more troubling, and more nuanced. Members of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration — most notably, the Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr. — persuaded congressional leaders that the law would be far simpler to administer, and therefore far more likely to succeed, if the two occupations were left out of the bill.

In the years that followed, Black domestic workers were consistently at the mercy of white employers. In cities like New York, African-American women lined up at spots along certain streets, carrying a paper bag filled with work clothes, waiting for white housewives to offer them work, often for an hour or two, sometimes for the day. A reporter, Marvel Cooke, and an activist, Ella Baker, wrote a series of articles in 1935 for The Crisis, the journal of the N.A.A.C.P., describing life in what they called New York City’s “slave markets.”

The markets’ popularity diminished in the ’40s after Mayor Fiorello La Guardia opened hiring halls, where contracts were signed laying out terms for day labor arrangements. But in early 1950, Ms. Cooke found the markets in New York City were bustling again. In a series of first-person dispatches, she joined the “paper bag brigades” and went undercover to describe life for the Black women who stood in front of the Woolworths on 170th Street.

“That is the Bronx Slave Market,” she wrote in The Daily Compass in January 1950, “where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor.”

That same year, domestic work was finally added to the Social Security Act, and by the 1970s it had been added to federal legislation intended to protect laborers, including the Fair Labor Standards Act. African-American women had won many of those protections by organizing, though by the 1980s, they had moved into other occupations and were largely replaced by women from South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.

Dignity Is Something You TAKE!!! NOT Something You Whine And Beg For...,

NPR  |  In the mid-'80s, just as his career as a writer was reaching its first ascent, Stanley Crouch presided over an attempted, unexpected, coup d'etat. Crouch wanted to return to a time when the serious Black practitioners participated in the gatekeeping. (The title of a 2000 Crouch piece in the New York Times says it all: "Don't Ask the Critics. Ask Wallace Roney's Peers.") That was all to the good, but another, more reactionary and perhaps even more commercial aspect of his proposed revolution proved impossible to implement: defining jazz as a fixed object made up of conventional swing, blues, romantic ballads, a Latin tinge... and not too much else. While executing this maneuver, Crouch rejected — by some lights, betrayed — his original peer group of Murray, Blythe and Newton, and instead embraced the latest musicians intrigued by a comparatively straight-ahead approach. (Newton complained, "A stylistically dominant agenda in jazz is like bringing Coca-Cola to a five-star dinner!")

It was an artificial conceit to begin with, and Crouch was too contrarian and combative to lead a movement. However, he did have one important acolyte: Wynton Marsalis, the man anointed as the biggest new jazz star of the era. Marsalis studied the texts of Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray the way he did the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. In what may have been an unprecedented event, a major jazz artist actually read critics, and let those critics inform his music. (Crouch also contributed liner notes to the first run of excellent Marsalis LPs.)

Between them, Marsalis and Crouch kicked off the jazz wars of the '80s and '90s, an argument about tradition versus innovation, a tempest in a teacup that played out in all the major jazz magazines, in many mainstream publications, in bars and clubs everywhere – and in the end did very little good to anybody. (The day Keith Jarrett angrily invited Wynton Marsalis to a "blues duel" in the New York Times was a notable low point.) The 2001 Ken Burns documentary Jazz, which featured Marsalis and Crouch as both off-screen advisors and on-screen commentators, was the climactic battleground. People who love post-1959 styles connected to funk, fusion and the avant-garde are still very upset about Ken Burns' Jazz. 

Still. When he started assembling the repertory institution Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987, Wynton Marsalis was advocating for the primacy of the Black aesthetic at a time when the white, Stan Kenton-to-Gary Burton lineage dominated major organizations like the Berklee College of Music and the International Association of Jazz Educators. The music of Kenton and Burton has tremendous value, but their vast institutional sway and undue influence in jazz education is part of this discussion. We needed less North Texas State (Kenton's first pedagogical initiative) and more Duke Ellington in the mix, and Marsalis almost single-handedly corrected our course – although Marsalis himself would give Crouch a lot of the credit. Indeed, Crouch's long-running internal mandate to get Ellington seen as "Artist of the Century" had finally paid off on a macro level, and the free high school program "Essentially Ellington" is one of JALC's most noble achievements.

Crouch and Marsalis also strove to bury the once-prevalent idea that Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom, and encouraged the Black working class to reclaim the jazz greats as crucial to their heritage. (Those ready to hate on Ken Burns's Jazz should keep that perspective in mind.)

There was some bad, a lot of good, and plenty to argue about. What can be said for sure: JALC never quite pulled off Crouch's proposed coup. All these years later, JALC remains merely a part of what makes jazz interesting today. Younger practitioners and listeners comfortably see the music as a continuum that can contain anything from the avant-garde harp musings of Alice Coltrane to the electric fusion of John McLaughlin to hip-hop stylings of Robert Glasper. Crouch's definition of jazz does not dominate the conversation the way he intended, perhaps paradoxically proving the original point that jazz musicians and critics don't really have much to do with each other.

Biden Campaign Ratchets Up Courting Black voters, Specifically Black Men

                           

metrotimes |  Since he left office in 2019, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has largely kept a low profile. But on Thursday, the Republican broke his silence to to announce in a USA Today op-ed that he was bucking his party and endorsing Democratic candidate Joe Biden for president.

In the op-ed, Snyder called President Donald Trump a "bully" who "lacks a moral compass" and "ignores the truth."

"As a proud nerd, I had to deal with bullies over many years; it is tragedy watching our world suffer from one," Snyder wrote.

The thing about tragedies, though, is that they can be wrought even by nerds like Snyder.

His greatest claim to infamy, of course, is his administration's handling of the Flint water crisis, which was a direct result of Michigan's emergency manager law. The people of Michigan rejected a similar law at the ballot in 2012; when that happened, Snyder and the Republican-led Congress just rammed through a new version that couldn't be rejected by voters. Then, while under emergency management, the city of Flint made the disastrous decision to switch its water supply — which led to its drinking water being poisoned with lead, harming thousands.

Even worse, a bombshell VICE report published earlier this year suggests a coordinated, years-long cover-up of the crisis that goes all the way up to Snyder, who may have known about the crisis much earlier than he testified.

Unsurprisingly, as Snyder's public profile was soured in the wake of the crisis, he has called for a return to "civility" in political discourse. But as the statute of limitations for criminal charges in the Flint crisis passed in April, followed by Michigan announcing a massive $600 million settlement for the victims in August, Snyder remained off the hook.

Now, it seems like Democrats are intent on rehabilitating him, the same way George W. Bush became recast as a fine artist who pals around with Hollywood icons at foot

Oligarchs Fund, Promote, Distribute, And Profit From Performative Blackness

unz  |  Here’s your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning tell us about what’s going on in America today?

1. They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people
2. They suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws
3. They alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race war
4. They indicate that powerful agents — operating from within the state– are inciting racial violence to crush the emerging “populist” majority that elected Trump to office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into a tyrannical third-world “shithole”.

Which of these four statements best explains what’s going on in America today?

If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning are as much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of “ideology”, and all three are being used to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as “Americans”.

The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history, their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative “Reset” that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect the strategy will ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging and unapologetic.

Any Chance Torey And Megan's Performatory ____________ Can Be Cancelled And Expunged?

TMZ  | Tory Lanez allegedly opened fire on Megan Thee Stallion because he was wasted -- that's what he claimed in a text sent to her shortly after the bloody incident ... as she was still in a hospital bed.

TMZ has seen the text Megan got on the evening of July 12 ... roughly 15 hours after she claims Tory shot her in her feet, and in it, he's begging for forgiveness. He wrote, "I know u prolly never gone talk to me again, but I genuinely want u to know I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart."

His only explanation for the violence ... "I was just too drunk."

In the text, Tory never references "shooting" or a gun, but it is clear he did something he regrets. In his words, "None the less s**t should have never happened and I can't change what did. I just feel horrible."

And, he repeats ... "Cuz I genuinely just got too drunk."

TMZ broke the story ... Tory, Megan and another friend had been party hopping in the Hollywood Hills early on July 12. Police responded to reports of shots fired from or around an SUV.

Jessica Krug Performed "Blackness", Just Not As Well Or As Usefully As Obama Or Kamala...,

jacobinmag |  Simply put, Jessica Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature. But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in liberal academic circles.

I don’t know George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug. I have no special insights into either her motives or personal struggles, nor do I have any reason to feel personally betrayed by the recent revelations that she had been passing for black for many years.

But while the court of public opinion has already found her guilty of at least one, perpetual count of “cultural appropriation,” in my view this conclusion misses the mark. To be clear, if I did not find “Jess La Bombalera” offensive, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this essay. Still, if one considers, first, that culture — the folk’s shared sensibilities informed by common experiences — exists, on some level, to be appropriated, second, the variety of black experiences precludes the existence of a singular black culture, and third, the implications for mass culture of thirty-years of mainstream hip hop, then calling Krug’s performance “appropriation of black culture” only compounds the problem Krug personifies.

If Krug is not guilty of appropriating “black culture,” she is guilty of attempting to establish her bona fides as a scholar of black people through a persona that both pandered to and reinforced commonplace stereotypes about black and brown people. Simply put, Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature.

But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in some liberal academic circles.

Because I’ve lived most of my life either on the near periphery or within academia, I’ve had nearly four decades of experience with the creepy essentialist language of “racial authenticity” that lives and thrives in more than one corner of putatively liberal academia. As a result, I learned a long time ago that some white liberals expect black and brown people to “perform” in ways that comport with their well-meaning, usually underclass-informed, and fundamentally racist expectations of black people.

I Despise Fun-Free, Hypocritical Joy Ann Reid - But Did She Do Anybody Wrong This Week?

dailybeast |  “For decades, America’s Muslim community has endured blanket portrayals that focus on one thing, not their families or individual achievements or even anything about Islam,” she said Wednesday. “Nope, just one thing: terrorism. Particularly after 9/11, profiling became a near American obsession for anybody Brown—god forbid with a beard or headscarf, whether they were Muslim or not, traveling through an airport could be hell. Physical attacks on not just Muslims, but Sikhs, who are not Muslim, increased.”

After noting how prevalent anti-Muslim stereotypes have been in media and entertainment, Reid then wondered aloud why there was a double standard when it came to describing extremism among white right-wingers compared to Muslim terrorism, taking aim at how the president has radicalized his base.

“It’s the misportrayal that is the problem,” she stated. “We’re all too quick to call out those who radicalize young men who are vulnerable. There have been treatments of this all over cable news for years. But when white Christians are radicalized, we don’t react the same way. When was the last time Donald Trump or anyone in his campaign was asked if they are willing to condemn the Boogaloo Boys by name?”

Touching on her own remarks, Reid was largely unapologetic, insisting that her comments were taken in bad faith and misconstrued.

“I asked that question on Monday, and there was a lot of conversation, particularly online after the segment aired, some of which was frankly not in good faith,” the ReidOut host declared. “But some of the conversation reflected the genuine feelings of people who have been subjected to the kind of stereotyping that I just described.”

“And who take matters like this to heart because of it,” she continued. “And we should all be sensitive to that, and I certainly should have been sensitive to that.”

She then turned to Newsweek editor-at-large Naveed Jamali, who was her guest during the Monday discussion, and said it was “not exactly the most artful way of asking that question, obviously, based on the reaction.”

“The way that I framed it obviously didn’t work,” she added.

Besides Jamali, Reid also brought on Dalia Mogahed, the director of research for The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, to discuss whether Reid made a “fair analogy."

Mogahed, for her part, said that Reid has “always given Muslim voices a fair shake” before noting that while the MSNBC host “intended” to ask a fair question, the way “it landed” was “unintentionally saying that Muslims were inherently violent.”

Why Was It More Fun For Kansas City Jewess Jessica Krug To Pretend Afro-Latina Than Be Herself?

timesofisrael  |  According to her bio on the George Washington University website, among Krug’s areas of expertise are Africa, Latin America and African American History. She has written two books, including “Fugitive Modernities.” 

“My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil,” she wrote in the introduction.

Krug also reportedly used the name Jess La Bombalera in activist circles.

A student who took a class with Krug in 2019 said she was “shocked” the professor lied.

“It was the last thing on my mind to think she was lying. I would think I had the details confused,” Anmol Goraya told CNN.

George Washington University said it was aware of Krug’s post but wouldn’t further comment.

Krug’s admission was similar to that of Rachel Dolezal, who in 2015 stepped down as the head of a local NAACP chapter after her parents said she had been posing as Black for years but was actually white.