"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."

"Although exit-poll data can be unreliable... [his coalition is] unusually nonwhite.... For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state’s majority-Hispanic border counties.... Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe... made a joke about Puerto Rico being a 'floating island of garbage,' which for a time became the campaign’s top story.... But... Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.... [P]erhaps Trump’s coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that 'white' and 'Hispanic' are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood...."

I'm reading "How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters/In 2016, the idea that Trump was a cloaked white supremacist made him seem like a fringe character. What does it mean that his popularity has increased?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker.

I don't know how much postmortem I'm willing to read. If your perception and analysis are so good, why didn't you see this before the election? I guess that's another way of saying hindsight is 20/20. But I chose this little essay to quote because it's not purporting to understand what happened and it is pretty modestly conceding confusion. That's appropriate. I would like to see much stronger criticism of Democrats. They were boosted by mainstream media, which either pretended not to notice how awful they were or just didn't see.

By the way, is "antagonistic comedian" a standard term? I've heard "insult comedian."

Anyway, to escape from elite media for a moment — I mean for 3 hours — I listened to Joe Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Tony Hinchcliffe (go to 00:04:00):

"The hosts seem to pride themselves on making [the podcast] 'Advisory Opinions' a venue for 'abject legal nerdery,' separate from partisan politics..."

"When the Colorado Supreme Court issued a ruling, in December, that blocked Trump from the Republican primary ballot, [Sarah] Isgur and [David] French convened an 'emergency pod' to discuss the case. French argued that the court was probably correct to disqualify Trump, in light of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that former officeholders who have 'engaged in insurrection or rebellion' after taking an oath of office are ineligible to serve. Isgur, by contrast, was wary. 'The whole point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to strip the states of power, because they had, y’know, not behaved well,' she said—the Amendment was ratified three years after the end of the Civil War. 'So the idea that we then empowered each state to decide who’s qualified to be on the ballot seems insane to me.' But both were dismayed by the idea that Republicans might be able to retaliate by disqualifying Biden, perhaps by claiming that he had failed to protect the country from invading immigrants. 'Give me an effing break,' French said during a recent episode, coming about as close as he ever does to cursing. Isgur reacted as if she had just unwrapped a thoughtful birthday gift. 'Wow,' she said. 'I got an "effing" from David!'"

Writes Kelefa Sanneh, in "Sarah Isgur’s Majority Report/On 'Advisory Opinions,' the lawyer and former Trump Administration spokesperson argues that the Supreme Court is good, even—or especially—in its current incarnation" (The New Yorker).

I have a tag already for David French. He's a NYT columnist. I'll make a tag for Sarah Isgur. I hadn't noticed her until this New Yorker profile came out, and now I've listened to a podcast and a half, and I intend to keep listening. Nice work! Listen to them here.

"Whenever someone wants to play down the importance of vocal virtuosity, Bob Dylan is Exhibit A: a brilliant croaker..."

"... who makes you feel sorry for all those hacks content to simply carry a tune. But for precisely that reason, Mr. Dylan isn't really a bad singer. He's got an unconventional voice, to be sure... but he's too idiosyncratic, too rock 'n' roll. A great bad singer must never give up on goodness. Perhaps Mr. West knows how preposterous he sounds, but he's still singing the best he can. I'd propose that the father of modern bad singing is Biz Markie, the rapper best known for the classic anti-love song 'Just a Friend,' from 1989. His bellowed plea -- wildly out of tune, and totally unforgettable -- sounded like something concocted after a day of romantic disappointments and a night of heavy drinking: 'Oh baby, you/ You got what I need/ But you say he's just a friend.' With each repetition of the chorus, he sounded funnier and more unhinged."

That's from "The Sweet Sounds Of Really Bad Singing" by Kelefa Sanneh, published in the NYT on January 18, 2004. That was 4 days after this blog began, but somehow I didn't catch it and blog it at the time. I'm reading it today because it's linked in what is — I'm sad to say — an obituary: "Biz Markie, Hip-Hop’s ‘Just a Friend’ Clown Prince, Dies at 57/An innovative yet proudly goofy rapper, he had an unlikely crossover hit with a tune that led one critic to call him (favorably) 'the father of modern bad singing'" (NYT). 

This is a wonderfully catchy song, and the terrible singing is part of what make it catchy and fun. If you watched MTV back in 1989 — as I did — this will surely resonate. Skip ahead to 1:33 to get right to the singing, but start at the beginning for spoken-word cheesy comedy and a story told in slow-paced rap: 

 

From the obituary: 

Biz Markie has said he was never supposed to be the vocalist handling those notes. “I asked people to sing the part, and nobody showed up at the studio,” he explained later, “so I did it myself.”

Perfect! How beautiful when things go wrong and the end result is far superior than if everything had worked out as planned.

"The profound sacred and spiritual meaning of the great music of the church must never be mixed with the transitory quality of rock and roll music."

"The former serves to lift men’s souls to higher levels of reality, and therefore to God. The latter so often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths."

Wrote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, in Ebony magazine, where he was writing as an advice columnist and answering a question from a 17-year-old who said he played gospel music and rock ’n’ roll" and wanted to know if that was okay. MLK said the 2 forms of music were "totally incompatible."

Quoted in "The Unlikely Endurance of Christian Rock/The genre has been disdained by the church and mocked by secular culture. That just reassured practitioners that they were rebels on a righteous path" by Kelefa Sanneh (The New Yorker).

"Even on campus, where the modern diversity doctrine was fashioned, Berrey found that the doctrine itself was hard to define."

"The prevailing wisdom seemed to be that 'racial minorities' were 'culturally distinct from but culturally equivalent to white people.' (The cultural differences were considered real enough to make diversity valuable but not real enough to explain, say, disparities in academic achievement.) At one point, Michigan’s admissions-office Web site pictured a welter of enthusiastic believers, including a student who declared, 'Diversity is one of the issues I’m most passionate about.” In a book called 'The Diversity Bargain,' another scholar, Natasha K. Warikoo, concludes that students at Harvard have fully internalized the logic of diversity as an engine of mutual profit. 'Interaction with peers of color is a resource some white students feel entitled to—or sometimes wrongly deprived of,' she writes. 'To many white students, minority students do not hold up their end of the diversity bargain when they join the Black Students Association or sit together in the cafeteria.'"

From "The Limits of 'Diversity'/Where affirmative action was about compensatory justice, diversity is meant to be a shared benefit. But does the rationale carry weight?" by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker.

"This music, so self-consciously English, sounded different in America, where its rather nerdy creators were greeted as exotic rock stars."

"That summer [1971], Yes played its first U.S. concert, at an arena in Seattle. A fan who approached Jon Anderson before the show remembered that Anderson was nervous. 'I don’t know what is going to happen,' the singer told him. 'I’ve never been in a place like this.' When Anderson sang, 'I’ll be the roundabout,' most American listeners surely had no idea that he was referring to the kind of intersection known less euphoniously, in the U.S., as a traffic circle... Why, then, did this music seduce so many Americans? In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published 'Rocking the Classics,' in which he offered a provocative explanation. Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract 'a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners' in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness 'provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience': white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument 'troubling.' In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on 'radical spiritual traditions,' offered an alternative to 'Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.'"

From "THE PERSISTENCE OF PROG ROCK/Critics think that the genre was an embarrassing dead end. So why do fans and musicians still love it?" by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker.

I've never liked prog rock, but I've never thought about it in relation to white anxiety. The author of the New Yorker article appears not to be white (and used to edit a journal of race and culture). He's bouncing off a new book, "The Show That Never Ends/The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock," which is by David Weigel, who appears to be white. Based on my fiddling with the "look inside" function at Amazon, I don't think Weigel gets into the whiteness of prog rock or even says anything about race at all, but obviously others have.

Meeting with Publius Decius Mus, author of the influential article, "The Flight 93 Election."

In "Intellectuals for Trump/A rogue group of conservative thinkers tries to build a governing ideology around a President-elect who disdains ideology" — in the January 9th issue of The New Yorker — Kelefa Sanneh seeks out and talks to the pseudonymous writer:

In September, on the Web site of the Claremont Review of Books, Decius published “The Flight 93 Election,” which likened the country to a hijacked airplane, and argued that voting for Trump was like charging the cockpit: the consequences were possibly dire, but the consequences of inaction were surely so....

Before he began to speak, he held out an iPhone showing a picture of his family: if he was unmasked, he said, his family would suffer, because he works for a company that might not want to be connected to an apostle of Trumpism....

"But what’s surprising about Trump’s strategy of racial provocation is that African-Americans have played a relatively small role in it."

Writes Kelefa Sanneh in "WHAT DO PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY DONALD TRUMP IS RACIST?":

When people call Trump racist, they are often thinking primarily of incidents... in which he has singled out Latino immigrants and their descendants. They are often thinking, too, about Trump’s series of remarks about Muslims... Or, for that matter, his portrayal of China as a menacing threat... But these days a wide range of prejudices are commonly subsumed within the expansive term “racism”; you might call a politician “racist” without meaning (at least not exclusively, or even primarily) that he is anti-black....

In general, though, Trump has had relatively little to say about African-Americans during this campaign. In December, he criticized Justice Antonin Scalia, who had suggested, during a hearing, that affirmative action might harm some African-American students by steering them toward colleges that are “too fast for them” when they might be better off at “a less advanced school—a slower-track school.” Trump seemed genuinely offended. “I thought his remarks were very tough,” he said. “I don’t like what he said.”...

Was Trump’s criticism of Scalia part of a grand plan to win over African-American voters? Perhaps not. One of Trump’s greatest political strengths is that very little of what he says sounds like the product of political calculation. (Of course, this, too, is one of his greatest political weaknesses.)...

Sanneh ends by wondering why Trump nevertheless polls so badly with African-Americans and posits the obvious: the Democratic Party has a tight grip on this voting bloc and Trump "has acquired a reputation as a racist."

Does it make a difference to black voters that this reputation has mainly to do with things he has said about Muslims and Mexicans? Or that he finds ways to talk of African-Americans as part of a threatened “we,” and not part of a threatening “them”? 

Apparently not.

ADDED: In the NYT, there's Charles M. Blow with "Why Blacks Loathe Trump." The most interesting thing in the way Blow made a show of his knowledge of the connection between black people and Islam but then had to do a correction:

[Trump] has scandalously maligned Muslims, apparently not realizing that it’s estimated that approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American. Indeed, the Muslim faith has deep roots in the black community because many Africans brought to this country as slaves were Muslims. The signs are everywhere. For instance, I spent my earliest years in the rural community of Kiblah, Ark., an area homesteaded by former slaves following the Emancipation Proclamation. In Arabic, kiblah is the direction in which Muslims pray toward Mecca....

Correction: August 18, 2016
An earlier version of this article imprecisely referred to the word “kiblah.” It is the direction in which Muslims pray toward Mecca and not derived from the word “ka’aba.”

"A truly greedy executive would keep a much lower profile than Shkreli: there would be no headline-grabbing exponential price hikes..."

"... just boring but reliable ticks upward; no interviews, no tweeting, and absolutely no hip-hop feuds. A truly greedy executive would stay more or less anonymous. (How many other pharmaceutical C.E.O.s can you name?) But Shkreli seems intent on proving a point about money and medicine, and you don’t have to agree with his assessment in order to appreciate the service he has done us all. By showing what is legal, he has helped us to think about what we might want to change, and what we might need to learn to live with. Most of our Presidential candidates claim to disdain Washington politicians, but, on Thursday, Shkreli put that disdain into practice—and helped illustrate, to anyone paying attention, why it is so richly deserved. He is candid even when candor doesn’t pay... He rolls his eyes at members of Congress, he carries on thoughtful conversations with random Internet commenters.... He is the American Dream, a rude reminder of the spirit that makes this country great...."

From "Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point," by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker.

"What counts as 'censorship' on a platform like Twitter?"

"Magazines and blogs are typically free to reject articles—and, for that matter, to delete offensive reader comments—without being accused of censorship."

That statement — by The New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh in "Censoring Twitter" — gets a big huh? from me. You get accused of censorship all the time when you delete comments on a blog. I lob such accusations myself. Even if "blogs are typically free" to delete what the commenters post, everyone is also free to make accusations about the nature of the deletions and to use the word "censorship" if they want.

Perhaps Sanneh means to say that it's not "censorship" and that he defines the word "censorship" to refer only to the acts of government because we only have a constitutional free-speech right against what the government does. I don't accept that limitation of the word. But I do delete comments sometimes, according to my standards. I own up to censorship, and I defend my standards.

But I do understand something Sanneh might be trying to say, something I agree with: Blogs are different from websites like Twitter and Facebook which are larger frameworks designed to accommodate the individual expression of others. My blog is on Google's Blogger, and if Google tried to control what I could say it would be quite different from my deleting comments that cross whatever line I've decided to defend.