"Undeniably, the public has soured on President Biden’s handling of [illegal immigration]."

"Voters trust Trump on it by wide margins, support making asylum harder and even back his border wall. This has pundits opining that the issue now favors Trump. But let’s be clear on why this is happening and what it really means for 2024. Recall that Trump’s handling of immigration was also deeply unpopular. In April 2019, another time when migrant arrivals dominated the news, large majorities opposed Trump’s approach, and very small minorities supported a border wall and wanted to make it harder to apply for asylum.... While the mere promise of a better-managed border would be a formidable argument against Biden, Trump... seem[s] determined to telegraph unbridled nativist savagery, which could well constitute political overreach in 2024...."

I'm trying to read the Greg Sargent column "Trump’s plan for giant detention camps points to a brutal 2024 reality" (WaPo).

Ah! Let me translate that. Trump can win on the immigration issue, but the way he can lose is if people perceive that his immigration policy is fascist and cruel. Therefore, Trump's antagonists are on notice that they must make the most of whatever evidence they have that Trump's ideas about immigration come from something truly evil. 

For example, just in this column, there's this:

"Apparently, a flight attendant had called ahead with some sort of concern that perhaps my mixed children weren’t my children because they were unresponsive during an interaction with her...."

"So we’re met, embarrassingly so, by this A.A. employee and police officers. They question my kids: ‘Are my kids OK?’ And I wanted to go through the roof. But I did not want my kids to see me handle the situation with anything other than grace and class.... I didn’t (and still don’t) think that a slow or tentative response from a 7 year old on an early morning flight should be enough criteria to have the authorities called... I’ve never begrudged the red flag, I’ve always begrudged the apparent lack of diligence on the part of the flight attendant."

Said David Ryan Harris, quoted in, "Man Says Airline Stopped Him on Suspicion He Was Trafficking His Children/American Airlines has apologized to David Ryan Harris, a Black musician who said he and his biracial children were confronted by an airline employee and police officers after a flight last month" (NYT).

"So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter."

"What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would 'destroy suburbia,' but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955....  [T]he big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream/Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment is from Phyliss Dalmatian of Wichita, Kansas:

Trump has turned the usual GOP dog whistle in a Tornado Siren. Blaring, omnipresent and undeniable. The Party Of, by and for White Males, with their stepford wives and perfect blue eyed children. That’s the myth, and the aspiration. Join us !

Except Johnny starts fires, bullies younger kids and has started stealing pain pills from relatives homes. And Sally has dreams of a glamorous life as a FOX spokesmodel, the epitome of GOP womanhood, before aging out. At 30. But, she’ll find a rich Husband before that, no problem.

Professor, to the very, very large majority of the GOP, not white people are an afterthought, at best. Takers, Moochers, Lazy, irresponsible, criminal, blah, blah blah.

Dream on, GOP. Your time is nearly done. You won’t be able to WIN, irregardless of vast and inventive Cheating.

Trump is your Epitaph. You own Him.

A wild fever dream from Wichita — replete with random capitalization, "irregardless," and raging contempt for white people. What's up with Kansas? I love the inclusion of the "Tornado Siren." Makes me want to conjure up some "Wizard of Oz" jokes. Maybe something with Toto and a Dalmation....

"Scrutiny of Social-Distance Policing as 35 of 40 Arrested Are Black/Mayor Bill de Blasio said the police had enforced rules properly..."

"... but other officials expressed concern about tactics similar to unfair 'stop and frisk' practices" (NYT)("Of those arrested, 35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white").

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has long denounced the unconstitutional “stop and frisk” practices of the Bloomberg administration, has found himself in recent days forced to explain why enforcement of social distancing in predominantly minority neighborhoods is different than “stop and frisk.”...

“What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”

Stop and frisk was aimed at the black community because that's where the incidence of gun violence was highest. Why is the enforcement of social distancing concentrated on the black community? I don't see how the difference from stop and frisk makes concentrating on black people better. It makes it worse!

I don't see de Blasio arguing that the coronavirus is victimizing black people disproportionately and that justifies the enforcement disparity. To say that would be to cite a similarity to stop and frisk, and how could that work for de Blasio? The pandemic is a bigger danger than gun violence? I don't know, but what he is saying doesn't cohere for me. It's a string of disjointed sentences — just nonsense.

Mayor Bloomberg said: "Ninety-five percent of murders- murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops."

"They are male, minorities, 16-25. That's true in New York, that's true in virtually every city. And that's where the real crime is. And the way you get guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them."

From "Bloomberg heard in 2015 audio clip defending ‘stop and frisk,’ throwing minority kids against wall: report" (Fox News).

"Me telling you to 'Go back where you came from. Did I say that? Is it on video?.... I called you a lazy b-i-t-c-h. That's the worst thing I said."

"This woman is playing the victim for political purposes because she is a state legislator. I'm a Democrat and will vote Democrat for the rest of my life, so call me whatever you want to believe. For her political purposes, make it black, white, brown, whatever. It is untrue."

I'm reading "State lawmaker, man she accused of verbally harassing her confront each other" (WSB-TV Atlanta).

I got there via Andy Ngo ("Media machine has been blowing up story of @itsericathomas, who claims a racist white man told her to 'go back where you came from.' Well, he returns during her presser to deny allegation. He says he’s a Democrat & she’s embellishing story for attention"). Erica Thomas is a member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Here's the raw video:

On Friday, I complained that the NYT published only "thin, undigested AP material" on the Oberlin punitive damages verdict.

Here.

But later that day, the Times published a full-scale article — "Oberlin Helped Students Defame a Bakery, a Jury Says. The Punishment: $33 Million" by Anemona Hartocollis — and it's a little obscure but, reading it carefully, I understood Oberlin's argument for the first time. I had thought that Oberlin just got the facts wrong when it accused the bakery of racism. I now see that the argument is that even if the bakery stopped blatant shoplifters, the accusation of racism stands.

Let me show you how this argument emerges from the text:

Gibson’s bakery, a local establishment known for its whole wheat doughnuts and chocolate-covered grapes, became the target of a boycott by students who accused it of racially profiling a black student.... Oberlin maintained that college officials had gotten involved only to keep the peace, and that it was supporting its students, not their claims that Gibson’s was racist. But the jury found that Oberlin had clearly chosen sides without first examining the facts....

Oberlin tried to distance itself from the protesters in court papers, saying it should not be held responsible for their actions. It blamed the store for bringing its problems on itself.

“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said. “The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”

Got that? It's irrelevant that the suspected shoplifters were real shoplifters. What the students called racist was the "chase-and-detain policy."

The store clerk seems to have suspected shoplifting not because of the person's race but because he could see 2 wine bottles hidden under his coat, but he "chased the student out onto the street and tackled him," and that's what's racist (in this view). If the chase-and-detain approach is racist, even when the shopkeeper is right about the theft, then it's not false to accuse the shopkeeper of racism.

Allyn Gibson, the 32-year-old store clerk, was trained in martial arts, according to Oberlin’s court papers, and his decision to chase down and tackle a student “beyond the borders of their store and into full public view of their customer base” opened him and the store up to public criticism....

Neither the college nor the dean ever said or wrote anything defamatory about the plaintiffs, the college said. In fact, it added, there was a split in opinion within the college community as to whether the Gibsons were racist or not, and it was their constitutional right to express their opinions on that score....

“Part of the narrative that has been built up is that Oberlin’s administration weaponized students against Gibson’s out of malice,” [Kameron Dunbar, who just graduated from Oberlin]. “I find that concept to be pretty insulting. We’re autonomous.”

The larger question — barely gestured at in the article — is what is racism? It may be a good idea to consider each human individual "autonomous," but the school is part of the culture that shapes the concept of racism, and racism can be understood broadly, perhaps broadly enough to include a chase-and-detain policy, broadly enough to make the policy racist without regard to guilt or innocence.

When can you express the opinion that someone is racist? The term is thrown around a lot these days. Is it defamation to use "racist" in the broad sense? There are a lot of people these days who think anyone who supports Trump is a racist. If some shop loses business because people know the owner voted for Trump and that's their idea of racism and they go around telling each other not to shop in the store because it's owned by a racist, can the shop owner sue them all and win damages?

How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?

"It doesn't really matter what I believe or anyone else believes."

On "State of the Union," yesterday morning, Jake Tapper talked to Terry McAuliffe about the Ralph Northam problem. Transcript. Video:



McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia just before Northam, and Northam was his lieutenant governor, so McAuliffe could not avoid vouching for the man he was there to denounce. And with Northam having made such a fool of himself saying one thing and then another, it was important for McAuliffe to sound competent and lucid as he put together the argument that Northam has to go. That didn't happen:

TAPPER: Northam is now saying it's not him in the photo. Do you believe him?

MCAULIFFE: It doesn't really matter what I believe or anyone else believes.

Why not?!! It's Tapper's first question. You're going to say it's a bad question? You're on the show for a reason. You worked closely with Northam. Help us out here! Was he confused? Is he a liar? We want to know what to believe, and you're telling us it doesn't matter what we believe?

"watch whiteness work."

watch whiteness work. https://t.co/wjcVGm4Akq

— deray (@deray) January 21, 2019

(DeRay Mckesson is a Black Lives Matter activist — Wikipedia.)

ADDED: Another we're-not-sorry angle:

“Assertions to the contrary are simply false.”

We’re to believe a 16-year-old wrote this statement. Huh. https://t.co/rKPw0C38VZ

— John Aravosis 🇺🇸 (@aravosis) January 21, 2019

I certainly hope the kid is not all alone. He should have adult counseling! I thought the statement sounded genuine — like a teenager telling a straight story — but I assumed that meant he had a good lawyer. And he should have a good lawyer.

AND: Here's a third approach to digging in:

Cannot be stared enough: Racist boys were there for a rally calling for pregnancy to be used as a weapon to subjugate women. They were wearing hats celebrating a man who bragged about assaulting women.

Their claims not to be bigots are pre-emptively nonsense.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) January 21, 2019

The effort to lure white South African farmers to Russia — which offers "abundant farmland, relative safety and a country that holds tight to traditional Christian values."

"What is not said — but clearly understood — is how this fits neatly into the identity politics of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin," WaPo reports.

The West may view Putin largely as a strategic and military adversary. Yet inside Russia, much of his support grows from the idea of Russia as the caretaker for a white, Christian and old-style order — rejecting “so-called tolerance, genderless and infertile,” in Putin’s own words in 2013....

There is Russia’s declining population and fresh ambitions to protect fellow Christians. Add to that the unease among some white South African farmers as the country debates possible land redistribution to redress racial imbalances during apartheid.... South Africa's land expropriation debate and the myth of "white genocide" have been a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world for years....

“I want them to know that Russia can be their mother country, too,” said [Victor] Poluboyarenko, who assists the human rights ombudsman in the agricultural heartland of Stavropol....

“We understand that our government must listen to the majority of the people,” said Johannes du Toit.... “But we don’t want our children to suffer from the roll of the dice.”....

“In Russia I enjoyed the freedom of just driving about, anywhere you want to go, between fields and into forests,” said 60-year-old Jan Geldenhuys....

"My dissertation chairman was Richard Brandt. Once after I had earned the doctorate and was meeting with him, he stood over me, lifted my chin toward him..."

"... and remarked that I looked like a maid his family once employed. Around the same time, early in the Ronald Reagan administration, an effort was made to rid Washington of the sex trade and shops that flourished along the 14th Street corridor a few blocks from the White House. I worked in nearby McPherson Square at the National Endowment for the Humanities and, as a volunteer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. One day I was walking near my office with a white male friend, a philosopher at an Ivy League university. We were stopped by the police, who profiled us as a hooker and john. I had to answer questions and show ID."

From "The Pain and Promise of Black Women in Philosophy" (an interview with Anita L. Allen) (NYT).

Scott Adams — wearing his Pope hat to make a moral ruling — says that the Confederate statues should come down.

The brand is "America" and it's working against your brand — even if only 20% of the people are feeling offended and excluded. It doesn't matter that you think it doesn't.

Scott Adams tells talks about racist statues https://t.co/3bpiyhxZdQ

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 15, 2017

He didn't really need his Pope hat for that, because he's not talking about his own moral vision. He's taking a businesslike, corporate view, discussing a branded product called America and noticing the moral opinions of the consumers of the product.

There's also some interesting discussion in there about the internment of persons of Japanese descent during WWII and whether statues of FDR should come down. If I understand Adams's standard correctly, if 20% of Americans are offended — based on serious reasons — then Americans as a group should want to update the American brand and remove the monument, which is just decoration.

ALSO: Pope-hatted Adams makes the moral ruling that the mob's pulling down of a statue of a Confederate soldier is "a moral gray area." There was no violence against persons, only property, and it "comes very close to free speech." It's destructive, but only of "a racist symbol." I'll give this post the "civil disobedience" tag. Adams doesn't use that term, but he briefly acknowledges that the destruction is against the law and that the protesters probably need to be arrested and prosecuted and given a light sentence. In standard civil disobedience thought, the disobeyers accept the legal consequences.

AND: Adams is very funny talking about the notion of gathering America's Confederate statues in a museum: "It would be the world's worst museum." You'd be saying "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee" and then "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee," etc. I'd just note that the sculpture was designed to fit in a park, so how about something outdoors, something like Grūtas Park (AKA "Stalin's World)(discussed in this post of mine from last May (about the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in New Orleans)).

AND: Let me repeat something from that May post, this image "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":

Hillary Clinton's unchallenged, illogical statement about private prisons.

In the middle of the impressionistic and meandering answers to Lester Holt's question "So how do you heal the divide?" — the "very wide and bitter gap" over "race relations" in America — Hillary said one thing that was simply illogical on its face. From the transcript:

I’m glad that we’re ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system. You shouldn’t have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans.

Government prosecutes criminals and obtains convictions and prison sentences. If government uses privately run prisons, it must pay these private businesses to house its prisoners. The entity filling the prison therefore has an economic incentive against putting more people in prison. The private business — the one with the "profit motivation" — has no power to create more prisoners. I can see opposing private prisons for other reasons, but Hillary's justification made no sense to me other than a random expression of disgust for business.

She zipped on to other race-related ideas, and Trump never called attention to this nonsense. So I'm looking for answers on the web today. I found this from last June at The Intercept:

After The Intercept revealed that the Clinton campaign had received campaign donations from private prison lobbyists, a number of activist groups confronted Clinton, leading her to announce that she would no longer accept the money and later declaring that “we should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

Oh! So perhaps Clinton doesn't really believe in ending private prisons at all, and the nonsense I heard was a dog-whistle to her old lobbyist friends in the industry. She premised her objection on the terrible "profit motivation" — thus also dog-whistling to the Democratic Party's anti-corporations base — but anyone who begins with economics and reasons from there will understand that private prisons are a way for government to save money.

And here's Politico, last February, noting that the Clinton campaign made $8,600 contribution to a women's prison charity after she was criticized by ColorofChange for getting contributions from lobbyists for private prisons:

Despite the refunds, Clinton campaign continues to benefit handsomely from the fundraising assistance of some closely connected to the private prison business. In another report filed Sunday night, the campaign disclosed that Richard Sullivan of Capitol Counsel—until recently, a Raleigh, N.C.-based federally registered lobbyist for the for-profit prison operator GEO Group—bundled $69,363 in donations for Clinton in the fourth quarter, bringing his total for the year to a whopping $274,891. That makes Sullivan the second-most prolific lobbyist-bundler for the Clinton campaign, beaten out only by D.C. lobbyist Heather Podesta, who's tallied up $348,581 so far.

Bernie Sanders used this issue against Clinton, as HuffPo reported last February.

Here's the way Hillary Clinton's own website explains her current position:

Hillary believes we should move away from contracting out this core responsibility of the federal government to private corporations. We must not create private industry incentives that may contribute—or have the appearance of contributing—to over-incarceration. The campaign does not accept contributions from federally registered lobbyists or PACs for private prison companies and will donate any such direct contributions to charity.

Ah, so it's really on the "the appearance of contributing" to over-incarceration that matters. Too bad Trump had absolutely no instinct to jump on this issue: She took contributions, Bernie and racial justice groups slammed her on it, she flipped her position for political appearance, and she doesn't see the need to talk straight about the economics of it; she says nothing about anything abusive happening in these private prison; her only reason is an economic point that makes no sense.

And check this out, from The Daily Beast: "Hillary Clinton’s Pitch to End Private Prisons Is the Surprise Hit of the Presidential Debate/A focus group in Pennsylvania loved Clinton’s attack on prisons that profit from inmates. Her position could help win a decisive victory in the state."

I guess that's good news for Trump: It's not about making sense. 

Trump talks about the profiling that Israel does and CNN puts "racial" before "profiling"...

... which is not what Trump said and not what Israel does.

Via my son John at Facebook, where there's a conversation going.

"If we were to start profiling people of 'Middle-Eastern' or 'brown' appearance, jihadists will simply recruit white Muslims from the Caucasus, like the Tsarnaev brothers..."

"... who struck at the Boston Marathon. In fact, al Qaeda has been trying to use our very prejudices against us for many years, which is why Osama Bin Laden recruited a 'white army of terror' from the huge number of converts that joined his cause. If it is only men we profile, jihadists will train women, such as the Chechens did with their Black Widows, or this latest Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino. Astoundingly, male jihadists have even cross-dressed in burkas to avoid capture. If it is any adult of fighting age that we screen for, jihadists have turned to grandmother suicide bombers and even animals laden with explosives."

Wrote Maajid Nawaz, whose Wikipedia page I'm reading after seeing him on TV talking about Brexit.

"Racism? By whom? This video of Texas cops stopping a black professor is a racial 'Rorschach test.'"

University of North Texas professor Dorothy Bland: "Walking while black is a crime in many jurisdictions... May God have mercy on our nation."

Police chief: "If we didn’t have the video, these officers would have serious allegations against them... Every white officer that stops an African American does not constitute racial profiling."

14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, arrested for bringing to school something that, to teachers, looked like it might be a bomb.

It was "a circuit board and power supply connected to digital display)" — what he explained was a clock that he'd made and brought in to impress the teachers.

Here he is explaining his story:



His engineering teacher said, according to Mohamed: "That’s really nice... I would advise you not to show any other teachers." In English class, "the clock beeped, annoying his teacher. When he brought the device up to her afterward, she told him 'it looks like a bomb.'" None of that sounds as though either teacher thought there was any chance it could actually be a bomb. But the English teacher confiscated the device, and later he was questioned and then arrested for bringing in a hoax bomb.

“I really don’t think it’s fair because I brought something to school that wasn’t a threat to anyone,” Mohamed told NBC. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I just showed my teachers something and I end up being arrested later that day.”...

“We always ask our students and staff to immediately report if they observe any suspicious items and/or suspicious behavior,” [Irving Independent School District spokeswoman Lesley Weaver wrote]. “If something is out of the ordinary, the information should be reported immediately to a school administrator and/or the police so it can be addressed right away. We will always take necessary precautions to protect our students and keep our school community as safe as possible.”...

“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said the [the boy's father], who immigrated from Sudan. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

Taking "transblack" seriously.

"Alyson Hobbs, who literally wrote the book on 'racial passing,' said there’s 'certainly a chance that she identifies as a black woman and there could be authenticity to that.'"

ADDED: Hobbs — whose first name is misspelled in that quote (it should be Allyson) — wrote a NYT op-ed that was published a couple days after she got this publicity. I blog that op-ed here.

"American history is full of tales of partly black people 'passing' as white, trying to shed the burdens of an oppressed people, but doing the reverse is much rarer."

"... Faking a racial history, in either direction, raises difficult questions about what race is and why it matters, and about the assumptions people make.... 'There was very little to be gained by identifying yourself as black, so if you did, no one questioned it,' said Ms. Sandweiss, author of 'Passing Strange,' an acclaimed book about a man who did just that in the late 19th century. 'It shows how absurd racial classifications often are.' There have been other examples of white people living as black, in American history and culture, but not many. When with his black wife and children, Clarence King, the subject of Ms. Sandweiss’s book, pretended to be a black Pullman porter, while in his parallel life he was a famous white geologist and surveyor with powerful friends. Mezz Mezzrow, a jazz musician who died in 1972, often passed as black, called himself 'a voluntary Negro.'..."

From a NYT article titled "Black or White? Woman’s Story Stirs Up a Furor."

The article has this quote from a Guardian columnist named Steven W. Thrasher: "The reason that [Rachel Dolezal's] story is so fascinating to me and to the rest of the world is that it exposes in a disquieting way that our race is performance — that, despite the stark differences in how our races are perceived and privileged (or not) by others, they are all predicated on a myth that the differences are intrinsic and intrinsically perceptible."

"A Brooklyn city councilwoman wants to know why 'blocs' of Asians are living in two Fort Greene housing projects — and suggested it would be 'beneficial' to assign housing by ethnic group."

"'How is it that one specific ethnic group has had the opportunity to move into a development in large numbers?' Laurie Cumbo, who is black, said at a council hearing on public housing Thursday."

Cumbo issued an apology, saying she only wanted to know if the New York City Housing Authority “uses a cultural preference priority component” in picking tenants....

Still, Cumbo told The Post, “There could be some benefit to housing people by culture... I think it needs to be discussed.”

Yeesh. Reminds me of the trouble Jimmy Carter go into 40 years ago when he campaigned (in Indiana, of all places) saying that he wouldn't use the federal government to "circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods":

In making the point, he used unusually blunt language about social differences — about "black intrusion" into white neighborhoods, for example. He spoke of "alien groups" in communities, and of the bad effects of "injecting" a "diametrically opposite kind of person" into a neighborhood....

He said, "I have nothing against a community that's made up of people who are Polish or Czechoslovakian, or French-Canadian, or black, who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods."