Devilish imagery.

 

That's at the top of the WaPo home page.

The red glow of the photograph is transfixing. If you can tear your eyes away from it and look to the text, you see "Mike Collins" and "KKK and Nazi." Emotional tainting accomplished. There's little potential for your mind to travel on to pull out "former... staffer" and "what appear to be," let alone to click through to investigate whether there's really anything to damage Collins.

Clicking gets you to this article (gift link):

"Do you think that it's the goal of the Smithsonian Institution to promote white supremacy culture?"

Congressman Brandon Gill asks Smithsonian Museum director Anthea Hartig at the House Oversight Committee hearing today.

It's quite an exchange. Gill has a very well-planned set of question designed to destroy Hartig, and Hartig's defense is almost entirely restricted to long silences and diligent note-taking, as if she's endeavoring to learn from Gill:

 

GILL: "Director Hardig... would you say that that the goal of history, even if it's not properly carried out... is to be objective?... Doesn't that seem a little bit concerning? It it certainly does to me because as part of this white supremacy document that your organization has promoted, objectivity is a core and defining aspect of white supremacy culture. Do you think that it's the goal of the Smithsonian Institution to promote white supremacy culture?

"I think what’s getting people talking — or rather, why everyone was watching these TikToks obsessively over the weekend and picking them apart — is how regressive the ads seem."

"The line about her having great jeans — several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok that this is a 'pro-eugenics ad.' Whether or not that’s the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencers, pop stars and musicians that feels tethered to the values of another time."

From "How American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ‘good jeans’ ad went wrong/A provocative new denim campaign featuring the actress leans into retro sexiness — and it’s sparking debate about eugenics and ‘wokeness'" (WaPo).

That's a gift link. My last of the month. In case you want to see the ads people are so worked up about. I've avoided talking about them because I don't want to help make them go viral. But they've obviously gone massively viral, so expect more of the same.

It's a pun: "good genes"/"good jeans." You'd think it would have been noticed, used, and groaned over decades ago and that it would be completely uncool to bring it up now. But what if it's cool precisely because people are sensitive and fearful about a perceived rise in enthusiasm for white supremacy. It's needling those poor souls. It's transgressive. Is that where we are?

By the way, Deepika Padukone used the pun 3 years ago, for Levi's jeans:

"I think of the [antiracist] programming as a kind of secular religion, a progressive penitence."

"The real work of advancing equality is never mentioned. One exercise that consultants recommend is for students to visit a grocery store to observe who is 'enforcing white supremacy culture.'"

Said Steve Wilson, quoted in "He’s a Foe of D.E.I. in Schools but Not a Fan of Trump’s Crusade/Steven Wilson was forced out of the charter school network he started for an essay that conflicted with antiracism initiatives. Five years later, he feels both vindicated and dismayed" (NYT).

Wilson got "canceled" in 2019: 

George Orwell said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."

I'm thinking about that today, watching this:

MSNBC host: JD Vance wishing to join his family plot (6 generations) in Kentucky is WHITE MALE SUPREMACY pic.twitter.com/zYfYtdSqmt

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 18, 2024

You have to go to college to think that up.

"Human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power."

"Moreover, many researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries then used such collections to advance deeply flawed scientific agendas rooted in white supremacy — namely the identification of physical differences that could reinforce models of racial hierarchy."

 
Said Sean M. Decatur, president of The American Museum of Natural History, quoted in "Facing Scrutiny, a Museum That Holds 12,000 Human Remains Changes Course/The American Museum of Natural History said it would address its collecting of remains, which stretched into the 1940s and included practices now viewed as abusive and racist " (NYT).

"'The Wrath of Becky'/Rated R for disgusting dialogue and dripping brain matter."

I'm reading a movie review in the NYT. I haven't been paying much attention to descriptions of new movies, but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist. It made me think of school shootings. I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z. 

"A year ago, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia summoned her fellow Republicans to become 'the party of Christian nationalism'..."

"I began to read books about white Christian nationalists — and discovered that I am one of them."

Writes Kenneth L. Woodward, in "How I became a white Christian Nationalist." 

That's in The Washington Post. I wouldn't click on something with a title like that if it weren't in mainstream media. And Woodward has mainstream credentials. He was once a religion editor at Newsweek. And he's got a mainstream-sounding book: "Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics From the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump."

So... they're doing this in the New Yorker crossword.

That's today's puzzle. Clue: "What kind of white nonsense..." Answer: "The Caucasity!"

It's good wordplay — a twist on "the audacity!" — but not anything I'd seen before, and the clue suggests this is a phrase in ordinary speech these days rather than a new joke. 

It really is white supremacy, in my view, which is — as advised yesterday by WaPo's Philip Bump — not to be too "rigid" about the meaning of "white supremacy." Bump, you will remember, argued that "white supremacy" could be understood to include promotion of the "structures of power that largely benefit Whites." So, if you like just about anything the way it is, you may be a white supremacist.

I had thought that The New Yorker would refrain from using racial taunts in its crossword! Why did it seem okay? Answer: White supremacy. You don't understand my point? To quote Philip Bump, "This confusion... stems from overly rigid understanding[] of... 'white supremacist.'"

ADDED: Here's a Yahoo article from 2020: "The 'caucasity': How a viral TikTok video is laying bare cultural appropriation through slang."

"Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy."

Philip Bump feels called to explain (at WaPo) after a man named Mauricio Garcia killed 8 people in a shopping mall in Texas. There's reason to think that Garcia held white supremacist/neo-Nazi beliefs because he wore a patch with the letters "RWDS," which, we are told, stands for "Right Wing Death Squad."

Maybe the letters don't really mean that or maybe Garcia didn't know the meaning, and maybe Garcia was white, but the point of Bump's column is to assume, based on the name, that Garcia was non-white and that he wore the patch because he was a white supremacist and then to try to explain why.

"... they wanted to be a mom and care for a house"... She doesn't seem to notice that she left out anything about having a husband.

I say this in all love and earnestness:

The happiest people I know are women who realized in college that they wanted to be a mom and care for a house

It's not always an easy thing, but the rewards are enormoushttps://t.co/lD9UvqA9mr

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 14, 2023

Did these college friends get what they wanted... or did some man horn in on their sweet dream? Well, of course, there would need to be a man to float the dream with a cash flow, but if all they want is to be a mom and care for a house, they could lose the man and keep the cash, the kids, and the house and still have everything they want. I hope PoliMath is misstating the mindset of the college women, but I have a problem with a dream life that uses another person as a means to an end. The husband could also be seeing his wife as a means to an end. Maybe all he wants are children and a well-kept household.

Anyway, I went on to read the NY Post article. This was the most interesting part:

Consider the white supremacy of requiring cooks to switch from gas to electric.

I'm reading "Will most chefs ever trade gas stoves for induction? It’s complicated" (WaPo):

The art of Chinese stir-fry cooking is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate with induction burners, even those specifically designed for woks, in part because heat transference occurs only when the pan is in contact with the electromagnetic cooktop. The way flavors are developed — such as oil singed as flames lick up and around the pan — are virtually unique to stir-fry cooking, especially those dishes that call for wok hei, a kind of charred quality that occurs when ingredients are tossed in a well-seasoned wok. For these reasons and more, chefs who specialize in stir-fry cooking will probably never surrender their high-Btu gas burners.... 'It’s kind of like asking, "Why can’t a guy doing Texas barbecue just use an electric stove instead of a wood fire?" Well, that’s not going to happen because that’s really the essential part of the flavor of the dish'...."

Disparate impact. 

"If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually.... But there’s a darker possibility..."

"... Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them. That’s partly because any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good. The late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article where he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — likely fell into that category. In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory, or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed, may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate pre-existing biases.... The history of diversity trainings is, in a sense, a history of fads. Maybe the current crop will wither over time, new ones will sprout that are stunted by the same lack of evidence, and a decade from now someone else will write a version of this article. But it’s also possible that organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical...."

Writes Jesse Singal in "What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?" (NYT).

No comments section over there. I'll just imagine the evisceration that would have taken place. Singal complains about the lack of science but offers no competing science other than the non-news that hearing about white supremacy hurts white people's feelings and might lead to more white supremacy. Every fix might backfire, so why try to fix anything? But how do you know that's not white supremacy talking?

"Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in an update to a Breitbart article that is now titled "Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West; UPDATE – Trump Responds, ‘Had Never Met and Knew Nothing About’ Fuentes."

I can't believe Trump doesn't control who has access to him! Either he's lying or he's reckless.  

I guess Ye sets his own terms and Trump makes a calculated decision to accept (and maybe he doesn't mind signaling that he's doesn't categorically reject white nationalists). Here's how Ye presents it:

#YE24 pic.twitter.com/DyIhMU5By6

— ye (@kanyewest) November 25, 2022

"The breeding kink—intense sexual attraction to the idea of getting pregnant, or getting someone else pregnant—is having a moment right now."

"A deluge of viral TikToks of users are professing their yearning to breed and be bred. A porn creator told Vice this week about a recent surge in demand for 'breeding' content. There is quite literally a WebMD article on breeding fetishism, not to mention an entire genre of horror movies and documentaries about unethical fertility doctors secretly fathering hundreds of kids. And the discovery of Elon Musk’s eighth and ninth (known) children on Wednesday led the richest man in the world to triumphantly tweet: 'Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,' and 'I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!'

I'm reading "Does Elon Musk Have a 'Breeding Kink?'/To ascertain whether or not Musk has a breeding fetish is to wade into territory that I'm not sure I have the stomach for—but I'm doing this for journalism" by Kylie Cheung (Jezebel).

Cheung answers her question:

"I am appalled that even as a healer I have to get my cup poured into in this incident, but in this incident I will continue to pour into other people's cup as a way to pour into my own cup."

Said Charles Murrell, "an artist and peace advocate in the Boston area." 

Quoted in "Community Leaders Condemn Hate After White Supremacists March Through Boston/Photos and videos on social media appeared to show throngs of protesters marching under the banner of the Patriot Front, characterized by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist group; Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and other city leaders have spoken out" (NBC Boston).

"The Drag Queen Story Hour website describes the program as 'just what it sounds like - drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores.'"

"'DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.'"

From "Proud Boys storm drag queen event for children at Bay Area library, deputies say" (ABC7 News).

"The men made homophobic and transphobic remarks against a member of the LGTBQ+ community who was hosting the event," [Alameda County Sheriff's Dept. Lt. Ray Kelly] wrote in an email. "There was no physical violence. Deputies responded to the disturbance and are conducting follow up to identify the group of men and their affiliation....We will initiate our hate crime protocol and will also address the annoying and harassing of children. More details to follow.... The men were reported to be members of the Proud Boys organization."

"I use the default emoji, the yellow-toned one for professional settings, and then I use the dark brown emoji for friends and family. I just don't have the emotional capacity to unpack race relations in the professional setting."

Said Jennifer Epperson, quoted in "Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think" (NPR).

But is the yellow emoji really a way to stay neutral and leave race out of your texting? One researcher, Zara Rahman, argues that skin tone emojis "make white people confront their race." But what are you supposed to do? If you're sensitive about white supremacy and you choose a white emoji, how does that distinguish you from white supremacist? But if you pick the yellow emoji, because it was the original emoji color and because you sort of identify with The Simpsons, how do you know that doesn't make you seem to be misidentifying yourself as Asian? Or worse, how do you know it doesn't seem to mean I don't want to confront my race.

Rahman says, "I completely hear some people are just exhausted," but emoji color selection is "one of those places where we just have to think about who we are and how we want to represent our identities." Why are social media companies subjecting us to "places where we just have to think about" some particular thing? They should be neutral platforms where we get to choose what to express and what to leave unspoken.

"A group of white supremacists stormed through downtown Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening, bearing American flags and mildly menacing plastic shields while marching to the beat of a snare drum..."

"... down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.... Members wore a uniform: white gators, sunglasses, blue jackets, khaki pants, and brown boots and hats. Some donned plastic shinguards, seeming to anticipate violence. As Patriot Front’s leader Thomas Rousseau... said, 'Our demonstrations are an exhibition of our unified capability to organize....' At the end of the night... it became clear that more than two dozen members of the white supremacist group could not leave... But the large rented moving van could not fit them all, so many of them were forced to wait in 45-degree darkness as the bulky orange vehicle made multiple trips over the course of nearly three hours. As the group finally departed, one police officer yelled, 'Whose shield is that?' after one white supremacist apparently left his plastic shield behind."

From "White Supremacists Stage Bizarro Rally in Downtown D.C., Find Themselves Stranded/Though they intended to 'reclaim America,' members of Patriot Front had more than enough trouble reclaiming their own ride" (The Daily Beast).

White gators?

A beautiful night at the Lincoln Memorial interrupted by demonstrators chanting “reclaim America.“ The crowd gave them the finger and exchanged profanities. pic.twitter.com/Z2voculi9Z

— Andrea McCarren (@AndreaMcCarren) December 4, 2021

Oh, I get it. White gaiters. White gators would be a little scary, kind of a Moby Dick on land concept.

Anyway, it's clear that The Daily Beast had to choose between portraying this group as terrifying or mocking them for ineptitude. It's nice to see this easy victory for mockery, even as The Beast tripped over its own mockery and wrote "white gators."

Did Joe Biden get angry over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse? And did he refuse to take back his baseless assertion that Kyle Rittenhouse is a "white supremacist"?

I'm seeing headlines to that effect — for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse: Biden angry after teen cleared of shootings" (BBC). Biden spent part of yesterday morning under sedation, getting a colonoscopy, but he was back in the world of the conscious by the time the verdict came out, able to hear the news and fly into a seething rage or whatever happened that got reported as anger.

First, let's look at the video. Video was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and it's important now as we judge the emotional state of our President:

He's asked for a reaction to the verdict, which he says he just heard, and his first words were exactly what a calm, rational person would say if he didn't watch the trial: "I didn't watch the trial." The reporter loads in a challenge: "Do you stand by your past comment" accusing Kyle Rittenhouse of "white supremacy"?

Biden is cautious: "Well, look, I stand by what the jury concluded. The jury system works, and we have to abide by it." That is absolutely not anger. He's not losing his cool in the slightest, and he simply ignores the problem of his ignorant remark about white supremacy. And that's the end of it. Immediately, there's another question on another topic (his health). 

Second, there's a "Statement by President Biden" at the White House website. Here's the whole thing, and I've put the anger material in boldface: