I used to really resent the way racism took shape in America. It was always a subtext but never a headline, covered by figures like or O’Reilly, but rarely brazen enough . Racism was more coded and harder to decipher, having learned the language of liberation and been able to mouth the words itself now.
It didn’t feel exactly like progress when overt racism like (satire of whom? Racist hayseeds?) wasn’t welcome in mainstream discourse, but rather like this hatred just changed its face, coated itself in sugar and learned how to be part of “respectable society” while still wreaking havoc, just doing so with a little more stealth these days. Like the shift in the language of misogyny, rooting racism out was thorny and difficult and tenuous in an age of self-proclaimed ostensible “equality.” It seemed easier when they just came right out with it.
I was wrong. For someone with so much appreciation invested in the power of language, I feel foolish and impatient for not realizing what kind of progress that really was. I forgot that explicit hatespeech is the singular most effective catalyst of violence. Not just psychic terror and oppression anymore, but .
“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” she continued.
“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Of course .
Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
Straight from the mouth of …
I don’t need any lessons in being honest with the American people, and if I did, I wouldn’t seek it from a Chicago politician. . . . There’s much we don’t know about Senator Obama. For a guy who has authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. Who is the real Barack Obama?
It’s as if somehow the usual rules don’t apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that . . . His campaign had to return $33,000 in illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors, and this weekend, we found out about another $28,000 in illegal donations. Why has Senator Obama refused to disclose the people who are funding his campaign? Again, the American people deserve answers.
In London, a city with a reasonably comparable racial climate to much of the US, a Nigerian immigrant was shot in the face, hand, and shoulder for .
Dube Egwuatu was buying a mobile telephone top-up card in an off-licence when the gunman confronted him and glared at the top, which carries an image of the Democrat US presidential candidate underneath the legend ‘Believe’.
The man then launched into a tirade of racist slurs, shouting ‘I f***ing hate n*****s’ and urging 36-year-old Mr Egwuatu to leave the shop with him.
The man then left the shop but when Mr Egwuatu re-emerged, the attacker was waiting for him in broad daylight with a threatening-looking dog and holding a gun behind his back.
Realising what had sparked the increasingly violent assault, the terrified Mr Egwuatu zipped up his jacket to cover the image of Mr Obama and walked to his car.
But the shaven-headed man, who was white, followed Mr Egwuatu and after pulling open the passenger door pointed the gun at him.
After pleading with the man to leave him alone, the married former street warden put the keys in the ignition and turned the engine on.
The attacker then fired the gas-powered ball-bearing pistol three times, hitting the civil servant in the face, hand and shoulder.
Via , a tense Canadian election season is also finding itself affected by right-wing violence. In Toronto, , targeting homes that had liberal campaign signs on their lawns.
“There are two child seats in the back of my car,” said Andrew Lane, chief financial officer for Bennett’s campaign. “To cut the brake line on a car like that is just evil. Awful.”
Added Lane, whose children are 6 months and 22 months: “You have to crawl under someone’s car and cut the brake line, knowing that it could kill someone, or their whole family.”
They know what they are doing. They know . There is no explanation for their actions other than that this part of the vision they have for this country.
The economy is collapsing, and loud voices from the GOP are explicitly blaming it on lenders being “forced” to . They are not just distorting the truth, but outright lying. They are using nationalist propaganda to marginalize their opponent, claiming that he could not possibly understand what it is to be ‘an American,’ that he hates the US military, and that he is secretly under the thumb of a terrorist agenda. They are using the rhetoric of fear to (“I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America,” ).
Really, truly this is the road to fascism. This is it. No hyperbole is needed to illustrate this point, not a touch. I don’t even know what to say. Look at what we’re turning into.
As to the video linked above, in 2003 on the O’Reilly Factor one of the most criminal myths the GOP once loved to regurgitate–
Here’s the unmentionable secret: Racism isn’t that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It’s rapidly becoming an ugly memory.
White people in ultimate positions of white privilege daring to negate and diminish the experiences of those who live every single day affected in some way by the quantifiable realities of hatred. That’s called hegemony. After this election, they’ll have a hard time towing this line again.
More:
And Palin today, telling the horde of wingnuts about Obama’s true statement that our forgotten war in Afghanistan is killing civilians. The wingnuts couldn’t handle the truth, so they roared their disapproval and one moron yelled “TREASON!”
Yes, because it’s now treasonous to point out that America’s doing something wrong.
Jesus.
Ahaha, dare she suggest that our US foreign policy is “imperfect enough” to amend?
I’d laugh if only I WASN’T CRYING LIKE A DUMB WIMPY LIBERAL BABY for our future.
I’m interested to see how this changes the level of aggression that happens at tonight’s debate. I pray he steps up his shit and plays it cool and composed, but spiked by some dissappointed dad-style zero bullshit.