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Archive for the ‘racism’ Category

Proto-Fascist Update: Right Wing Using Anti-Islam Bigotry to Divide and Conquer

August 21st, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

 

Fallout of Hate Is Spreading

Across America from 9/11 Site

By Joshua Holland
Progressive America Rising via AlterNet August 21, 2010,

Scientists building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos referred to the coordinates where a test device was detonated as “point zero.” When the horror of nuclear warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term “Ground Zero” entered our lexicon. The expression has come to mean the epicenter of a catastrophic event, be it a nuclear detonation, a disease epidemic or an earthquake. It is the point from which damage spreads, whether it’s radioactive fallout or a deadly contagion.

That the site of the World Trade Center has come to be known as Ground Zero illustrates how the American public has come to fetishize the attacks of 9/11. It’s not an apt analog for the physical destruction that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center. But it is an appropriate metaphor for the virulent and socially acceptable bigotry against Muslim Americans that has radiated out from Ground Zero and spread across the United States.

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‘Absolutely Racist’ – Exposing Fox New’s Case-Hardened Media-Lynching Politics

July 27th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

 

Fox News' Long History of Race-Baiting

Media Matters, July 27, 2010 5:34 am ET

Howard Dean and Joan Walsh recently called out Fox News, criticizing what they called its "racist" handling of the deceptively edited Shirley Sherrod video clip. Indeed, Fox News and its personalities have a long history of aggressive race-baiting and racially charged commentary.

Walsh, Dean describe Fox as "racist," highlight Sherrod, New Black Panthers coverage

Howard Dean: Fox acted "absolutely racist." In a July 25 appearance on Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told host Chris Wallace: "Let's just be blunt about this. I don't think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and you're certainly not a racist, but I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a -- they had an obligation to find out what was really in the [Sherrod] clip. They have been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this [Sherrod] business and [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor and all this other stuff."

Walsh: "It's true" that Sherrod is a victim of Fox racism. On the July 25 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, Walsh, Salon.com editor in chief, stated of Sherrod: "I'm not giving her a pass, but I think the idea that she shouldn't be able to say Fox or Breitbart is racist is preposterous. She gets to say that because it's true, and because, from her vantage point, it's especially true."

Walsh describes "Fox News's 50-state Southern strategy." In a July 25 Salon.com post, Walsh noted that Fox News is hyping "one 'scary black people' and 'Obama's a racist' story after another" and wrote: "Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state 'Southern strategy,' the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon)."

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Taking a Deeper Look at the Women in the Tea Party Orbit

July 5th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing, women

The Tea Party and

the New Right-wing

Christian Feminism

By Ruth Rosen

5 July 2010

OpenDemocracy.net

Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain’s policy of “taxation without representation.”

Many liberals and leftists dismissed the Tea Party as a temporary, knee-jerk response to the recession, high employment, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, and an African American president who had saved American capitalism by expanding the government’s subsidies to the financial, real estate, and automobile industries.  Perhaps it is a temporary political eruption, but as E.J. Dionne, columnist at The Washington Post has argued, the movement also threatens the hard-won unity of the Republicans. “The rise of the tea party movement,” he writes, “is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

Who are these angry people who express so much resentment against the government, rather than at corporations?   Since national polls dramatically contradict each other, I have concluded that the Tea Party movement has energized people across all classes.

One important difference, however, is race.  At Tea Party rallies you don’t see faces with dark complexions.  Another important distinction is that men and women are drawn to this sprawling movement for a variety of overlapping but possibly different reasons.  Both men and women seem to embrace an incoherent “ideology” which calls for freedom from government, no taxes, and an inchoate desire to “take back America,” which means restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and “safe.”

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Ayn Rand: Sociopath as Mentor to Far Right

February 26th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

Ayn Rand, Inspiration to Right-Wing,

Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killers

 

By Mark Ames

AlterNet.org

February 26, 2010

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

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Snarky Quips Don’t Help Dept: Get Serious about 2010 and the TeaBaggers

February 17th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

What Not to Do

About the Tea Parties

& And Some Hints

About What to Do

 

by Leonard Zeskind

Huffington Post

The Tea Party convention has come and gone, and we need to look past the speculative bubble surrounding Sarah Palin's possible presidential ambitions and examine the Nashville gathering more closely. A fact-based analytical look at this developing phenomenon is much needed. There is no call to get snarky about the foibles of these Tea Party-types, however much the blogosphere lends itself to the small pleasures of poking fun at others. Neither will pulling down some off-the-shelf theory devoid of hard data give us the handles necessary to tackle this terribly new situation in real time.

During the past year the Tea Parties have managed to capture the angst and the sense of political and social dispossession felt by a definite strata of middle and working class white people. In the process, they have demolished whatever remained of the notion that the conservative, far right wing movement was dead. Street protests in April and July laid the basis for something akin to a civic uprising during the town hall meetings last August. While the Massachusetts election of Senator Scott Brown is now credited with derailing health care reform by virtue of his possible vote to sustain a filibuster, it was in fact the town hall events that first threw Democratic health care plans off the track.

Tea Partiers have already started to run campaigns for political offices small and large in the 2010 Republican primaries. There will certainly be some Democrats who wish them well, using a partisan-based logic that leads to disaster. If you hope that a more radical Republican Party will make it easier to elect moderate and liberal Democrats, you ignore the simple fact that when Republicans have been pulled further to the right, Democrats have usually followed. Worse is never better, it is always worse.

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Reading the Tea Leaves – Not a Pretty Picture

February 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

 

White Racial Resentment

Bubbles Under the Surface

of the Tea Party Movement

By Rich Benjamin
AlterNet, February 5, 2010

Editor's Note: Rich Benjamin's commentary on the underlying "white grievance" currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.

The Tea Party movement, holding its first convention this weekend, is angling to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and in deed, since at least the 1960s counterculture. Only this time, the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

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Critical Tool: Understanding the Right and Its Divisions

October 31st, 2009 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

Roots of Right Wing

Populist Rage - Realignment

By Chip Berlet
Huffington Post

There is a seismic shift occurring in the political Right as established organizations scramble to respond to the new wave of right-wing populism.

The Republican Party and its largest single voting bloc, the Christian Right, are split in how to respond to the rapid emergence of a right-wing populist movement outside their control as reflected in the teabaggers and townhallers.

That was clear at the 2009 Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC this past weekend. Some speakers made repeated attempts to reach out and embrace the angry teabaggers and townhallers, while the more moderate speakers praised their "patriotism" but urged toning down the rhetoric. This reflects a larger split inside the Republican Party.

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