Taken out. Plus: The Trumpmakers

As most of you know, LegalEagle is one of the best channels on YouTube, and this account of the second Trump impeachment is particularly good. I want to address one point made at roughly the 16 minute mark:

Right after Trump was informed that Vice President Pence had been evacuated, due to all of the supporters invading the Capitol, minutes later he tweeted to the mob that Pence was a coward. Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." "USA demands the truth."

The truth may be more disturbing. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville was the one who delivered the message to the president, and his wording is important.

"I said: Mr. President, they've taken the vice president out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go," Tuberville said, according to CNN and other accounts. Tuberville also said he was "probably the only guy in the world" to hang up on the president.

We can't be certain that these were Tuberville's precise words. Only the NSA knows for sure, and they won't tell. But Tuberville is obviously trying to recreate the precise phrasing, and we have every reason to believe that he has reported accurately. 

 

My reading of the situation is that Trump thought that Pence had been "taken out" in the Bugsy Siegel/Johnny Roselli/Paul Castellano sense of those words. Trump went into that day expecting a body count. I can guess his rationalization: We're in a war and wars have casualties. 

The fact that Trump referred to Pence in the past tense means that Trump's tweet should be read as a premature eulogy. The message: Pence had it coming.

 

Mike Pence could diminish, if not end, the Trump cult with one fiercely-worded denunciation. Why hasn't he issued it?

Today's Trumpmaker. If blogs were still popular, I might create a new blog devoted to calling out each and every left-wing idiot who gives the world a "Trumpmaker" moment. These moments occur whenever an alleged "progressive" makes a statement or commits an act designed to turn otherwise-apolitical white people into scarlet-capped Nazis.  

Here's an example. Karen Ames, a veteran employee of the Department of Education in the Bronx, is suing the department because she was forced from her position. The reasons for dismissal:

1. She is white.

2. She is Jewish. She committed the sin of mentioning her family's Holocaust experience at a meeting where she was expected to apologize for her skin color.

3. She refused to make the "Wakanda Forever" salute when asked to do so. At a freakin' school superintendent meeting. No, I am not making this up.

 

And never mind the fact that both Wakanda and the Black Panther were created by a couple of white Jewish guys named Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. 

 

(I was a big Panther fan when I was a kid, but even then, I never would have said "Wakanda Forever" in public, for the same reason I never would have said "Flame on!" or "Up, up and away!" It's just silly.)

“The agenda of Chancellor Carranza and his senior leadership team was euphemistically touted as an ‘equity platform’ but in reality, it was a platform used to create gender, age, racial and ethnic divisions in the NYC School system,” she contends in her Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed Friday.

Ames was grilled about her “ethnic background,” chastised by a colleague at a training session when she shared her grandparents’ experience during the Holocaust in Poland, and “admonished” when she declined requests at superintendents meetings to take part in the comic book movie-inspired “Wakanda Forever” salute to “black power,” she charges in the legal filing.

At an implicit-bias workshop where superintendents were asked to tell their personal stories, Ames talked about her grandparents’ loss of two children during the Holocaust — only to have colleague Rasheda Amon tell her, “you better check yourself,” the lawsuit alleges.

“That is not about being Jewish! It’s about black and brown boys of color only,” court papers quote Amon as scolding.

"Black power" salutes at a school superintendent meeting? Seriously?

 

Yes, the above story was published by the New York Post. No, I normally do not read that rag -- in fact, I have always despised it. But I must now say to you what I have said whenever right-wingers shut their eyes and ears to unwelcome news published in the NYT or the WP: Libel suits exist, and they make lies costly. If a newspaper has enough assets to be worth suing, it cannot concoct reality out of whole cloth. 

 

Ames' suit against the Department is quite real. I am sure that the Post has described it accurately. Lying about Ames, who is not a pubic figure, would be extremely foolish.

 

Granted, that lawsuit tells only one side of the story, and we must listen respectfully when the other side is told. But nothing about Ames identifies her as a MAGA maniac or a white supremacist; she seems to be a classic liberal Jewish New Yorker. In all likelihood, she has exposed an actual instance of an increasingly familiar scenario: Progressives in minor (but not unimportant) positions of power believe that it is acceptable to denigrate white people in the workplace.

 

Especially Jewish white people. You know: Like the ones who invented T'Challa. 

You are making a massive, massive mistake if you dismiss or minimize the importance of these "Trumpmaker" episodes. Right-wing headline writers adore these moments because such headlines feul the MAGA movement, created the MAGA movement. We've seen a daily parade of Trumpmakers over the past few weeks, and that parade explains why Trump still wields enormous power and influence.

 

Nobody on the lumpenprole right cares about actual policy anymore -- hell, Trump drove up the deficit more than anyone. The MAGA movement is founded not on policy but on rage against liberals.

 

And what created this rage? Identity Politics, and the liberal endorsement thereof. Nothing else.   

 

As I've said before: Adolf Hitler was the ultimate exemplar of Identity Politics. As I'll say many times in the future: Race consciousness creates racism. As more and more "progressives" have embraced Identity Politics, Klan membership has skyrocketed. Cause and effect.

Understand this: My politics are about class, not race. Throughout my life, I have usually voted the way most black people vote because it is in my class interest to do so. I'm poor, poorer than most black people. I can honestly say that, from one coast to the other, I've ridden on buses surrounded by black and brown people, by my fellow toilers in the lower working class. And now, I can't even afford bus fare. 

 

I've never lived like the postmodernist proponents of Identity Politics in academia, who drive nice cars and sip lattes and buy clothing new and more-or-less live like aristos. And I certainly have never lived as well as an asshole like Carranza.

 

I know very well that the Democratic party owes the African American community a huge debt. I'll be forever grateful to black voters for choosing Biden in the primaries, thereby saving us from Bernie Sanders (a sure loser in the general election). In my pantheon, Stacey Abrams is a goddess. A thousand bravos to her: She gave us the Senate. A thousand bravos to the millions of average black voters: They saved this nation.

 

Unfortunately, the Democratic party is threatened by a small but loud segment of the black progressive community -- mostly BernieBros -- who just plain hate white people. The same may also be said of some prominent Hispanics, such as Carranza.

 

They hate whites. There. I said it and I won't take it back. You know I'm right.

 

Actually, their hatred is not the problem. In every conceivable group and sub-group, there's always going to be a certain amount of inchoate hate radiating in every direction. The problem is that hatred of whites has become socially acceptable. White liberals are too damned petrified to criticize anti-white bigotry; instead, they wallow in casuistry as they defend inexcusable inanities, such as a requirement to shout "Wakanda forever!" at school superintendent meetings. 

Those "training sessions" (in both the public and private sectors) are actually excuses for forcing whites and males to engage in ritualized displays of self-abasement. Whites are instructed that white is evil, and males are instructed that the penis is evil. They are threatened with job loss unless they pretend to be ashamed of their skin color and their genitals. 

 

All such "training sessions" should be made illegal.

 

Allow me to repeat words from a previous post published last summer -- and please remember that these words describe the way Democrats were then being portrayed in the media:

Dems don't just want to see Confederate statues removed in an orderly fashion: They want to blow up Mount Rushmore. Dems are now portrayed as the party that wants police eradicated in communities most beset by violence. Dems are now portrayed as a party that views white people in terms so disdainful that even Elijah Muhammed would have said "Now you're going too far."

The Dems are now literally the party that wants Black capitalized and white in lower-case letters. The Dems are now the party that has no problem with a Black college professor who openly announces "I hate white people." At the same time, Dems are seen as the party that wants all white males to live in fear that seemingly-innocent words might be construed as "micro-aggressions" against blacks -- sorry: Blacks -- and women.

The only well-known liberal commentator who has balls enough to deride these progressive Trumpmakers is Bill Maher. We need more like him.