A couple days ago the Secretary of State in Maine determined Trump’s name should be removed from the ballot in her state and, already, I’m getting emails asking me to sign petitions THANKING her for, in essence, doing her job. Only in America! Let’s see! Section three of the 14th Amendment to our constitution couldn’t be any CLEARER. It’s straight forward that if you’ve taken an oath to defend the constitution AND you CHOOSE to participate in INSURRECTION or give “aid and comfort” to those who’ve participated in INSURRECTION, you’re INELIGIBLE to hold any office of any kind, federal or state, PERIOD! Full Stop!

So, why do we have to go out of our way to “thank” someone in elective office for simply “doing their job.” Well, the answer’s easy – there are very few office holders in America who are willing to do their job when it runs into/comes in conflict with Donald Trump. We all know the result. My guess is this Secretary of State is already facing DEATH THREATS from the unhinged MAGA “faithful” and, likely, Trump is egging them on – with his mob style rhetoric where he can’t be held accountable in case one of his “deranged” supporters might happen to do something really naughty. Our TWICE IMPEACHED so-called two time popular vote LOSING (ex) president facing 91 FELONIES likes to code his words in “dog whistles” and my guess is he’s already doing it toward this lady who’s simply doing her job.

Of course, Colorado’s Supreme Court sent the first “salvo” in the attempt to get Trump thrown off the ballots – well, at least in Colorado. Now Maine! Who’s next? I have to add, from what I’ve read, even the “progressive” legal experts I’ve listened to – and there are many – it seems almost unanimous they think the Supreme Court will find a way to overturn these two decsions – both based on “state’s rights” and a “textual” reading of the constitution (which is what Court conservatives claim to “hold dear,”) And, trust me, I’m with them. I’ve been watching the SCOTUS make politically charged decisions since AT LEAST 2000. So, the only thing which will be surprising is how they go about violating their own principles.

But let’s take a look at the actual definition of insurrection and then compare it to Trump’s own words – From the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. The act or an instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.
2. A rising up; uprising.
3. The act of rising against civil authority or governmental restraint; specifically, the armed resistance of a number of persons to the power of the state; incipient or limited rebellion.

So, if you’ve been paying attention you know Trump continues to (the “Big Lie”) say the 2020 election was “rigged.” Even though there’s been NUMEROUS members of his own administration who’ve pointed out he was told there was virtually NO “fraud” in the 2020 election which could change the outcome. He knew he LOST. He LOST over 60 lawsuits. He just is unable to accept reality due to what appears to be the fact he’s a narcissistic sociopath (alleged). However, that certainly does not mean he’s not culpable for the attack on our nation’s Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021 – which according to the above definition was an “insurrection.”

Of course Trump has been continually attempting to avoid accountability for his participation in that INSURRECTION. His own words are stuck in my head: “We have to go the the Capitol and fight like hell. If you (talking to the mob) don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country anymore.” Obviously, his followers took his words literally and the result was Trump watching (proudly) as his supporters attacked the Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers (in response to his call to action) injuring over 140 of them leading to (I believe) the DEATH of three of them. The Police officers were attacked with a variety of weapons and a torrent of disgusting verbal assaults (especially the African American officers).

Trump watched the INSURRECTION he had incited on TV in the “White House” for something like 3 hours – even sending a “tweet” to his supporters that “Mike Pense didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” as his supporters were chanting “Hang Mike Pense” – they had actually constructed a gallows on the Capitol grounds. Reports are that when Trump was advised his VP was in danger his response was “He deserves it.” Since then, as I said above, Trump has been doing everything he can to avoid accountability – including running once again for president in 2024 as a “get out of jail free card.”

Those of us who’ve been watching this process – meaning the indictments Trump is facing, including four FELONY charges relating to the January 6th INSURRECTION – play out, and who want to see Trump face a jury of his peers regarding his actions after the November 2020 election culminating with the attack on the Capitol prior to the 2024 election – people like me – are confident he’s GUILTY as charged. (I guess I’d be a bad person to sit on the jury) I’ve read MOST of the books pointing out what happened (including recently Cassidy Hutchinson’s book) and the evidence is, in my view, overwhelming Trump belongs in jail.

To be clear, his own words are sufficient to, it seems to me, make the case regarding the 14th amendment issues. I actually heard/saw Trump say the following (on TV) which actually proves his “intent” to overturn a “free and fair election” – “That’s right!! Mike Pence failed us. Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Trump added in his statement. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the election!” He said these words in response to the Senate proposing legislation to amend the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to ensure no Vice President (in the future) could entertain the option of overturning an election (that would include Kamala Harris, by the way) – Trump apparently was thinking the fact Senators felt the need to make it clear Pense’s constitutional role was ceremonial only – proved the two of them COULD have “overturned the election” of November 2020.

So, I refer back to the definition of INSURRECTION – “The act or an instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.” Did he or didn’t he? To me, the evidence is irrefutable – HE DID! participate in INSURRECTION. Full Stop! Do I expect the Supreme Court to agree with Colorado’s Supreme Court and barr Trump from the ballot in the upcoming election. Of course not. They will find a way to say section 3 of the 14th amendment to the constitution doesn’t say what it actually says – which is:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me, if you’re a “textualist” as the “conservative” members would have us believe (they are overturning one precedent after another because of what they refer to is the actual “text” of the constitution) it couldn’t be clearer Trump SHOULD be disqualified from holding ANY office in ANY state or the federal government because he’s an INSURRECTIONIST – by his own words and the “text” of the definition of INSURRECTIONIST and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Here’s my prediction: Judge Thomas, who by all accounts SHOULD recuse himself from this case – after all, his wife was a participant in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election by (allegedly) participating in the “fraudulent elector” scheme – but, he won’t. Also, I expect Judge Gorsuch to reverse himself – in regard to a ruling he made when he was on the Court of Appeals overseeing Colorado (they mentioned his ruling in the majority opinion of Colorado’s Supreme Court ruling Trump SHOULD be disqualified). In 2012 concerning a challenge to a person’s claim of eligibilty to run for president Gorsuch wrote: “it is ‘a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process’ that ‘permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”

Just as I expect Judge Thomas to reverse himself in the upcoming challenge to the “Chevron doctrine” (I’ll write more about that later) I expect Gorsuch to find a “creative” way around his own words/decision just over 10 years ago. This court has proven itself to be nothing more than right wing Puppets who are controlled by the billionaire/corporate oligarchs who are attempting to wrest control of America from “we the people.” John Roberts will go down in History as one of the WEAKEST Chief Justices to ever be in that important positions. The CORRUPTION of members of his court – likely including him via the connections of his wife – is, to me, sickening.

Selfishly, I don’t have too much time on this planet, and it grieves me to watch what this court is doing to the established precedents which helped to “make this country great.” We have a long way to go, but the beauty of the constitution is that it’s a “living document” which has been able to evolve over time getting us closer to the original ideals (which I have to add were written down by slave holders). We’ve come a long way in my lifetime and we’re witnessing a concerted attack on America’s late 20th century and 21st century progress – and, much of these gains have been painstaking – especially for those Americans who are part of “minorities.” That is, not “White Anglo Saxon Protestent.” The Roberts Court is attempting to “turn back the clock.” How will they jusify Trump’s INSURRECTION?

Final Thought: Not only is Trump facing 4 CRIMINAL indictments but his, like a true sixth grade bully, attacking our court system as he’s facing – in the words of Bernie Sanders – YUGE civil penalties. Likely over $250 BILLION in the New York Fraud trial plus, who knows how much in punitive damages, likely MORE than Rudy Giuliani was fined, in the E Jean Carroll trial. Trump chose to sit in the court, challenge the judge’s authority, and continue DEFAMING Ms. Carroll from inside the courtroom where the entire purpose is to determine the amount of damages. Is that STUPID or what. Plus, by all accounts his attorney is in way over her head. The judge has had to instruct her on – get this – how to introduce evidence. I believe he used the term “courtroom 101.”

I decided to do a little “checking” and discovered Trump, who will likely appeal whatever the verdict is (meaning the amount he owes Ms. Carroll) PLUS will appeal the verdict in the Fraud Trial. I thought, “can he do that and simply not pay any money until after he pushes an appeal out for – maybe – years?” (Putting the liability on his children) Well, what I discovered is Trump will have to post a bond, secured by real property, in the amount of any judgement he owes PLUS the anticipated interest which will accrue during the appeal as a requirement to appeal the verdicts. It’s not hard to imagine he’ll have to post a bond in the amount of $500 MILLION (the interest in New York on an unpaid judgement accrues at – only – 2% per annum) plus at least a couple MILLION to cover the interest if it appears he’s going to be able to stall the payment a couple of years. Stay tuned….

Does the EPA Die Today?

The Supreme Court, it appears, is planning to gut most of America’s regulatory agencies in what could be the most consequential re-write of the protective “deep state” since the New Deal…

THOM HARTMANN

JAN 17, 2024

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Republicans on the Supreme Court are, it appears, planning to gut most of America’s regulatory agencies, in what could be the most consequential re-write of the protective “deep state” since it was largely created during the New Deal in the 1930s.

The vehicle for this radical transformation of America is a case that will be argued today, in just a few hours, before the Court: Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo.

If they pull it off, these six corrupt Republicans on the Court could destroy the ability of:

— the EPA to regulate pollutants,
— the USDA to keep our food supply safe,
— the FDA to oversee drugs going onto the market,
— OSHA to protect workers,
— the CPSC to keep dangerous toys and consumer products off the market,
— the FTC to regulate monopolies,
— the DOT to come up with highway and automobile safety standards,
— the ATF to regulate guns,
— the Interior Department to regulate drilling and mining on federal lands,
— the Forest Service to protect our woodlands and rivers,
— the FCC to protect us from internet predators,
— and the Department of Labor to protect workers’ rights.

Virtually the entirety of America’s ability to protect its citizens from corporate predation through regulation rests on what’s called the Chevron deference (more on that in a moment), which the Court appears prepared to overturn in today’s case.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education “on day one” if he’s elected president. If the Supreme Court has its way, he wouldn’t have to bother. It’ll become impotent.

Far-right conservatives and libertarians have been working for this destruction of agencies — the ultimate in deregulation — ever since the first regulatory agencies came into being with the 1906 creation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, a response to Upton Sinclair’s bestselling horror story published that year (The Jungle) about American slaughterhouses and meat-packing operations.

Gutting these agencies is what Steve Bannon meant when Trump brought him into the White House and he said one of the main goals of that administration was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” If there’s any coherent explanation of the phrase “deep state” as used by Republicans, it’s our nation’s regulatory agencies.

The modern effort to destroy or at least neuter America’s protective agencies began when Ronald Reagan put Anne Gorsuch in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

She directed the agency to dial back restrictions on expansion of factories and other operations that were already polluting the atmosphere. That provoked a challenge to the Supreme Court, Natural Resources Defense Council, v. Gorsuch, where the Court overruled the Reagan administration.

Gorsuch nonetheless continued her efforts to gut the EPA. In her first year heading the agency, there was a 79 percent decline in enforcement cases, and a 69 percent drop in cases the EPA referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. She pushed a 25 percent cut in her own agency’s funding into Reagan’s first budget proposal.

It took Congress years to overturn her cuts to the Clean Air Act “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers,” according to Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.

She took a meataxe to President Carter’s renewable energy programs and “set solar back a decade” according to Clapp.

Gorsuch finally resigned her office to avoid prosecution for what Newsweek described as “a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, [Super]fund mismanagement, perjury, and destruction of subpoenaed documents, among other things.”

Her son, Neil Gorsuch, was devastated by his mother’s resignation. In her memoir Are You Tough Enough? she tells the story of how Neil confronted her when she resigned:

“Neil,” she wrote, “got very upset. Halfway through Georgetown prep and smart as a whip, Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems. He also had an unerring sense of fairness, as do so many people his age.

“‘You should never have resigned,’ he said firmly. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president [Reagan] ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?’

“He was really upset,” she added.

Now, it appears, her son is preparing his revenge.

To get there, he and the other Republicans on the Court appear hell-bent-for-leather to turn regulatory agency rule-making upside-down, which will please the billionaires who give them luxury vacations, buy them homes, and pay them absurd speaking fees (and paid Roberts’ wife over $10 million).

Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA and CO2 — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):

1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.

2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit atmospheric CO2, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak CO2 or methane (which degrades into CO2), etc.

3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.

4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the CO2 emissions begin to drop.

This is a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established what’s called the “Chevron deference” to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.

That doctrine — established by the Supreme Court and reflecting a century of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence — says that when a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior they have the legal authority to regulate, the courts should “defer” to the judgment of the agency.

Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.

Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision. This set up today’s arguments.

Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2,” the agency lacks that power. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision a year-and-a-half ago.

The coal-, oil-, and natural-gas-fired power plant industry has been popping champagne corks for almost two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet.

In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others).

And, of course, Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but in 2020 wrote:

“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”

Giving us a clue to how this will probably go down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2; all 3 Democratic nominees opposed the decision.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the Court:

“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change…yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency…the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must be done by Congress rather than administrative regulatory agencies.

As if Congress had the time and staff. As if Congress was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings. As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action even if it did.

Gorsuch, et al, succeeded in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.

In the case being argued today, however, the Court is explicitly preparing to expand that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every regulatory agency listed at the open of this article (and more).

They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress itself.

Specifically, this case the Court is hearing today — Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo — has to do with whether or not fishermen should have to pay fees that help cover the cost of the agency that regulates them.

But when you look at the briefs being filed by billionaire- and corporate-funded rightwing groups like the CATO Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, Independent Women’s Law Center, Southeastern Legal Foundation, Christian Employer’s Alliance, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Advancing American Freedom, and the Buckeye Institute, you find the real goal of this litigation.

CATO, for example, writes:

“[I]t is now clear that Chevron deference is unconstitutional and ahistorical. Over the past forty years and counting, it has wreaked havoc in the lower courts upon people and businesses.”

Competitive Enterprise writes of the National Marine Fisheries Service:

“The agency lacks inherent legislative power: it may only use the powers that Congress gives it. … Only Congress can decide if a power given to it by the Constitution should be exercised. … The agency’s attempt to exercise this never- assigned power not only goes beyond the authority Congress gave it; it goes beyond any authority that Congress could legitimately give it.”

Pacific Legal Foundation cuts right to the heart of the ability of agencies to regulate anything, saying the case turns on:

“Whether the Court should overrule Chevron…”

The Buckeye Institute writes they’re submitting their amicus brief to the Court:

“[T]o speak on behalf of the thousands of small businesses concerned with agency aggrandizement of power through Chevron deference…”

On the side of you, me, and most other average Americans who just want clean air and water, safe drugs and cars, and reasonable protections in the workplace, the Biden administration has stepped up.

In defense of America’s regulatory agencies, the federal government’s brief filed with the Court lays out what’s at stake:

“Petitioners bear an especially heavy burden in asking this Court to overrule Chevron, which stands at the head of ‘a long line of precedents’ reaching back decades. The Court in Chevron described its approach not as an innovation, but as the application of “well-settled principles” concerning the respective roles of agencies and courts in resolving statutory ambiguities.

“Federal courts have invoked Chevron in thousands of reported decisions, and Congress has repeatedly legislated against its backdrop. Regulated entities and others routinely rely on agency interpretations that courts have upheld under the Chevron framework.

“By centralizing interpretive decisions in agencies supervised by the President, Chevron also promotes political accountability, national uniformity and predictability, and it respects the expertise agencies can bring to bear in ad- ministering complex statutory schemes.

“Petitioners offer no persuasive ‘special justification’ for overruling Chevron, let alone the type of ‘particularly special justification’ that would be required to overturn such a deeply ingrained part of administrative law.

“Petitioners principally contend that Chevron improperly transfers the authority to ‘say what the law is’ from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch. But this Court has explained that the Chevron framework rests on a presumption that ‘a statute’s ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps.’ (emphasis mine)

This could be the big enchilada, the case that fundamentally transforms America and American government from a modern, well-functioning nation into a third-world backwater where massive corporations and the billionaires they made rich, instead of We the People through elected representatives, set the rules. It’s corporate America’s dream.

It could fulfill Bannon’s and Trump’s promise to dismantle — or at least eviscerate — most of America’s regulatory agencies, leaving us all subject to the tender mercies of the country’s CEOs.

Several groups have called on Gorsuch to recuse himself from the case because one of his friends and patrons is a billionaire who’ll profit greatly from the destruction of our regulatory agencies. Not to mention fulfilling his mother’s legacy.

So far, though, he doesn’t seem to care about the apparent conflict of interest: the Republicans on this Court seem incapable of feeling shame or behaving ethically.

Keep an eye on this case and pay attention to the reporting on today’s arguments before the Court. Knowing what’s coming down the road — and why, and from whom — may well be vital for those of us concerned with the future of our country and our children’s safety.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Snowflaking of White Privilege

If America is ever to become a pluralistic, multiracial democratic republic we must come to terms with racism and white privilege…

THOM HARTMANNJAN 11, 2024176

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Some white people really don’t want to hear that if they’d been born Black their lives would have almost certainly been much harder. It shatters their ability to cling to the number one most important aspect/benefit of white privilege. It confronts them with the end of innocence.

This is particularly difficult for America’s elite media. The very idea of calling out, for example, Trump supporters for their racism is “beyond the pale.” And I mean that nearly literally.

A “palus,” the “pale” referenced in that old phrase, was a sharpened stake sticking out from a fence designed to keep people within a certain area: it was the 13th century version of barbed or razor wire. They were called “paling fences.” The British used them back then to keep Irish people from leaving their Gaza-like confinement areas in eastern parts of Ireland, the area that, for the British, was “beyond the pales.”

America’s news media is as wary of calling Republicans racists as the Irish were of getting themselves impaled (also where that word came from) on the British fences. Think about it: when was the last time you heard or read Trump, or his cult followers, being explicitly identified as “racist” by any of our major media outlets.

And yet they are racists.

Even when Trump calls Letitia James “Peekaboo James,” evoking the old “Jigab**” slur from the era of his childhood, they look away. Even when he uses his favorite descriptor for Black people: “thugs.” Or when he talks about brown-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America. They’ll acknowledge he’s quoting Hitler but appear terrified of calling him a racist or pointing out he’s using racism as a political weapon.

On my radio/TV program yesterday, a caller brought up the topic of Trump’s racism in the context of white privilege. I commented that I was probably in my 50s before I realized that the biggest, most important, most powerful, most impactful aspect of white privilege was that, as a white guy, I didn’t have to think about the color of my skin every day.

I don’t have to worry how the color of my skin will influence the interaction when I’m pulled over by a cop. I don’t have to wonder if the color of my skin was why I was given a crappy seat in a restaurant. If I’m walking around a department store and somebody seems to be interested in the same things I’m looking at, I don’t need to wonder if they’re following me because of the color of my skin.

A few months ago, Karen Hunter — one of the truly top-notch hosts on SiriusXM — was kind enough to invite me on her show. She asked me what white privilege meant to me and I gave her the description in the previous paragraph. Karen seemed thoughtfully amused, suggesting that perhaps I was bragging.

But what I meant was that I was absolutely shocked when this realization hit me: horrified that I hadn’t understood it earlier, that I hadn’t learned about it in school, that my parents had never discussed it with me.

Of course, I knew it at some deep level. I had all the knowledge necessary for that insight. I’d just never applied it to myself and my own life: I’d always told myself the story that I got where I was because I was smart and worked hard: I’d left home at 16 and never went back. Throughout my life, I’d omitted the color of my skin from my personal origin story (which, of course, is the highest expression of white privilege).

Similarly, I’m aghast at all the racist rightwingers on a jihad against any school or teacher who would help the kids growing up today come to what had been a belated realization for me.

They’re on their crusade against DEI, CRT, and Black history because when white kids are hit with that realization it’s usually accompanied by empathy for those people who are forced, every day, every time they leave the house or apply for a job or even get admitted to a hospital, to confront the many ways in which their skin color can make their experience so very different from that of white people.

And G-d forbid white people have empathy for their fellow human beings born with darker skin.

That could lead to America becoming a society where “the content of your character” is more important than the color of your skin. Republicans love to quote that phrase of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but what they’re really saying is that we shouldn’t discuss skin color and its impact at all.

After my riff on the air yesterday about my personal insight, a listener named Donna sent me the following email:

“Stop with the white privilege. Don’t you know every time you mention that and racism you are constantly dividing our great country. Why do progressives always do this. All races are privileged during their lives. Yet you never mention them. Many Muslins, Asians, Jews, Puerto Ricans and many other races are privileged. Do you not know they work from the bottom up to get that privilege. I know many immigrants came here legally like the Irish and Italians etc. that worked damn hard to get here and were treated like the lowest class of people. Yet they worked hard to get that privilege. So cut out your nonsense.

“When you work hard to raise your family and [are] proud of this country you can become privileged. It’s your choice. The opportunity is yours. Stop putting us into different classes. It really harms this country. I believe we were put here to be kind to each other and help each other not to divide. Please stop your nonsense. I’m white and don’t feel privileged. Lost a parent at young age and worked hard. No privilege there. I don’t appreciate your constant rambling about this.”

My point in quoting this email is not to call out or embarrass Donna, but to highlight her almost perfect articulation of how most white people think of their own white privilege. Which is to say, they don’t: “No privilege here.”

And, apparently, no privilege in our media, either.

Dan Froomkin over at Press Watchers has spent a good part of the past year identifying this same type of denial, both among Trump-humpers and in our mainstream media. In his Press Watch newsletter last week, he asked the question, “How much of Trump’s support is due to racism?”

He also explores the problem of the American press’ near-absolute unwillingness to call much of Trump’s and his followers’ behavior and rhetoric what it clearly is: good-old-fashioned all-American racism.

Froomkin points to a recent Washington Post article about how Trump and most GOP politicians regularly take openly racist positions, both rhetorically and on legislative issues. But throughout the article, the authors refused to describe these Republicans as racists. They wouldn’t even quote anybody calling them racists: that would be, by the standards of today’s journalism, beyond the pale:

“When mainstream journalists do address racism,” Froomkin writes, “they do so with euphemisms and denials. These days that means they understate the racist rhetoric from Trump and other leading Republicans, and they actively cover up the racism of his supporters and make excuses for them.”

This is, he notes, even worse than simply ignoring racism because its effect is to normalize it. And he encourages his journalistic peers to take the next step and do some real reporting:

“Reporters should be fanning out to assess racism’s role in the choices the electorate is making. And that doesn’t mean asking: Are you racist? When they say no, that’s meaningless.

“It means asking them what they believe. Do they subscribe to the great replacement theory? They’re racist. Do they believe that white Europeans are more desirable as immigrants than Africans or Asians? Racist. Do they believe that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country? Racist. Do they feel like minorities are unfairly getting ahead of them in line for the American Dream? Racist.”

As I was writing the first draft of this article yesterday afternoon, an email came into my in-box from Donald Trump.

It was absolutely dripping with the racism that Trump has proudly exhibited all the way back to the days when he was demanding the death penalty for five innocent young Black men accused of a Central Park rape, a demand he continues to make today, long after they were all exonerated and the man who actually committed the crime was arrested and successfully prosecuted:

“Reports all over the country,” Trump starts out, “show that Obama is hellbent on stopping our 2024 campaign. He’s RETALIATING because I’m the President who ripped his disastrous ‘legacy’ to shreds.” 

Right. Go after the Black guy to raise money and get out the vote in the last weeks of your primary campaign. Nothing racist about that, right?

Trump then features three headlines citing his destruction of President Obama’s legacy:

“How Trump is rolling back Obama’s legacy”
       Source: Washington Post

“Trump Discards Obama Legacy, One Rule at a Time”
      Source: New York Times

“Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed”
      Source: NY Mag

Trump wrapped up yesterday’s pitch to his racist base with this:

“Come January 20, 2025, we will FINISH the job and remove the last remnants of Obama’s legacy AND cast Biden’s legacy to the ash heap of history along with it.”

While that email presumably went to millions of Americans, I think it’s safe to say that it won’t be called out by the media. There won’t be a story about it in today’s newspaper or this morning‘s television. Just like most media refused to call him a racist when he told four Black congresswomen to “go back … [to the] places from which they came.”

Politico quoted a few Democrats calling Trump’s “go back” comment racist, but didn’t identify the statement or Trump himself as racist. Ditto for NBC News, CBS News, and USA Today. The New York Times at least identified the phrase itself, but did so by way of correcting an error of Trump’s:

“Wrapped inside that insult, which was widely established as a racist trope, was a factually inaccurate claim: Only one of the lawmakers was born outside the country.”

Last night on Fox News, one of their hosts did a segment asking if DEI was responsible for the door blowing off a Boeing plane. Because, you know, Black people are stupid and if you hire a bunch of them to build airplanes you’re gonna have substandard airplanes.

Nothing racist about Fox “News,” right?

If America is ever to become a pluralistic, multiracial democratic republic we must come to terms with this endemic racism and white privilege.

Our media must stop being terrified of the paling fence Republicans have erected around themselves and their racist rhetoric. So what if these “conservatives” (the modern-day euphemism for “racists”: William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather of modern conservatism, wrote about whites as the “advanced race”) are such snowflakes that they’ll yell, scream, and play victim?

It’s way past time to call racists what they are, teach the actual history of America, and — as a society and culture — make unacceptable the kinds of semi-coded racist rhetoric and racially-targeted Red state anti-voter legislation that’s so common today across the GOP.

And that begins with white people: we must understand our own sordid history, acknowledge our privilege, and strive to remake America into a nation that works for all its citizens.

As President Kennedy said of world peace but also more generally argued when it came to racial reconciliation, “We are not helpless before that task.”

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Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene Channeling Centuries of Racist Rhetoric?

What is the opposite of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Whites-only communities, whites-only jobs, and racial segregation…

Thom Hartmann Jan 9

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As one of Georgia’s most high-profile racists (a high bar in that state), Marjorie Taylor Greene has a reputation to uphold. Which is probably why this week she posted an attack on the Blackrock investment firm for having DEI or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at that company.

“Corporate communists believe they have to force behaviors,” Greene wrote on her Xitter feed. “They only need to remember as a corporation or business their ONLY job is to SERVE THEIR CUSTOMER with the best job possible to make their customers happy! It’s not about gender, sex, race and blah blah blah.”

In this, Greene is channeling centuries of racist rhetoric that argued it was inappropriate for government or companies to have any concerns about racial fairness or equity. After all, the white customers of Georgia’s segregated 1960s lunch counters were “happy!” What else is necessary?  

There’s a reason why America’s white supremacist Republican politicians like Greene and Stefanik are pushing so hard to get rid of DEI and to fire Black people in academia and the Pentagon: it wins them votes. From the geriatric Fox “News” followers, to white nationalist militias, to the preachers in all-white evangelical churches, the browning of America has provoked a collective freak-out.

And when you put it into the context of presidential administration policies over the past seventy or so years, it just makes sense that at this moment in time we’d see this explosion of exploitative racism from the hard right in America.

Like with any six-decade-old memory (from childhood, no less), I can’t be sure my recollection is as vivid as I think it is, but I have a clear recollection of my Dad pointing out and commenting about a “Colored Entrance Around Back” sign (or words to that effect) at the old RE Olds Hotel (later renamed the Jack Tar) in downtown Lansing, Michigan in the late 1950s.

The hotel housed one of the better sit-down restaurants in Lansing and we went out only rarely, but it was one of my parents’ favorites, that sign notwithstanding. My recollection is that the sign offended my Dad who, although a Republican, was a strong advocate of civil rights (at that time, the segregated South was almost entirely Democratic).

Chattel slavery had only ended about 90 years earlier, the Klan was riding high, and Fred Koch was funding “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards across the country, expressing rightwing outrage over the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board decision that required the racial integration of our nation’s public schools.

Virtually every door to opportunity was closed to Black people in the 1950s. Their segregated public schools were substandard; America’s top colleges only occasionally let in women, much less Black people; unions and employers alike opposed African Americans in the workplace; and it was nearly impossible to find a Black doctor, lawyer, college professor (outside of HBCUs), or cop.

In a speech which began the racial transformation of America, President John Kennedy addressed the nation on June 11, 1963 about this issue:

“We are confronted today primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

“Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise.”

Kennedy didn’t live to see the legislation he proposed pass Congress: that job fell to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But JFK set the stage for racial reconciliation and Black opportunity, and America is the better for it.

In his speech, Kennedy pointed out how far behind Black people were, as a result of centuries of slavery and nearly a century of legally enforced segregation:

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.”

But just ending legal segregation and discrimination in America wasn’t enough, Kennedy knew. That’s why he originated the term “affirmative action” with his Executive Order 10925, which required any contractor or company that wanted to do business with the federal government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”  

President Johnson followed up with his own Executive Order, 11246, which spelled out exactly what affirmative action meant:

“Such action shall include, but not be limited to the following: employment, upgrading, demotion, or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship.”

Over the loud objections of white supremacists and open racists like George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, affirmative action became a watchword phrase during the 1970s. That decade saw the first wave of Black people getting a quality education and finding good jobs, particularly in the government sector.

Then came the Reagan Revolution, powered in part by white backlash against Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, and Carter’s affirmative action programs.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth.  Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people. 

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, “federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.”

As president, Reagan directed his Justice Department to stop promoting affirmative action and instead attack those programs in pleadings before the courts. When the Supreme Court refused to outlaw such programs, though, Reagan began what The Washington Post called “a two-pronged approach to circumvent existing civil rights laws.”

Up and down the line at the DOJ, the Reagan administration simply refused to enforce civil rights laws and affirmative action laws and policies they didn’t like. As the Post article noted:

“Reagan’s secretary of labor, for example, implemented new federal compliance guidelines that exempted as many as 75 percent of companies contracting with the federal government from previously mandatory affirmative action programs.”

Reagan also fired people in the federal government who supported affirmative action, replacing them with opponents of school integration and bussing like the man he put in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, William Bradford Reynolds.

Reynolds and his compatriot Clarence Thomas (then Chairman of Reagan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) blocked the federal government from using lawsuits to enforce affirmative action.

When Bill Clinton came into the White House in 1993, he re-started the affirmative action programs put into place by Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.  In a speech, he said:

“My experiences with discrimination are rooted in the South and in the legacy slavery left. … The job of ending discrimination in this country is not done. … We should reaffirm the principle of affirmative action and fix the practices.”

By the time George W. Bush became president, private industry and academia had both begun a serious embrace of what President Kennedy called affirmative action.

A new system, called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” set standards that colleges and companies were eager to embrace in pursuit of a more diverse and fairer educational and work environment. From Ivy League universities to the nation’s largest corporations, DEI initiatives were the hot new thing in the 21st century.

The Bush administration, arguably the first Republican administration since the Civil War to reject racism as a political strategy, embraced DEI, as did the Obama administration which followed.

Donald Trump, however, wanted to put an end to the entire process. This was the guy, after all, who as a teenager worked for his father interviewing people for the subsidized housing project they owned and would write a “C” (for “Colored”) on the applications from Black people so they never got an apartment in Fred Trump’s properties. Fred had, just decades earlier, been arrested at a 1927 Klan rally.

Trump reverted to Reagan’s policies: He issued an executive order banning diversity training on racial and gender biases across government agencies, nonprofits, and institutions with federal contracts. As The New York Times headline noted: “Trump Attack on Diversity Training Has a Quick and Chilling Effect.” The article pointed out:

“Both implicitly and explicitly, Mr. Trump has made race a centerpiece of his bid for re-election, warning suburban voters of the perils of low-income housing and the spreading of ‘anarchy’ in the cities. During the debate, he refused to condemn white supremacy and told the Proud Boys, an organization linked with white supremacy and acts of violence, to ‘stand back and stand by.’

“Beyond rhetoric, the president has mobilized the federal government to prosecute his efforts. Microsoft said this month that the Labor Department had initiated an investigation into its commitment to double the number of Black employees in leadership posts by 2025. The Justice Department sued Yale University last week, accusing the school of discriminating against white and Asian-American applicants in admissions.”

Trump is now running for president again, and his racist base are wildly enthusiastic about the prospect. They hate DEI and affirmative action, and want to see women and Black people returned to their second-class status that preceded the civil rights era.

Republican racists — much like Democratic racists before Kennedy’s presidency — proudly lay it out for all to see. They’re campaigning on their racism.

After all, what is the opposite of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Whites-only communities, whites-only jobs, and racial segregation.

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