Yves here. I’m running this post so you can see the clips in question. #WhichHillary was trending on Twitter on Thursday, at least until it was apparently expunged from the “trending” list:
So, since #WhichHillary trend was deleted by Twitter, whose CEO hosts Clinton fundraisers, now we have to start #WhichHillaryCensored
— Taylor Loy (@TaylorLoy) February 26, 2016
But at least Wired took notice in Twitter Attacks Clinton’s Record With #WhichHillary:
Campaigning in the age of social media means that sometimes you’ll be two days away from the South Carolina presidential primary—a race you’re expected to win handily—and suddenly a hashtag will start trending on Twitter that calls into question every inconsistency of your decades-long career in politics.
That was the case for Hillary Clinton Thursday morning when the hashtag #WhichHillary started trending, eliciting more than 88,000 tweets by 1 pm ET. The hashtag, which has been used intermittently on social media to point out times that Clinton has supposedly flip-flopped on issues, gained steam after an altercation between Clinton and Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams at a private fundraiser in South Carolina Wednesday.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc. Originally published at Alternet
It took one activist in South Carolina to ask a question no one in the media had the courage to ask: Why Clinton used decidedly racist language in 1996 to promote her husband’s “tough on crime” legislation. Speaking before Keene State College to promote Bill Clinton’s crime bill, then-First Lady and campaign surrogate Hillary Clinton said the following:
Black Lives Matter protester Ashley Williams wasn’t going to let these comments go. At a $500-a-head event in Charleston, South Carolina, the young activist held up a sign that read, “we have to bring them to heel,” and shouted at the former Secretary of State, “I am not a super predator.”
Clinton demurred, avoided a direct response, and Williams was eventually escorted out of the building. At least someone had bothered to confront Clinton with her own words:
Today, Clinton’s dehumanizing language is jarring, but some 20 years ago it was the cornerstone of right-wing criminal justice panic, some of which the Clintons helped stoke. The comments, first unearthed by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie in May of last year, have recently resurfaced and become something of a headache for the campaign around the margins. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, cited them in her scathing critique of Clinton’s record on race, as did the Daily Beast’s Goldie Taylor.
“I wanted to bring her to confront her own words,” Williams told the Huffington Post. “We did this because we wanted to make sure that black people are paying attention to her record, and we want to know what Hillary we are getting.”
Popularized by John J. DiIulio Jr, the superpredator myth was born from the pages of the far-right Weekly Standard and is credited with providing pseudo-academic cover for a wave of harsh anti-drug and juvenile penalties that swept the nation in the ’90s. DiIulio eventually disavowed the idea, telling the New York Times in 2014 that his projections were mistaken and that “demography is not fate.” The Times chronicled the devastating effect the myth had on the African-American community:
It certainly had consequences. It energized a movement, as one state after another enacted laws making it possible to try children as young as 13 or 14 as adults… Many hundreds of juveniles were sent to prison for life, though in the last few years the United States Supreme Court has ruled that such sentences must not be automatic, even in murder cases. Individual circumstances and possible mitigating factors should be weighed, the justices said.
Inescapably, superpredator dread had a racial component. What the doomsayers focused on, in the main, were young male African-Americans. For Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University writing for The Huffington Post last September, the deep-seated fear that any black teenager in a hoodie must be up to no good was essentially what got Trayvon Martin killed in Florida two years ago.
The scandal is that it took one intrepid activist to finally confront Clinton with these words. The most glaring failure to do so came from Fusion, who hosted the Iowa Black and Brown forum before the February 1 caucus. While the panel did press Clinton on her support of mass incarceration, it remained vague and didn’t cite these specific, racially charged statements despite the fact that they had been floating around social media for some time.
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But for some reason, none of the old black people voting for Hillary remember the Dems used to do this kind of thing all the time. The young people, who didnt see this kind of thing happen… Are the ones that know this kind of thing happened.
Im so confused.
The older ones know. They just come from an era where such compromises were common and expected, where even the black leadership supported and propagated such language. They think the young ones are naïve and impractical for demanding new political realities.
Ohhhhh I get it now. So its sort of like the WEB Dubois/Booker T Washington split because of the Atlanta Compromise
Dubois wanted change to happen soon or immediately, and Washington said blacks should go slow so as to not make white people angry. Washingtons plan was called the Atlanta Compromise
In retrospect, IMHO the Atlanta Compromisewas flawed, as it did not work out as Washington said it would. For over a half century there was no civil rights progress whatsoever. Then MLK and company made things happen in a surprisingly narrow time-frame.
Seems to me that the debate between the old and young is a modern rehash of this kind of debate thats been going on in the black community for over a century now.
« I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. »
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
One might substitute “black moderate” these days, but the overall gist of MLK’s words recalls very much the “political realities” compromises of the Clintons in the 80s and 90s, in Arkansas and in the White House. These compromises are the result of an overriding principle of ambition, the hallmark of Clintonian politics.
Julian Bond at least in his lectures said “white moderate” was code for black ministers and other black leaders who had theirs but wouldn’t join the movement and that King understood many whites were indifferent because the black church and many black leaders urged peace in our time. Those whites would get off the sideline if organizations such as the black church picked a side. The targets would understand what King meant. King was announcing an intention for them to play ball or face war. Malcolm X’s later use of the term House Negro and Field Negro wasn’t plucked from the sky.
The protests, boycotts, and the sit ins were organized by young people, not he accepted leadership class.
+1
They appear to be the same people who when you tell them of incidences of suspected discrimination in hiring—looks of shock, fear, or contempt from the middle manager when you look and dress just as square as he/she does, followed by being passed over—rationalizations along the lines of “Maybe you just need to interview better”. Or being told by same middle manager to apply for another position in the same department, followed by a non-tender of an interview upon doing so. Rarely any recognition of a wider systemic problem
Police Brutality against non-violent blacks—No serious condemnation of the brutality, no demands for punishment of the bad apples, but rather the rationalization along the lines of “Well, the cops have a tough job” or “I can’t believe that, as a matter of fact, I’ve never had a problem with the police in all my years”.
Also the ones who say be patient, don’t push for some particular change right now; keep your powder dry. They remind me of Obama as a matter of fact:).
I like the metaphor you use of the boil. Another is psoriasis, where when the normal organs of elimination, which handle toxins in the system, can’t do their job due exhaustion and an overwhelming workload, the body will open up new channels to the skin, even on the face, to find alternative ways to expel toxicity and save the body from poisoning. Something has to erupt, or the system is doomed to pain and death. Without the kind of activism you describe the symptoms of social dysfunction and corruption occur as a result of parasites operating unbeknownst or even mindlessly assisted by the host, until it’s too late for a save.
It is precisely a ‘re-run’ of the W.E.B. Du Bois approach vs the Booker T. Washington approach. Well spotted.
Thanks for that reminder! I confess I had forgotten about that. Yes, that’s important to highlight and very closely aligns with what’s happening now.
People are afraid of disavowing powerful and trusted leadership. I’m still amazed by the number of lifelong Catholics who seem to have no problem with the massive and recent child abuse scandal that was covered up and allowed to continue by senior church leaders. The younger generation has largely checked out, but I would have expected a scandal like that to utterly decimate the ranks of church goes and it hasn’t. The same holds for political leadership.
Yes. Good analogy. I, too, find it amazing that friends of mine – we are boomers – are still willing to stay in the RC church. I realize that their parish church provides a community that they’ve belonged to for decades. But still…
And frankly, the pedophilia is still happening. It’s just that now, US pedophile “priests” are routinely shipped off to third world countries. It’s really disgusting.
But I’ve heard radio interviews of what are clearly older black women, and they speak very glowingly of HRC. She’s their gal, and she’ll be “on their side.”
Eh? Not so much… HRC has already directed us to have very very very very LOW expectations. I guess I’ll give her .0001% credit for being honest about that.
Whew, there’s a lot baked into that idea. We’re talking about authoritarian organizations that trade on parentification, usually paternalization, of that authority. In important respects leaders want people to feel that criticism risks alienating themselves from the church. Further, that constraint cannot be recognized, the notion of “powerful and trusted” covers over “powerful and feared.” “Trust” becomes an obligation, not something that really derives from performance.
In what context was this reported in 1996? The Internet was largely an X-Files discussion site, and Simpsons Episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts” demonstrated the news was awful two years before the launch of Fox News in 1996. If most people heard it at a campaign event, I think it would pass as noise. The GOP wasn’t going to use this against her. Unless you had the tape in, you wouldn’t be able to rewind it, much less show it to others.
On a another note, it’s always great to see my home town make the news.
If you’re talking about “superpredators”, that subject was all the rage for a while. Then the last generation raised with unleaded gasoline got too old to commit crimes and the crime rate fell off a cliff, and the “superpredator” panic was politely scrubbed from public discussion.
The optics of taking down #WhichHillary are seriously not good. If Clinton and her people can’t handle 140 character tweets, how is she ever going to stand up to a crude take down from Trump?
My understanding is that they took it down because Hillary supporters believed it to be an offensive dog-whistle: “Witch Hillary”. Silly, but that’s the argument.
Hahahaha, ‘witch’.
Trump could probably call her a bitch and get away with it. Without even using a dog whistle. As SD above said, if she cant even weather such relatively germane tactics from Sanders, this hypersensitivity is going to be a fatal flaw later on.
That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.
Reading your comment is the first time that implication has occured to me.
Yeah, it never would have occurred to me either if people (mostly Hillary supporters) weren’t talking about it in my Twitter feed.
Yesterday afternoon I added a WhichHillary tweet when it was #1 trending—WitchHillary never occurred to me till now. What an abuse of power—simple censorship.
Twitter needs to be a “safe place” for Hillary supporters, I guess. Meanwhile, us BernieBros will soldier on!
Says the campaign that propagated and stll uses “BernieBro,” even after the writer who coined the term disavowed it.
Twitter joins the corporate media blackout of Hillary criticism and Sanders’ views. The rich have circled their wagons around Hillary.
Do you have a source for this?
No real source; just lots of tweets like this and this.
#WhichHillary tag is still going strong this morning. Lots of fresh tweets.
And if it can be proved that Hellery’s BFF Twitter CEO is behind removing the tag from the Trending list , that may be a much bigger story than the BLM activist getting escorted out of the mansion. twitter censoring political speech is a Big (word starting with F removed since Skynet is a prude) Deal.
Oh, the hashtag is alive, but it was removed from the trending list when it was still trending. That’s the censorship.
1. The fact that it was trending would lead more jounros to take up the story; it’s clearly news.
2. A lot of people on Twitter will look at stuff on trending just because it’s trending, so taking it off trending way reduces exposure.
The take down optics look bad if you can see them. Will this story get coverage?
The witch excuse is a smoke screen.
Attempting to censor Twitter (in this kind of very specific, scrub one hashtag way) is a stupid, stupid idea. Vastly more people, including vastly more young black people in Hillary’s “firewall” will hear about this now than they would have before the censoring.
Writing as an outsider, I really have to say the US media is pathetic. Its one thing to be biased (I don’t know of a country which doesn’t have a media biased to the establishment), but to be so utterly one sided and biased to the extent that there are such good stories out there that they chose to overlook is incredible. There is so much ammunition out there against Clinton and yet they refuse to use it. You would think that the desire for a good juicy story would overwhelm a half decent journalists desire to cosy up to the establishment. Yet there seems an absolute refusal to ask any hard questions, while Sanders is subjected to constant sniping when not being ignored. Even the fact that Twitter is openly interfering should be a front page news story to any half decent journalist.
PlutoniumKun: Media coverage is one aspect of U.S. class politics. But, of course, we don’t have social class in the U S of A. So how could upper-middle-class M and F journalists be fronting for the policies and politics of the top 2 percent in Washington, D.C.? It simply isn’t possible, don’t you see?
You should see the class and race biases in U.S. arts-and-culture journalism. Theater and movies are just one long saga of upper-middle-class angst and dyspepsia, now aren’t they?
Yes we totally utterly and completely agree with you, PK! It’s one of the big reasons that I tossed out my tv ages ago. Utterly putrid, vile and useless.
So-called “media” in the USA has largely been turned into a debased form of InfoTainment. And no, the important stores are NEVER told, and US citizens are appalling and deliberately and uniformly uninformed/misinformed. It’s pernicious.
Democratic voters, by and large, are just as uninformed and just as low information as citizens who vote GOP, imo.
Our media is almost solely owned by the .001%, and they control the message. You have to use the Internet to get anything approaching real information.
> I really have to say the US media is pathetic
I think the word you’re looking for is “corrupt”.
The mainstream press in this country is under heavy censorship-the term mainstream applies to the larger print outlets that also have a huge Web presence. I believe the NYT web site gets 90 million unique visitors each month. It has been discovered by the almost ghostly few investigative reports that do emerge that CIA and State Dept officials lean on, consult with and otherwise do control work to suppress the news that is supposedly ‘fit to print.’ So if a major outlet like the NYT has a juicy story that will garner even more visitors to the web site and promote the sale of copy, they hold onto the news and deliver it when the government sees fit. This actually happened in the past five years in one well publicized event. So to summarize, the news in this country is censored.
Seemingly smaller venues have better luck in evading government control but there is the highly publicized case of Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury news who uncovered a court case that showed the CIA was involved in drug trafficking on the Streets of Los Angeles. There is even a web site devoted to the original publication which draws on the original publications that the government attempted, to no avail, to bury.
Clinton has heavy, thick government ties
So we basically do not have a free press due to heavy pressure and operations directed against our own newspaper editors. The CIA is the heavy here.
Clinton has heavy, thick government ties and can still tap into those. Plus the mainstream likes her because she has already promised to not rock the boat except to further push out the fringe members of society so as to completely marginalize more every year.
The Main Stream press has been heavily censored by the CIA and State Department.
All news sources fail to allow for full discussion of the news, and it’s not just in this country. But for now the emphasis is on all. Including web based bloggers.
Would suggest people wait for the Michigan Primary where the black people will vote for Clinton or Sanders. The black precincts and churches will tell the story. March 8th is a short time to wait
Wait to/for what?
Michigan Primary is March 8th.
I, like so many others, am at a loss to explain the popularity of Bill and Hillary Clinton among older African-Americans. Haven’t they been betrayed too many times already?
Some say the Clintons have earned blacks trust, and Bernie hasn’t. Really?
How can so many blacks trust Hillary Clinton after the Clintons’ dog whistle, dirty tricks and brass knuckles assault on Obama in the 2008 Campaign?
Bill and Hillary are a matched set.
Contrast them with Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 article, “The Bravest Man I Ever Met,” about Norman Thomas, Socialist Party leader and five-time presidential candidate. King couldn’t attend the 80th birthday celebration for Norman Thomas because he was in Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. He sent the following message to America’s foremost Socialist:
“I can think of no man who has done more than you to inspire the vision of a society free of injustice and exploitation. While some would adjust to the status quo, you urged struggle. While some would corrupt struggle with violence or undemocratic perversions, you have stood firmly for the integrity of ends and means. Your example has ennobled and dignified the fight for freedom, and all that we hear of the Great Society seems only an echo of your prophetic eloquence. Your pursuit of racial and economic democracy at home, and of sanity and peace in the world, has been awesome in scope. It is with deep admiration and indebtedness that I carry the inspiration of your life to Oslo.”
Would Martin Luther King, who supported democratic socialism, be supporting Hillary? Is there any doubt that he would be supporting Bernie Sanders?
Unlike Hillary Clinton, King rejected the idea of slow, incremental change. Before he was assassinated, King was mobilizing a multi-racial poor people’s army march on Washington for a “Poor Peoples Bill of Rights.”
Cornel West asks, “Does America have the capacity to hear and heed the radical King or must America sanitize King in order to evade and avoid his challenge?”
The fear of losing what you worked so hard to attain. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. This isn’t just a race issue. As always, fear of change is the root of the problem. Just ask 50% of the population. It’s a lot easier to survive/rebuild your life physically when your 20 then when your 60.
I think Glen Ford’s analysis of the situation is especially apt. Basically, politics and ideology aren’t the fundamental issue, because, as Ford puts it, fundamental compromise is baked into AA allegiance to the Democratic party. As he tells it, black people recognize full well that both R and D are rich man parties, the primary difference being the R party actively seeks to do black people harm, whereas the D party treat them with indifferent neglect. So, as the argument goes, black folk vote D in the hopes that they will, at least, protect them from the overt violence of the R party.
It’s about survival, not which policies you support.
That how it seems to me (as a white person). Well, whether you’re a minority or not, seems to me that a lot D-voter allegiance to the party is based on Lesser Evil and not much more these days.
But given the performance of D-pols, it’s hard sometimes to view them as lesser evils… They are part and parcel of what’s so very wrong and go along to get along, at best, while also often selling their constituents down the river. JMHO, of course.
How many decades does it take before someone says, “well, I guess the Democratic Party hasn’t done a very good job of protecting me from violence either”. After all, would “Black Lives Matter” exist in 2016 if both parties hadn’t been complete failures for everyone except the wealthiest among us?
If the African American community wants to continue seeing deterioration, then by all means they should vote for Hillary Clinton.
There is an issue with Bernie being Jewish. Relations between blacks and Jews in the US historically are not good. As one of my friends says, “Bernie reminds them of the landlord.”
Not entirely unfair given the tolerance for racist policies in the only jewish state.
It is unfair given that:
1. Zionism is not the same as Judiasm
2. Sanders has said he’s non-observant.
I wasnt referring to the first statement but the second. Or put another way, Bernie may be jewish and I don’t think him racist. However racism is not rare in israel. Since many Jews are supporters of Israel it is not unreasonable for black voters who know nothing else about a candidate, to be suspicious of Jewish candidates. Zionism is correlated to judaism.
However it might be better to ask whether Zionism is better correlated to judaism than evangelical Christianity. I can easily imagine it isn’t. In which case my bad!
Actually having re read I realise I am wrong and you are right. Best to just delete my second reply.
If blacks wish to be that stupid and vicious in their perceptions, then once again . . . let them lie in the bed they choose to make for themselves.
Here is an interesting book on Jewish white flight in south-side Chicago.
Slightly off-topic, here is a rather literary article by Joshua Cohen (New Republic) in which Bernie is portrayed as a self-hating Jew. IMO, worth reading despite the cynicism.
The New Republic has long been hard core Zionist, for all the time Marty Peretz was in the loop. You should read some of the articles from when Gore was running for president. Cringe-making. While it’s now under new management, it looks like its old posture is alive and well.
As Asley Williams was led out by the handler, Clinton was heard to say, “now, back to the issues.” Tone deaf.
It doesn’t get more ironic than that. At least for now!
Yes, Bravo to Ashley Williams, the entire video is priceless.
Race is never an issue, which is why the U S of A can’t make real progress on race. For HRC, the issue is her inevitability.
Of course not. It is pretty much consensus that it is better that some innocent black teens should die, than the police accept a marginal increase in the risk of death or injury.
Please explain how after 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and the massive divide in wealth and life chances those two facts have instilled in this Republic, race is never an issue?
I take to be facetious or you mean the people represented by the power structures refuse to accept that race is an issue?
neo-realist. Yes, refuse to accept. James Levy: Never an issue in the sense that too much will have to change to deal with race and how it has deformed the U S of A, and white America is not ready to make the changes required for a more equitabe and ethical nation–personally, politically, economically, and theologically not ready (and planning to remain not ready).
So race is not to be discussed, eh. Not an issue.
At least Charleston’s principal newspaper has a column (not straight news article) that seems to give the incident reasonably balanced coverage. Can’t tell from the Web version, but it might even start on the front page. Adding emphasis, it’s accompanied by an equally prominent article on the death of a black woman in the county jail due to medical neglect, an incident noted in yesterday’s NC links.
However, I’ll be darned if I can find any mention at all in the Web version of what is arguably the state’s newspaper of record and the one that would likely have the greatest influence on Democratic primary voters in South Carolina. Instead, there’s a less prominent article headlining a bigger gap between Clinton and Sanders in the latest South Carolina polling than previous polls, 64-14%.
Whoops, cut-n-paste error! The state’s “newspaper of record” link above should go to Columbia’s The State newspaper.
#Bluelivesmatter
Ashley Williams was a brave woman to confront, in the deepest bowels of the Rice establishment in Charleston the heart of darkness that is Hillary Clinton.
“Nobody’s ever asked me before….you’re the first person to ever ask me….I’ll be happy to address it but you are the first person to ask me….”
Says is all
The background admonishing is priceless.
And it’s capped off perfectly by the emphatic ‘thank you’ after ‘getting back to the issues’.
Great to see something by Adam Johnson here
Hillary’s words “bring to heel.” Was she talking about dogs? How revealing. I can’t imagine a speechwriter vetted it. Or maybe it didn’t just slip out. Not sure which would be worse.
“Bring to heel..” MOST LITERAL DOGWHISTLE EVAH!!!
The phrase “bring to heel” is idiomatic. It literally translates as a command for a dog to follow its master at the actual heel. Ms. Clinton seems to be channeling her inner hillbilly. The phrase does have a whiff of eugenics, but she lacks the conviction to actually commit to that belief system of hate and exclusion without selling those beliefs out when it becomes politically expedient.
bring to heel
Force to obey, subjugate. For example, The prisoners were quickly brought to heel. This term transfers commanding a dog to come close behind its master to similar control over human beings or affairs. [Second half of 1800s]
See also: bring, heel
That’s just one of the definitions … this is JIM CROW LANGUAGE.
It was delivered in racist, coded white supramacist screeching when she used it. People forget some of us were already “onto” her back then.
It’s bad enough to use the “superpredators” racist code, but the bring them to heel is a way to DEHUMANIZE anyone who would dare to challenge her superiority.
The only “back to the issues” Hillary is interested in is getting back her taxpayer-paid executive plantation on Pennsylvania Avenue, where she can loot some more linens, art, china, furniture as she did last time.
I come from a mixed race (native, white) family, I HEARD her codes from the off. I am fed up with them and am gladdened about the viral nature of the twitter storm. May there be many more!
She is seriously mistaken if she can’t understand that young women cannot genuflect when she issues her admonishments to stick with the white supramacist script and playbook. As for the blacks who support her, they already have been brought to heel. Not their fault, the code is strong and works mostly unconsciously, same as class accents in the UK do …
What a punk Clinton shows herself to be.
I was working at high levels in the Juvenile Justice system at that time — on the law enforcement side, mind you — and I felt at the time that the “super-predator” meme was nothing but a racist dog-whistle designed to demonize young Black men in order to facilitate their mass incarceration, while using “Free Trade” to export any hope they might be offered of a meaningful future. Hearing HRC using it is chilling.
The arrogant way that she puts down that young woman is despicable.
A Washington Post opinion piece about this event. The MSM has tried to avoid this issue, but it won’t go away.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/why-hillary-clintons-super-predator-apology-is-such-a-big-moment-for-political-protest/
In 1996 Hillary, Bill and most national Democrats were engaged in “minority punching”, the equivalent to today’s hippie punching. The 1996 Democrats believed the would score net benefits politically in being tough on crime and the lazy poor, knowing full well the disproportionate impacts these policies would have on the minority community. Like the punching of hippies today, the establishment left understood they could do this because the minority communities had no where else to go, and because they believed there would be little to no political cost.
It is the same today, nothing has changed in terms of the policies of establishment Democrats. What has changed is the working poor has expanded to include more whites as well as minorities, and the broader decline in opportunity and living standards has opened some eyes.
If the AA community is the reason that Hillary gets the nomination (possible to probable) and then the Presidency (unlikely), then four years of betrayal will hopefully disabuse them of the notion she’s on their side. It seems like she’s running out of firewalls.
Nitpick time: is Ashley Williams part of Black Lives Matter? I’ve heard that she is and that she isn’t.
Can Hillary even be trusted with women’s issues? How do we know, she won’t have her ‘Nixon in China’ moment when it comes to women?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/29/hillary_clinton_i_could_compromise_on_abortion_if_it_included_exceptions_for_mothers_health.html
Survey says…no, Hillary can’t be trusted. I’m completely baffled anyone would consider voting for her.
Dang!! Good stuff.
Since twitter is devoted to censoring anything anti-Clinton and is devoted to denying itself as an access platform to these videos, how might anti-Clinton twitterati keep anti-Clinton hashtags up on twitter faster than twitter can take them down? And how might anti-Clinton twitterati do it in a way where growing numbers of trend-pushing followers can easily keep finding and following?
Perhaps subtle respellings of #whichClinton? could work. Create a hashtag called “wwhichClinton? When twitter takes that one down, create one called “whhichClinton?”
When twitter takes that one down, create on called “whiichClinton?” and so on and so forth. The wannabe-followers will learn how to search for the slight respellings of the same basic word. And the 140 character limited text could say: Quick! See these videos before twitter censors us again! ( And of course offer links to the videos).
this was the 90s folks. the Gansta Rap decade. Tupac Shakur and crack cocaine. Thug LIfe and tatoos. Black men shooting up the hood in gang bang wars.
I bet there was one hell of a lot of black people who agreed with Hillary back then. Black people don’t like getting shot any more than white people. Black people usually shot other black people, not white people. What do white people know about getting shot by black people? Not very much, that’s for sure.
You guys should check out Chris Rock on Youtube doing his “I hate Niggaz” riff. I bet a lot of black people thought like that. Look at them in the crowd! They’re all laughing their asses off and clapping wildly. Do you think they’re too dumb to understand the world around them? They’re not rednecks now, don’t stereotype! hahahah
At any rate, this isn’t the racial issue it seems to be. It”s a lot more complicated. But that doesn’t mean it’s not analyzable. It’s not a 2 dimensional vector space (B, W), it’s probably a 4 or 5 dimensional space.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean I’m a Hillary supporter. I’m on Team Bernie, having given him $100 last weekend. Ber-nie! Ber-nie! Ber-nie! No lie. I gave him $100 and I’ll probably give him more. I’m used to being around Jews, living in New York. They’re not that unusual, actually, except for the no-ham thing. They don’t like pork barbeque. But so what. I don’t care if Bernie is Jewish. Or even if he’s black. Who cares? If you want to see a black dude, take a white dude with a tan and put him in a dark room. Then look at him.
here you go Honkeytown — that’s the new name for the Peanut Gallery, Honkeytown, cause you allz too gddam dumb to fgure shlt out befoe you hed breaks
And here’s . . . Chris . . . Rock!!!!!!!
youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
Picture of the crowd doing in hissing this brave protester:
http://i.imgur.com/86xX7oB.png
Ashley Williams’ refusal of Clinton’s apology:
http://i.imgur.com/eNNCuGS.png
I’m seeing a lot of comments of the “I don’t like her methods but” variety. A lot of people are blind to the fact that protest by definition is exceptional. It is only necessary when the normal forms of communication breakdown.
I mean, come on. What this young lady is protesting against is orders of magnitude more “rude” then the way she’s protesting. Common bully tactic, turn the victim into the perpetrator. The people in that house have so distanced and bubbled themselves off from the infinite injustices she is referring to, that it somehow justifies them in labeling her as rude. They like to pretend that their intentional ignorance about it is not infinitely rude.
And the fact that Clinton is so out of touch that she is not ready for a (pretty tame, If you think about it) protester, on top of her highly polished and filtered campaign–not personal, not in person, not on camera–response, it all shows how Hillary Clinton the human is really not the candidate at all, rather the huge machinery behind her and around her, that is the true alternative to Bernie Sanders.
Take a listen to a [full Bernie Sanders campaign rally](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9_2xIb0t1g). There is a powerful narrative that that weaves through it. If you really want to get to know Bernie Sanders, you will listen to him in the longform like this. He is most definitely not a soundbite politician.
Take a listen to a [full Hillary Clinton rally](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhd_Xq-zf34). No narrative at all, just a bunch of decent ideas, and lots and lots and lots of smart sounding facts. And there’s this bizarre quality of her confidence requiring the mob being behind her. I never sense that she’s confident in her own ideas, rather only when she hears that the crowd is with her.
I’m still forming my mind around all of these things, but at the very least I am confident that there is a passion and a driving force underneath everything that Bernie Sanders says. Not to mention truth and caring. I don’t sense any of these things and Hillary Clinton. She’s a really smart lady who has signed her life away to the Big Money Devil, and who therefore requires the votes of those to her (actual) policies will hurt. She’s in an impossible position and she is doing the best that can be expected.
No one has mentioned this but $500 for a dinner and close encounter with a national politician is paltry. People would pay that for local political campaigns. I am starting to wonder if she is having trouble raising money. She will always have her Super Pac but 500 is not a lot of money to get that close to a Presidential candidate.
Good point, EducatedFool. A few years ago, a local acquaintance paid something like $10,000 in order to attend a Hillary event like the one shown in the video.
I seem to recall something about a $500-$2700 range for admission, but don’t recall the article…
Hissing? What are they? Cats? Serpents?
haha. kind of.
I was once interviewed to see if I would fit in on a jury that would decide the fate of a14 year old about to be tried as an adult. He sat before us, waiting while this happened. Something very deep down inside me told me that this was very wrong. There was no excuse for these policies, then or now. People know when they are scapegoating others. And they are entirely responsible for their choices if they do so.
No mention of Bill’s Sister Souljah moment?
My dad had a rough experience in DC when he visited US for the first time in the early 90’s. Look you can’t agree or justify what was said at the time but a lot of people had those feelings back then not just Ms Clinton