There is only one overriding issue of political concern right now, encompassing much of what appears on this blog. That is how to defeat Republicans on Nov. 8, about 25 weeks from now. The future of democracy in the United States is at stake. Really.
 |
| To win in November, Democrats must capture the votes of women and persons of color, groups whose interests Republican actions attack. Vice President Harris should lead this effort keyed to abortion rights and voting rights. |
JL
* * * *
IF YOU LIKE THIS BLOG, PLEASE FORWARD IT TO AT LEAST ONE OR MORE FRIENDS OR FAMILY MEMBERS WHOM YOU FEEL MIGHT ENJOY READING IT. Suggest that they visit www.jackspotpourri.com. A simpler method might be to click on the envelope at the bottom left corner of each posting, which looks like this 
. Clicking on it makes it easy to forward a very basic, abbreviated version of the blog.
JL
* * * *
There’s Nothing Wrong with Social Justice
"This email is being sent to the three
candidates for the Democratic nomination for governor I will vote for whichever of you wins, but I
do have my preference, which really doesn’t matter so long as the primary
winner defeats the present governor.
Please try to incorporate the following verbatim in your campaign
literature and your speaking engagements! It will help!
'The Anti-Woke bill which Governor DeSantis signed
includes guidelines explicitly barring social studies material that teach the
concept of ‘social justice ' from Florida’s schools. Republicans claim
that social justice is closely aligned to Critical Race Theory. That’s
something they use to try to scare voters, pretending it is part of some evil
subversive scheme, which it isn’t. They use it to cover up their racism.
That bears repeating. They use it to cover up their racism. That’s what
racists do.
Attacking ‘social justice’ is the same as attacking the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and of course, the Gettysburg
Address, government of the people, by the people and for the
people! The teaching of how these historic documents came about is
what DeSantis is banning! The Civil War, why it was fought, the history
of immigration in this country, the rise of the labor movement, the Federal
laws protecting workers and consumers … They’re all part of ‘social justice’
and Republicans don’t want kids to learn that in school because it’s part of
the role of government that they want to do away with.
The governor and his legislature want to deny
history. America fought the Second World War to defeat enemies who passed
the same kind of censorship laws DeSantis and his legislature pass and
which encourage parents to squeal on teachers they think are
violating them.
Watch carefully. You might see a swastika flying over the
State House in Tallahassee before long!”
(The generally accepted definition of ‘social justice’ is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities. The documents and the events cited in my email above all promote efforts to fulfill that definition. I don't see anything wrong with that. Only foes of democracy might.)
JL
* * * *
Covid Not
Going Away So Fast
(The
other day I made a donation to the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Fund. That was the uncommon type of cancer that claimed
my wife’s life almost twelve years ago.
From the stories on their website, I see that while some progress has
been made, there are still many unanswered questions about this disorder. The
same is also true of Covid19, on which we are only beginning to get a handle.
The lesson in both cases is to recognize how little we really know and how much
more there is to learn.)
And
speaking of Covid, it is wise to keep an eye on the rate that people are being
infected in your area. Re-infections
are occurring, as well as infections of some of those vaccinated. While the virus’ most current variants seem
milder than the ones of 2020 and 2021, causing fewer deaths, any increase in
infections warrants continuing masking.
The theory behind this is that the fewer infections that occur reduce
the spread of the virus, lessening the number of potential ‘hosts’ which might
provide an opportunity for it to mutate into new variants. And of course, vaccinations, while not turning
out to be permanent protection, do reduce the severity of infections.
Bear in
mind that Covid ranks third in causes of death in our country, following heart
disease and cancer. Keep things in
perspective.
JL
* * * *
Replacement
Theory Explored – The Fuel of anti-Democratic Bigots
Here’s a New
York Times article, published a few days ago, explaining the danger of
‘Replacement Theory’ to those who are unfamiliar with it and relating it to the
murderer in the recent Buffalo supermarket shooting. It is apparent that some politicians and
commentators sandpaper Replacement Theory’s rough edges so that it seems more
acceptable to some of their followers who would otherwise be turned off by
outright racism and antisemitism. But
it still remains the same ‘Replacement Theory’ and works toward accomplishing
its undemocratic and evil goals. But we
seem to be stuck with it though, if only because of the First Amendment’s
guarantee of a free press. Read on:
A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered
Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.
Replacement theory, espoused
by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing
politicians and commentators.
Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish
Inside a Pittsburgh
synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts
gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into
the United States.
The next year, another
white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened
fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to
kill Mexicans.
And in yet another deadly
mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is
accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s
predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that
the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my
own people.”
Three shootings, three
different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now
commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life,
replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by
Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine
of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and
fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory,
once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and
semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more
muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white
people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in
conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed
to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.
By his own account, the
Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization,
immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and
antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black
Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in
recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly
anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican
Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign
advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media
personalities.
No public figure has
promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than the Fox host
Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of
his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month
showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified
the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force
demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his
show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo
suspect did.
“It’s not a pipeline. It’s
an open sewer,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who
was fired in 2020 after defending the network’s decision to call Arizona for
then-candidate Joseph R. Biden, and who wrote a forthcoming book on how media outlets
stoke anger to build audiences.
“Cable hosts looking for
ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which
stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted
users online,” Mr. Stirewalt said. Social media sites and internet forums, he
added, are “like a focus group for pure outrage.”
In just the past year,
Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia
congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned
Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement
theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting
to “drown” out “classic Americans.”
In September, Ms. Stefanik
released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a
PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants,
which her ad said would “overthrow our
current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That
same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on
Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida,
stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.
“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT
about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr.
Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz
said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”
One in three American
adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans
with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an
Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that
people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One America
News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in
replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.
Underlying all variations
of replacement rhetoric is the growing diversity of the United States over the
past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian
surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than
doubled, according to the Census Bureau.
Democratic politicians
have generally been more supportive of immigration than Republicans, especially
in the post-Trump era, and have pushed for more humane treatment of migrants
and refugees. But the number of immigrants living in the United States
illegally, which rose throughout the 1990s and 2000s, first began to decline under President
Obama, a Democrat whom critics nicknamed the “deporter-in-chief.” There is no
evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens and others who are ineligible. And
while Mr. Biden has laid out plans to expand legal immigration, federal
agencies have expelled more than 1.3 million migrants at the southwest border
on his watch, while continuing some of the more restrictive immigration policies begun by former
President Trump.
Throughout his presidency,
Mr. Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory,
sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders”
in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been
more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an
Arizona state senator, who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced
and invaded” by illegal immigrants.
Efforts to reach Ms.
Rogers on Sunday were unsuccessful. Reached by email, Mr. Gingrich declared
replacement theory “insane,” adding that he was opposed to all anti-Semitism as
well as “the white racist violence in Buffalo.”
Responding to criticism of Ms. Stefanik’s ad in the wake of the
Buffalo shooting, a senior adviser for the congresswoman sent two responses: a
sorrowful statement from Ms. Stefanik about the killing in Buffalo, and a fiery
rejoinder from the adviser that “despite sickening and false reporting,” the congresswoman
“has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”
Experts who study digital
extremism and media described a complex interplay between the darker version of
replacement theory that features on white nationalist or nativist websites, and
the attenuated versions now echoing around the conventional right, including on cable
news and in pro-Trump media outlets.
“Someone like Carlson can
introduce viewers to ideas that they then explore more fully online, searches
that lead them into far-right spaces that either reinforce their existing views
or radicalize them,” said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Columbia University.
“But someone like Carlson is also important because he legitimates those ideas,
making them seem less radical when viewers see them.”
Measuring the extent of
Mr. Carlson’s influence in spreading replacement theory may be impossible. But
controversies around the host’s use of “replacement” rhetoric appear to have at
least helped drive public curiosity about the idea. Until the Buffalo
shootings, according to Google data, there had been three big spikes in Google
searches for “replacement theory” or “great replacement,” a European
variation popularized by the French writer Renaud Camus in recent years. Two
followed the shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, each covered
by news outlets around the world. The third came in April 2021, when Mr.
Carlson drew calls for Fox to fire him after defending the idea of demographic
“replacement” on the network.
The Buffalo suspect
appears to have immersed himself on web forums like 4chan and 8chan, where
versions of replacement theory abound. That is also where the suspect, before
setting out to slaughter Black shoppers in Buffalo, posted a 180-page
compendium of racist arguments and internet memes.
He wrote that he got his
news from Reddit. He began browsing 4chan in May 2020 “after extreme boredom,”
he wrote, and quickly found a gateway to anti-Black and antisemitic replacement
content. Reflecting the most extreme versions of replacement theory, the
suspect deemed Black people, like immigrants, as “replacers”: people who
“invade our lands, live on our soil, live on government support and attack and
replace our people.”
According to a detailed
analysis by the Anti-Defamation League provided to The Times, the suspect’s
screed plagiarized almost two-thirds of another manifesto — the one left by an
Australian man who in 2019 murdered dozens of Muslims as they prayed in two
mosques in Christchurch. In some instances, the Buffalo suspect replaced the
Christchurch killer’s references to Angela Merkel, the former German
chancellor, with George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist. One page of the
Australian’s document includes a purported count of Jews working at the senior
levels of major media outlets, including Fox itself.
Oren Segal, vice president
of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said that the Buffalo suspect’s repurposing
of the Christchurch manifesto to justify an attack on Black Americans
“demonstrates the evolving and interactive nature of extremist propaganda.”
Mr. Carlson’s replacement
rhetoric comes without the explicitly antisemitic elements common on racist web
platforms. There is no indication that the Buffalo gunman watched Mr. Carlson’s
show, or any other on Fox, and Mr. Carlson has denounced political violence
even as he fans his viewers’ fears.
But there are also notable
echoes between Mr. Carlson’s segments and the Buffalo suspect’s long litany of
grievances, reflecting the blurry boundary between internet-fueled griping and
lines of attack now common in conservative media and politics.
“Why is diversity said to
be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra
and repeated ad infinitum,” the suspect wrote. The line nearly matches one of
Mr. Carlson’s go-to attacks on Fox. “How, precisely, is diversity our
strength?” Mr. Carlson asked in a 2018 segment, one of many in which he has hit
on the question. “Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be
specific as you explain it.”
A Fox spokeswoman declined
to comment.
Amy Spitalnick, the
executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that waged a successful civil suit against organizers
of the 2017 Charlottesville rally, argued that the broader promotion of
replacement rhetoric normalized hate and emboldened violent extremists.
“This is the inevitable
result of the normalization of white supremacist Replacement Theory in all its
forms,” Ms. Spitalnick said. “Tucker Carlson may lead that charge — but he’s
backed by Republican elected officials and other leaders eager to amplify this
deadly conspiracy.”
(Alan Feuer, Emily
Cochrane, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Chris Cameron and Azi Paybarah contributed
reporting.)
JL
* * * *
Who Reads
Newspapers Anyway
Pew
Research indicates that in 2020 the total circulation of all newspapers in the
United States (print and digital combined) was about 23 million copies each
day. Sunday circulation was about a million and a half greater. Contrast this with the approximately 155
million who voted in the presidential election that year, and even assuming
each paper was read by more than one person, that leaves a very large number of
voters either uninformed or dependent on less reliable sources of information such
as the internet, social media, TV, or radio.
It’s no wonder we elect the kind of people we find it Congress, State
legislatures and governors’ chairs.
Newspaper circulation is trending downward, as that medium begins to
sniff its extinction, so this is a growing problem.
JL
* * * *
Blame for Florida Homeowners’ Insurance Woes and a Solution
The
Florida legislature is going into a special session on May 23 to deal with
insurance company failures, the cancellation of many homeowners’ property
insurance policies, and skyrocketing rates for existing policyholders. They should examine why a typical Florida
homeowner is confronted with these problems. I suspect that whatever remedies the
legislators come up with will be to help shore up insurance companies rather than
to benefit homeowners.
It is pretty clear to me from
what I read in the newspapers that Florida’s dilemma is caused by questionable
claims submitted by contractors who solicit such business and once having the
claim, usually involving roofs, assigned to them by the insured, then submit it
to insurance companies. Insurers pay
many of these claims, even if they appear questionable, rather than contesting
them, getting off more cheaply than paying for lawyers to go to court, where
they might lose anyway. Some Florida law firms specialize in these questionable
cases against insurers.
The solution to this problem is
criminal action, leading to possible incarceration, against contractors,
lawyers and even homeowners who cooperate in submitting fraudulent claims.
JL
* * * *
Little
Hope for SCOTUS Change
Get over
the idea of doing anything about Supreme Court for a long time. The appointment of three Justices by the
defeated former president would seem to assure the right-wing of a
conservative, if not reactionary, SCOTUS for many years to come. Unless the Democrats amass sufficient
Congressional majorities to expand the SCOTUS, an unlikely happening, that kind
of change is unlikely.
The
effect of public opinion upon the Court, whose reputation has been sullied by
its politicization and most particularly by the conservative leadership of the
late Justice Antonin Scalia, might bring about some change, but don’t bet the
farm on that happening either. Alito,
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are tough nuts to crack.
JL
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment