Racist in Chief

Amanda Marcotte reacts to von Clownstick's decision to end the executive order that created DACA.

[Von Clownstick] accusing Obama of overreach is always rooted in a belief Obama was never a rightful president. As with most things [Fuckface], it really goes back to racism. The only reason to believe Obama was incompetent and illegitimate is racism.

She cites Ta-Nehisi Coates in her contention that racism is the president's "prime directive".

It is often said that [von Clownstick] has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.

Coates argues that white supremacy lets him overcome any deficiencies.

To [von Clownstick], whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, [he] is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, [Fuckface] cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: [he] is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, [he] is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But [von Clownstick's] counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For [Fuckface], it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—[von Clownstick] has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness.

Polls show von Clownstick winning white votes across economic class, age, and education levels.

The focus on one subsector of [his] voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which [Fuckface's] presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us [Fuckface von Clownstick] is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.

Those that disparage "identity politics" overlook von Clownstick's success at taking advantage of white identity.

What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.

The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.

Working class unity fails in the face of entrenched racism. Coates reminds us that most Republicans still view Obama as an illegitimate president and that paved the way.

It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”

Update (September 16):  Paul Street criticizes Coates' comments on "left" priorities.

The actual left analysis holds that the always capitalist Democratic Party “lost its way,” so to speak (turned further to the right), when it more completely abandoned economic and social justice (centrally including racial justice and equality), labor rights, the poor, minorities, and environmental sanity in pursuit of an ever-closer alliance with corporate America, Wall Street, and the elite professional class.

[T]he actual U.S. left and progressive program has long been and remains directed at addressing both (a) the specific discrimination and oppression faced by Black and other non-white Americans and (b) the economic/class inequality that oppresses the broad multi-racial working-class majority while it falls especially hard (thanks to racism, deeply understood) on the non-white poor. The longstanding legitimately Left progressive agenda addresses both race and class at one and the time. It does not accept Coates’ false dichotomy between class and race.

[T]he real conflict for many of us on the actual Left isn’t between identity politics and class politics. It’s between bourgeois, zero-sum, divide-and-rule identity politics and a left politics that understands racially (and gender- and ethnic- and so on) specific experience, oppression, and identity as critical in building movements of popular solidarity in the struggles against the combined, interrelated, and overlapping evils of class rule, racial oppression, imperialism, patriarchy, police-statism, and – last but not least – ecocide.

Update (September 17):  Referring to tweets and comments from Dear Leader, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks,

What would happen if Barack Obama had said that?

Update (September 26):  Steve Schmidt blasts Fuckface over the NFL debacle.

To see him try to hijack this symbol, to wrap himself in it for the purposes — pre-meditatively, purposely of dividing the country is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my lifetime. What [von Clownstick] is doing here is as terrible a thing, and maybe the most terrible thing, that has ever been done to this country by a President of the United States. Despicable doesn’t begin to describe it.

I saw a handsome young man on TV, an NFL player, he got a little bit jammed up when a reporter asked him a question, ‘Is he a racist?’ He didn’t want to say it. So let me say it. I want to help him out. He’s a racist.

Update (November 25):  Despite the election of their hero, today's racists don't yet have much to show for it according to Matthew Sheffield.

The "alt-right" may have no idea how to accomplish anything significant beyond triggering leftists on the internet. But the utter inability of today's Republican Party to fight it off, or even to understand what has happened to American conservatism, suggests that the ideological crisis provoked by the "alt-right's" emergence is far from over.

Update (December 1):  Will it be collusion or mental illness that brings him down? Heather Digby Parton looks at the latest evidence for a breakdown.

On Thursday morning, for some inexplicable reason, the president of the United States retweeted three videos claiming to be Muslim extremists perpetrating violence.

These anti-Muslim videos are the worst kind of hate propaganda, the kind of thing one expects to find deep in the bowels of the extremist right-wing internet.

Update (January 11, 2018):  Negotiations over immigration prompts Fuckface to ask:

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?

Update (March 11, 2018):  It's not from Dear Leader himself, but I'm guessing Steve Bannon's comments to the National Front Party of France would please many Orange supporters.

Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.

[H]istory is on our side.

Update (June 26, 2018):  The Supreme Court upheld a version of the travel ban imposed on several countries. Leading the dissent, Justice Sotomayor maintained that

[A] reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.

Update (June 28, 2018):  Jared Yates Sexton explains the feeble plea of Justice Kennedy's concurrence.

To the president, Kennedy presented an even more impotent appeal: You can do this, but you shouldn’t.

You will, but -- my God, I wish you wouldn’t.

Update (October 26, 2018):  By outright calling himself a "nationalist", Fuckface gets about as close as you can get to openly admitting your racism. Steve Schmidt explains the message it sends.

[They] understand exactly what he means. By the way, let's stop calling them 'white nationalists' and call them by their names, which are 'neo-Nazis' and 'Klansmen'.

[I]f you go to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, you see celebration that they have achieved a goal. That they have been given a seat at the table. That their views are held as somewhere in the mainstream, and they are part of a coalition led by [Dear Leader].

Update (October 30, 2018):  Now he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship. Since that would violate the constitution, even Paul Ryan had to admit:

Well, you obviously cannot do that.

Update (November 5, 2018):  Rather than end the midterm campaign with a positive note, Dear Leader in his infinite stupidity decided to go with the racism.

Update (March 17, 2019):  It's not really a great defense if you chief of staff has to go on TV and say this:

The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.

Update (April 8, 2019):  Stephen Miller is a genuine Nazi. Amanda Marcotte:

Miller's influence is so strong that conservative [administration] critic Max Boot has blamed him almost entirely for [Fuckface's] ever-more-radical attitudes on immigration, calling Miller a "puppet master" with "a long and odious agenda, which includes repealing birthright citizenship" and "cutting levels of legal immigration."

[Dear Leader] is obsessed with closing the border, which means closing ports of entry where people can cross legally. He has also quit even trying to hide that his views are rooted more in white nationalism and hatred of Latinos, rather than in particular concerns about the legal status of immigrants.

"Can’t take you anymore. Can’t take you. Our country is full," [He] said in a speech on Friday, demanding that refugees turn back.

Update (April 13, 2019):  Heather Digby Parton explains the strategy behind the Department of Homeland Security purge.

[H]ostility to immigrants is the glue that's holding his coalition of white voters together. Those without college educations, conservative evangelicals and the like, will stick with him. But those white college-educated types who don't care for his antics are still with him on this issue and he can't afford to lose them.

Republicans are now united around anti-immigrant racism.

[Fuckface] and Stephen Miller have no intention of trying to change [that]. They believe it's their ticket to a second term. And they are clearly willing to push the legal and constitutional envelope as far as necessary to make that happen.

Update (April 15, 2019):  Amanda Marcotte thinks a racist campaign strategy won't necessarily work this cycle.

[B]y 2018, huge numbers of people were fed up with pretending that bigots mean well. Full-throated denunciations of [Dear Leader's] racism and sexism have become normal in a way that would have shocked people in 2016. Now that politicians and journalists feel free to call out [his] racism and fear-mongering for what it is, I suspect that has blunted the impact of his demagoguery. The media's increasing willingness to admit that [Fuckface's] rhetoric almost always involves actual lying has helped, as well.

These attacks on Ilhan Omar are just the beginning of what will be a two-year blitzkrieg of lies and bigotry rained down on the country by [von Clownstick], Fox News and their allies. Democrats need to offer a blunt, unapologetic, forceful response that correctly identifies this behavior as racism and sexism, and calls out attempts to deny it as gaslighting. [Manbaby] and company are going to be hyper-racist no matter what. But a forceful pushback can make the road much tougher for them.

Update (July 15, 2019):  Heather Digby Parton argues that yet another unsurprising racist outburst is just part of the re-election strategy.

[E]ssentially, that's what the 2020 election is going to be about whether [Democrats] like it or not. [Fuckface] welcomes it because he believes that most Americans are as racist as he is and that he will be rewarded for this indecency with a second term. Expect this bigoted talk to ratchet up to levels we never imagined could be uttered in 21st-century America before this is all over. It already has.

Update (July 16, 2019):  Amanda Marcotte continues to insist this electoral strategy won't work.

[Dear Leader's] racism is wildly popular with his base ... but a large majority of Americans find it repulsive.

[His] apparently adamant belief that white nationalism will pay off in electoral terms doesn't reflect any reputable political polling. It appears instead to be an artifact of his obsession with TV and with Fox News in particular. It's a closed loop of awfulness: The more [Fuckface] pushes his racist agenda, the more the network amplifies his message, and the more he believes his bigotry is massively popular. Unless and until [this asshole] takes a decisive L in 2020, he's going to keep believing the majority of Americans are secretly on his side.