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RSN: Cornel West Says Sen. Manchin Is 'Gonna Have to Get Off His Symbolic Crackpipe'
04 July 21
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Moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin "have to do away with the filibuster in order to get any work done," Dr. Cornel West said, due to "a right-wing party that's authoritarian."
r. Cornel West believes Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin must support the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the noted Black intellectual maintaining that Manchin needs to recognize Senate Republicans will never support legislation for voter rights with a colorful description.
“Okay, what do you think?” Don Lemon asked West Thursday on his eponymous CNN show after showing Manchin in an earlier clip, the pair in discussion about President Joe Biden‘s effort to support Democrats’ legislative efforts.
“He’s saying he still wants to work with Republicans to get it done. Is the choice now between the filibuster and democracy?”
“Yeah,” Cornel West said in response. “I think Brother Joe coming out of West Virginia — some of my favorite folk I know [are] from West Virginia — but I must say that he’s gonna have to get off his symbolic crackpipe too, that you [are] gonna have to do away with the filibuster in order to get any work done because you’ve got a right-wing party that’s authoritarian, with deep neo-fascist sensibilities, that has no commitment to democratic processes, no commitment to democratic values.”
The philosophy professor added, ”And then, at the same time, you’ve got Democrats who run around talking about being bipartisan, but for the most part, they lack a backbone. They don’t have enough fight.”
Earlier this month, Manchin presented a voters’ bill he thought of as a compromise to his Republican colleagues, and it was quickly rejected.
As previously reported, the compromise, which was supported by Georgia voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, was dead upon arrival. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered at the time: “Senate Democrats seem to have reached a so-called ‘compromise’ election takeover among themselves. In reality, the plan endorsed by Stacey Abrams is no compromise.”
“McConnell has the right to do whatever he thinks he can do,” Manchin said at the time. “I would hope there are enough good Republicans that understand the bedrock of our society is having accessible, open, fair and secure elections.”
An opinion piece from David A. Love published last month by theGrio said Manchin and Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema “stand in the way of justice, freedom and democracy, and pose a threat to the lives of Black people.”
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A Special Operations unit arrives after state police announced they were conducting a search for armed persons following a traffic stop in Wakefield, Massachusetts on July 3, 2021. (photo: Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: What to Know About Rise of the Moors,
an Armed Group That Says It's Not Subject to US Law
olice in Massachusetts arrested 11 men Saturday after a bizarre hours-long standoff that led to a partial shutdown of Interstate 95 and a stay-at-home order for the surrounding area. The standoff with the men in tactical gear who claimed to be part of a Moorish American group ended up lasting almost nine hours. In the end, it was resolved “through a combination of negotiation and tactical measures,” Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason said.
The bizarre series of events started at around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, when a state trooper saw two cars pulled over on I-95 with their hazard lights on in Wakefield. The officer saw men refilling their gas tanks with their own fuel and stopped to see if they needed help. The officer quickly realized the men were all wearing military-style uniforms and were armed with long rifles and pistols. The men refused to provide identification and their firearm licenses so the state trooper asked for backup and the men fled into nearby woods.
The men claimed to be part of a group called Rise of the Moors that “does not recognize our laws,” police said. The group describes its members as “Moorish Americans dedicated to educating new Moors and influencing our Elders,” according to its website. Officials said they were headed from Rhode Island to Maine for training. “Their self-professed leader wanted very much known their ideology is not anti-government,” Mason said. “Our investigation will provide us more insight into what their motivation, what their ideology is.”
The scene, from a distance, looking northbound on Rt 95/128. https://t.co/WXEWjCvmdk pic.twitter.com/kkY3nHkJbt
— Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) July 3, 2021
While the standoff was going on a member of the militia hosted a livestream on the group’s YouTube page, insisting they had not been violated any laws and were not trying to cause any trouble. “We do not intend to be hostile, we do not intend to be aggressive,” he said. “We’re not anti-government, we’re not anti-police and we’re willing to give them any information they need so that way we can continue with our peaceful journey.” The man said they made the stop in the middle of the highway to avoid “making any unnecessary stops” while carrying weapons and they were traveling to their “private land.” Another member of the group says in the video that they are “foreign nationals.” The group was carrying a Moroccan flag.
Experts were quick to say that the men appear to adhere to the “Moorish Sovereign Citizens,” a movement that emerged in the early 1990s. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as an offshoot of the sovereign citizens movement, which has broad anti-government beliefs. Adherents see themselves as part of a sovereign nation and claim they aren’t subject to U.S. law. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have characterized it as an extremist movement. “It was very fortunate that no one got hurt today,” Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, tells the Washington Post.
Law enforcement refused to get to go into a lot of detail about the group and its beliefs. “I’m not going to talk about what their forum is, and what their ideology is—I think they’ve been pretty vocal on social media about who they are and what they espouse. I’m not going to propagate that—they can define that for themselves,” Mason said. Some wondered whether the standoff was part of a plan for the group to make itself better known. “These guys have hijacked social media and mainstream media in Massachusetts, to get their word out,” former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis told a local CBS affiliate. “It’s very unusual – unless the group has a plan; unless the group has been thoughtful about merging on the public scene. If that was their plan today, they’re achieving that goal.”
'It is highly unlikely that Cosby, 83, will ever see the inside of a prison cell again.' (photo: Matt Slocum/AP)
Signs opposing critical race theory line the entrance to the Loudoun County school board headquarters in Ashburn, Va., on June 22. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
The movement’s critics demonize it, then dismiss it.
ttacks on critical race theory are everywhere these days: Its detractors claim that the academic movement is “planting hatred of America in the minds of the next generation” and “advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims,” and say that it might even qualify as “child abuse.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) held up the Senate confirmation of one of President Biden’s nominees “because of her history promoting radical critical race theorists,” Hawley’s spokeswoman said. Delivering a speech in June pretty clearly aimed at bolstering his political prospects, former vice president Mike Pence said that “critical race theory teaches children as young as kindergarten to be ashamed of their skin color.”
Wrong.
“The critical race theory (CRT) movement,” explain legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” Its most direct academic origins can be found in the work of the late Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, who rigorously challenged mainstream liberal narratives of steady racial progress, illustrating how landmark legislation — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — failed to deliver liberty and justice for Black Americans.
The concept is certainly left-leaning, and it shakes up the traditional story of America as the unalloyed land of the free. But its central contention isn’t particularly radical or difficult to grasp. Far from preaching anti-Whiteness or Black victimhood, or rejecting individual rights, critical race theorists seek to explain how our laws and institutions — colorblind in theory — continue to circumscribe the rights of racial minorities. In the post-Jim Crow, post-Brown v. Board era, they ask, why and how do race and racism continue to play a constitutive role in America?
What developed as a framework for interrogating racial dynamics in American legal institutions influenced academics in neighboring disciplines, notably including sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s conceptualization of “color-blind racism,” philosopher Charles W. Mills’s notion of a “racial contract” and education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings’s analysis of the racial achievement gap. These works helped reinforce the insight that our country’s severe racial inequities are deeply embedded in social structures, so any serious attempts to rectify our racist history will necessarily involve structural reform; diversity seminars are not reparations.
Today, elite law schools across the country offer courses in critical race theory. Yale Law regularly hosts a critical race theory conference, and UCLA Law’s critical race studies program organizes an annual symposium with speakers from various disciplines. Contrary to critics who’ve portrayed the idea as mere leftist folderol, these are scholarly efforts to assess the impact of race in the law and society. As an academic school of thought, you can take critical race theory or leave it — and many do.
For some, the idea that American justice isn’t completely colorblind, or that “racism” can mean more than explicit, individual hatred, is simply a bridge too far. But often, rather than constructively engaging critical race theorists’ core argument, many conservatives have preferred to contort the theory in order to claim that it is itself racist, applying their trumped-up definition to nearly any kind of discussion of racial injustice in America. And then they attack that as un-American — or worse.
On Newsmax TV, former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris suggested that for biracial kids with a White father and a Black mother, critical race theory might “reinforce the Oedipal notion all kids have of wanting to kill their father and marry their mother.” Televangelist Pat Robertson asserted that CRT declares “people of color have to rise up and overtake their oppressors” and “instruct their White neighbors how to behave.” Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) tweeted, “Critical Race Theory destroys unit cohesion necessary to win in combat and defend this nation.”
Some of this traces back to the work of the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, whose influence on the right has waxed as he pursues a self-declared “one-man war against critical race theory,” publishing a raft of articles this year alone. In May, Rufo boasted of his new influence, tweeting that his D.C. trip itinerary included a speech to House Republicans and meetings with the staffs of GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton and Hawley. He has suggested that the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan is “a simple transposition of critical race theory’s basic tenets.”
The goal seems to be to banish, if not to ban, all critical discussion of the impact of race in American life today. Consider Rufo’s insistence in a recent tweet that any school district material invoking the concepts of “Whiteness, White privilege, White fragility, Oppressor/oppressed, Intersectionality, Systemic racism, Spirit murder, Equity, Antiracism, Collective guilt [or] Affinity spaces” is guilty of teaching critical race theory.
He’s among the culture warriors whose vilifications of critical race theory rarely make an effort to grapple with a straightforward proposition: that our facially neutral system of laws can and does produce unjust racial disparities, such as those we see in sentencing and in police violence. And his crusade has trickled down. In December, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, an activist who once toured with Donald Trump Jr., defined critical race theory as the belief that “racism is in the air, it’s in our bones, it’s in our DNA”; the idea, in his words, that “no progress has been made whatsoever” on race; one that is taking “the racism that once existed in the American South, and now weaponizing it against people that looked like the people that used to be the terrorists,” pushing the “belief that there are no individuals” and “trying to destroy” Western civilization; and “the most racist thing that is being spread in popular life in America — it is no different than the teaching of the KKK.”
For most, the moral panic around critical race theory isn’t that intense, but the phrase can still be a stand-in for those who chafe at even the notion of systemic racism. Think of the aggrieved letter written by a parent at New York’s Brearley School, and published by polemicist Bari Weiss, ripping the school for “adopting critical race theory” and shrinking systemic racism to this definition: “Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. . . . We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.”
No critical race theorist denies that there is a debate to be had about the contours of systemic racism; none would dispute that debates about systemic or institutional racism have moved beyond law school classrooms. But having those discussions isn’t planting anti-White hatred or resigning people of color to perpetual status as victims of it. And teaching the history of racial movements, tensions and atrocities — and why their impact is still felt today — isn’t indoctrination; it’s part of a basic introduction to American history, which should take place before a fruitful conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of critical race theory can get off the ground.
No one on the right can credibly say “racism is a thing of the past” or “America is a colorblind society” because that kind of blanket statement rings hollow when the last hundred years have been bookended by the Tulsa massacre and the murder of George Floyd. Nor can they flatly submit that difficult conversations about race are out of bounds. Instead, they aim their objections at an academic-sounding theory that connotes patriotically incorrect elitism.
“Critical race theory” has become familiar enough for figures on the right to use it as an almost comically broad catchall: In a two-minute span on the Senate floor, Hawley said the theory “appears to have become the animating ideology” of Biden’s administration and that anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi advocates “state sanctioned racism.” But the phrase remains just unfamiliar enough to excuse most of its critics from articulating their specific objections: When Kendi says, “The heartbeat of racism is denial,” instead of offering good-faith counterarguments, many of his skeptics write him off as an anti-White race hustler. They’re less apt to point out that he devotes a chapter of his book “How to Be an Antiracist” to criticizing anti-White racism. Or to note that Kendi, who acknowledges critical race theory’s influence, doesn’t identify as a critical race theorist.
Arguably the greatest success of this disinformation campaign has been its ability to convince parents across the country that critical race theory poses a real threat in the classroom. (As if grade-schoolers nationwide are suddenly unpacking the relationship between redlining and today’s racial wealth gap.) Loudoun County, Va., parent Shawntel Cooper’s characterization of the theory as “a tactic that was used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan” secured her an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Tatiana Ibrahim, a parent in Carmel, N.Y., accused the school district there of implementing “Black Panther indoctrination,” “teaching our children to go out and murder our police officers,” and “demoralizing” students “by teaching them communist values.” She, too, landed a Fox interview.
Some people see it as their duty to defend a stock American narrative against the complicating realities of racism and inequality — fair enough. But there’s a difference between rejecting an analytical framework and wholly misrepresenting it. And between intellectual criticism and race-baiting demagoguery.
By this point, the campaign against the theory, and the phrase, isn’t even camouflaged. In March, Rufo tweeted: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” “To win the war against wokeness,” he wrote in April, “we have to create persuasive language. From now on, we should refer to critical race theory in education as ‘state-sanctioned racism.’ That’s the new weapon in the language war.” (This past week, he dialed the idea back in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, making the narrower case that the “Battle Over Critical Race Theory” isn’t about some “exercise in promoting racial sensitivity or understanding history,” but rather, he says, about shunning a “radical ideology.”)
It’s plain. Today’s attacks on critical race theory aren’t meant to rebut its main arguments. They’re meant to paint it with such broad brushstrokes that any basic effort to reckon with the causes and impact of racism in our society can be demonized and dismissed.
Democratic socialists on the march. (photo: Alice Bacon/DSA)
Socialism is now a real part of the political landscape — while “capitalism” has never been more unpopular.
f you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain.” Winston Churchill never actually said these words. But, if they continue to live on as a popular slogan, it’s probably because they capture a common attitude about the correlation between political idealism and age. The young, or so this story goes, are invariably drawn to the novelty and transgression of progressive or even radical ideas — a disposition that usually dissipates with age. There’s a decidedly unsubtle, patronizing implication here, the idea being that conservatism is arrived at through experience and is thus synonymous with maturity.
Anecdotally, at least, there are real reasons for people to assume politicization works this way — among them the trajectory of the generation that began to come of age in the 1960s. The actual empirical evidence, however, suggests a lot more variation in the political values (and voting habits) of the young, old, and middle-aged alike. In 1980, Ronald Reagan basically drew even with Jimmy Carter when it came to voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine — winning the same demographic in a landslide upon reflection four years later. Margaret Thatcher actually got more support in her 1983 electoral rout from those between thirty-five and forty-four than from people over sixty-five and also won more than 40 percent of first-time voters.
The formation of political identity is ultimately a lot more complicated than what’s implied by the oft-assumed trajectory from youthful idealism to hardheaded maturity. The collective experiences of particular generations and groups of people can make them more or less radical or conservative depending on the circumstances. In this respect, the findings of a new Axios/Momentive survey are striking but in many ways unsurprising.
Conducted in mid-June among more than two thousand adults over the age of eighteen, the poll’s topline finding is that just half of Americans (49 percent) ages eighteen to thirty-four now hold a positive view of capitalism — a precipitous drop from only two years ago, when the figure was some 20 points higher. Among those eighteen to twenty-four, only 42 percent now have a positive view of capitalism, while 54 percent hold a negative view. Even Republicans in the same age bracket exhibited a similar trend: the share who currently view capitalism in a favorable light is now 66 percent (down from 81 percent in January 2019).
Overall, there has been a small uptick in the percentage of Americans with a favorable view of socialism — one powered, according to Axios’s survey, primarily by black Americans and women. Here, the picture is a bit more textured and ambiguous:
While perceptions of capitalism have changed rapidly among young adults, perceptions of socialism have changed more incrementally among all age groups. Slightly fewer young adults now than in 2019 say they have a positive view of socialism (51% now vs. 55% in 2019). But that dip is offset by slight increases in the number of adults ages 35-64 and 65+ who say they have a favorable view of socialism.
Despite an overall increase, favorable perceptions of socialism remain in the minority (41 percent positive versus 52 percent negative). However, the picture again gets more complicated when broken down into specific questions. This should come as no surprise, given the stigma successfully attached to the word during the Cold War. For example, 66 percent of Americans agree that the federal government should legislate policies that aim to reduce the gap between the poor and the wealthy (once again, there’s been a startling shift among younger Republicans here: two years ago, only 40 percent favored such policies. Today, the figure is 56 percent.) This is consistent with other polls showing majority levels of support for policies like Medicare for All and various new taxes on the rich — even those not inclined toward “socialism” as a broad signifier are perfectly amenable to many of the things socialists these days advocate.
Across every age group, but especially among the young, it’s easy to see why Americans’ general views of capitalism have been deteriorating amid a renewed interest in both social democratic policies and socialism as a broad alternative. The coronavirus pandemic, much like the 2008–9 financial crisis, has underscored yet again how hierarchical, unfair, and often brutal the current political and economic consensus really is. Millions are drowning in student debt while facing bleak job prospects. Rents are soaring. As millions more face a brutal and precarious job market, billionaire wealth has spiked dramatically.
When the system around them is so obviously dysfunctional, people intuitively look for alternatives. The bottom line, according to Axios’s Felix Salmon: “Politicians looking to attack opponents to their left can no longer use the word ‘socialist’ as an all-purpose pejorative. Increasingly, it’s worn as a badge of pride.”
In this file photo from November 2017, Palestinian human rights activist Farid al-Atrash gives a press conference as part of Amnesty International's 'Human rights day.' (photo: Eric Feferberg/AFP)
Independent Commission for Human Rights says Farid al-Atrash was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint east of Jerusalem.
Palestinian human rights lawyer has been arrested by Israeli forces after taking part in a protest in the occupied West Bank against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, his rights group said.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) said in a statement that Farid al-Atrash was arrested early on Sunday at an Israeli checkpoint east of Jerusalem while returning from a protest against the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, where the PA is based.
It said al-Atrash was transferred to Israel’s Hadassah Hospital and called for his immediate release from Israeli police custody.
According to the commission, al-Atrash was on his way to Bethlehem from Ramallah when the arrest took place.
Issa Amro, a prominent Palestinian activist and friend of al-Atrash, said he was released from hospital hours later and was still being questioned by Israeli authorities. It is unclear why he was admitted to hospital.
Neither the Israeli military nor the police made immediate comments.
Both Amro and al-Atrash have been arrested by Israel in the past for organising and taking part in protests against its military occupation of the West Bank.
But Amro said al-Atrash had recently focused his efforts on protesting against the PA over Nizar Banat, an activist who died shortly after being violently arrested by Palestinian security forces last month.
He said another rights lawyer, Mohannad Karajah, who is defending protesters arrested by the PA, was briefly detained by Palestinian authorities on Sunday.
Amro himself was arrested by the PA last month and held overnight, days before Banat died in custody. The PA does not comment publicly on arrests.
Israel and the PA coordinate security in the West Bank in order to suppress the Palestinian group, Hamas, and other groups that both view as a threat.
That policy is deeply unpopular among Palestinians and is one of several longstanding grievances fuelling the recent protests.
Thousands of Palestinians have joined demonstrations in recent weeks against the PA, which governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The PA has grown increasingly unpopular and dictatorial in recent years, even as Western countries continue to see it as a key partner in the moribund peace process.
This arrest comes amid a violent crackdown on Palestinians by Israeli forces, including arbitrary arrests and the targeting of demonstrations and rallies against discriminatory Israeli policies and the establishment of illegal Israeli settlements.
A coal-fired power plant. (photo: Getty Images)
It’s Friday, July 2, and the U.K. is accelerating its deadline for quitting coal.
he United Kingdom is planning to end all coal-fired electricity generation by October 2024, moving up the country’s previous target by a full year. The new timeline is designed to “send a clear signal around the world that the U.K. is leading the way in consigning coal power to the history books,” said Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the country’s energy and climate change minister, in a statement on Wednesday. The announcement comes months before the United Nations’ annual climate change summit, COP26, which will be hosted in November in Glasgow.
Ending coal-fired electricity does not mean ending coal extraction. The U.K. will still be mining coal for export and using it in industrial processes like steel production, and a heavily protested brand-new coal mine is still under consideration in Northern England.
Despite these caveats, any move to reduce coal consumption is good for the climate. Coal-fired electricity is extremely carbon-intensive, accounting for 30 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions globally. It’s also a major source of fine particulate matter, a deadly air pollutant; fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels killed 8.7 million people globally in 2018.
Sam Fankhauser, a professor of climate change economics and policy at the University of Oxford, told Forbes that the target “merely formalizes a development that has all but been secured already through a combination of market forces, renewable subsidies, and climate and environmental policies.” Nonetheless, Fankhauser called the accelerated timeline “a welcome milestone of big symbolic value.”
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