By David Futrelle
Early in the Trump administration, amateur and professional White House watchers noticed something rather striking about the assorted photo ops that the new President and his handlers liked to stage for the press: they all seemed to feature gaggles of smug white dudes, with the occasional white woman added to the mix to provide a little bit of gender if not racial diversity.
While some considered this a public relations blunder, probably because the staff at the White House was so amateur it didn’t even realize how off-putting the optics of these all-white photo ops were to most Americans, others wondered if the Trumpies were doing it on purpose — offering a not-so-subtle wink to Trump’s racist fans, an assurance that, yes, white dudes were once again firmly in the saddle in the White House.
I think it’s pretty clear the cynics were right here. If you have any doubt, look at this official White House video of the recent Congressional Picnic held on the South Lawn of the White House. It’s possibly the whitest thing I’ve ever seen.
Seriously, I’ve watched this video five times and I’ve only spotted two people of color amidst the vast sea of white people on the South Lawn — a secret service agent and what appears to be a staffer involved in setting up the event.
And guess what? Trump’s most racist fans are receiving the message being sent here loud and clear. In a blog post yesterday (archived here), pickup artist turned white supremacist propagandist James “Heartiste” Weidmann hailed what he called “Trump’s Love Letter To Heritage America,” Heartiste’s pet term for what he sees as the golden age before the civil rights movement and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.
After posting the video above, Weidmann notes that the sheer overwhelming whiteness of the video is clearly “intentional” on Trump’s part.
Trump knows what he’s doing, and he knows the sides in this battle for the soul of America. His promos, visuals, and speeches are an extended play love letter to Heritage America. To White America, before it became a Dirt World Depot. If you doubt Trump’s loyalty to the cause, dispel your doubt. His heart is in it. He fights for you.
Weidmann’s fans were even more enthusiastic in their praise.
“Not a single bulldyke, Skype or nog in sight,” wrote someone called LeShitlourde, using two favorite alt-right slurs for Jews and blacks. “My America right there. Thanks DJT.”
“[T]his is not just a love letter,” added plumpjack, “it’s a declaration of WAR.”
Hackett To Bits offered his own love letter to white “civilization.”
Message to the mud peoples of the world and their enablers: this is what ordered, civilized existence looks like, you should eat your hearts out.
Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the all-white optics. While conceding that (at least to a racist like him), “the video is beautiful. A breath of fresh air after 8 years of thug entertainers and muzzie dinners at the white house,” Alea Iacta Est worried that mere videos won’t be enough to stop
the primary trend. I’m doing my best. Voting and making white babeez, but my neighborhood pool is no fun any more. Its always being closed because noglets barf in it, and I look like the foreigner now. I don’t want white picnics on the south lawn. I want my country back.
Too bad for you, then, that “your country” is no more than a racist fantasy. America has never been as white as that picnic on the White House lawn.
Which brings us to the giant irony to Trump’s “love letter to White America” — the jazz music on the soundtrack. While the band featured in the video looks to be all or almost all-white, jazz music is, obviously, anything but. Originating in black America, jazz is an amalgam of African traditions and American innovation, and the most celebrated and influential Jazz musicians have of course almost always been black.
While the anodyne jazz featured on the White House video soundtrack may give racists warm fuzzies, here’s some jazz and jazz funk that will more likely give them heart attacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWD6dYcD9DM
My first assumption was that Trump couldn’t get a person of color to set foot within 300 feet of him if he paid them good money. I personally would leave town before I would be associated with him in any capacity whatsoever (except as a protester), but then I’m white. I had also assumed that only a subset of white people want to go near him.
Traditional European culture generally does not regard culture as property, in the same way as Native Americans generally did not regard land as property, and we do not currently regard air as property.
Re: Alea Iacta Est
Is he really trying to say that only black kids puke in pools? I really hope he’s just complaining about too many black people, like Cartman’s whole “Minorities in My Waterpark” number, ’cause if he’s actually saying that only black kids puke in pools he may well be too stupid to survive in this world.
“noglets barf in it”… the only thing I find in the Urban Dictionary is “A boy who doesn’t use a condom when he has sex and ends up with a kid at a young age.” What that has to do with whatever point he was trying to make, I haven’t a clue.
Main reason apartment pools get closed: Management doesn’t want to pay for preventive maintenance. I never got a note from ANY apt. management asking me if I had any lights out, or any other sort of “we’re maintaining the place” except pest control occasionally. Everything else was reactive maintenance.
I don’t even see anyone Mediterranean-looking in that video. It was edited so sharply…I don’t see any possible Asians, either
@Bina
About the bogus Cheeto Time magazine cover…years ago, I saw an ad for a company that would dummy-up a fake People magazine cover, for a fee. If I remember correctly, this was pre-internet. Maybe that’s the case, here?
re: fake Time covers
I’ve heard a rumor that the bar code on the fake Time is the barcode from an old Photoshop tutorial on how to fake a Time cover.
If true, it’s probably just an old Photoshop job. 100% he knew about it and probably asked for it.
PoM:
https://leoamoretti.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/its-time-for-another-photoshop-tutorial/
@JS
“noglets”
I’m assuming it’s a play off “n*gglet” or some similiar slur for a mixed race child?
@Ikeke
“Whiteness” will denigrate Irish people as drunkards…”
WTF timewarp did this tumblr post crawl out of; turn of the 20th century Boston?
Dammit, I knew I should have gotten on tumblr; none of my shoes fit. I tried using the Dr. Scholls machine in Walmart, but all it gave me was a crappy code for some crappy insoles. Where are my XRays? XRays are the waves of the future.
Both Richard Spencer and Stephen Miller started their political careers through media coverage of the Duke University Lacrosse Case: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/the-duke-lacrosse-scandal-and-the-birth-of-the-alt-right.html
Spencer was a Ph.D. student at Duke during the controversy. He wrote a popular article for The American Conservative arguing that Duke professors “rushed to judgment” in allegedly assuming the lacrosse players were guilty. Spencer was on the editorial board of The American Conservative for a year and then became increasingly radical over time.
Note that the charges against the lacrosse players were dropped because the district attorney withheld DNA, they weren’t found not guilty or declared factually innocent. The players’ lawsuits were based on the prosecutor’s misconduct, not declarations of factual innocence of any crime.
@History Nerd: The “Not guilty” verdict is not a statement of factual innocence. This is why, for instance, OJ had to pay a wrongful death settlement while being “Not guilty” of murder.
According to Duke University, the NC Attorney General Roy Cooper stated pretty clearly “We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.” Cooper took over the case in January 2007 after the state bar association filed ethics charges against Nifong for withholding exculpatory evidence and making inflammatory statements about the case.
“Exculpatory evidence” is evidence in favor of the defendants in a criminal trial, so if evidence was withheld, it was in favor of the students.
You imply they were just “released on a technicality” by saying “not factually innocent”, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Taking your “not factually innocent” bit even further, I too have not been declared factually innocent of this crime. I’m certain the NC Attorney General won’t prosecute me for it though.
@JS
They’re clearly not guilty of sexual assault, but there could’ve been more complexity (threats, intimidation, etc.).
It’s Nifong’s fault that it turned into a shitstorm.
The Duke Lacrosse Scandal is really a fascinating study in the interactions of race and gender privilege and liberal/feminist attempts to deal with them. In this case liberals and feminists got it wrong, because it seemed to be an all too familiar story: a group of ultra-privileged white men taking sexual advantage of a poor black single mother/college student forced to do sex work by economic necessity. Unfortunately, Richard Spencer and Steven Miller, racist scumbags that they are, got it right — as they say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
The real story is a very common one: a poor black single mother/college student with a long history of mental health and drug abuse (self-medication) problems who repeatedly fell into the very large cracks in the mental health care “system.” The victim, Crystal Gail Mangum*, at the age of 17 had reported being raped by her 21-year-old boyfriend and two or three of his friends when she was 14; some members of her family believed her, others partly believed her (her mother apparently thought that the rape had been at 17, not 14), and others did not believe her at all. The police asked her to write her account of the rape in her own words, but she did not do so, and the matter was dropped. This could have been a traumatic experience that contributed to her mental problems or an early symptom of the mental problems — it’s now impossible to know.
Some years later she stole a cabdriver’s keys while giving him a lap dance, then took his cab and led police on a high-speed chase. Eventually she tried to run the cab into a policeman who was blocking her way but fortunately only smashed his cruiser. Her blood alcohol was twice the limit. She ended up serving three weekends in jail.
The Duke lacrosse players asked for white exotic dancers for their party, but the company sent Mangum and a black/Asian woman. Mangum was clearly too intoxicated to dance; the other woman tried to perform but the players started to lose interest and drift away. Mangum apparently fell asleep at one point and was excited at times, and the team captain persuaded the other dancer to take her to the hospital. What apparently happened there is that the examining physician suggested that she might need inpatient treatment for her drug use. She had been in a mental institution for a short time previously and hadn’t liked it, so when a nurse asked her if she’d been raped she seized on that. Originally she appears to have claimed that there were a larger number of attackers, but settled on three — which was about as many as could have fitted the small bathroom. So the most likely explanation for her story is that she was desperately trying to avoid the possibility of involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
The alleged rape occurred in 2006. In 2010 her oldest daughter called police because of a violent argument between Mangum and her boyfriend. There are various accounts of what happened, but Mangum did put his clothes in her bathtub and set them on fire, and police claimed they heard her threaten to stab the boyfriend. She was charged with several offenses, including attempted first degree murder (which seems to clearly be overreach) and arson, but was acquitted on all charges except endangering her three children, for which she was sentenced to time served (about three months). In 2011 she was convicted of second degree murder for stabbing a subsequent boyfriend who died of the wounds a few days later, and is currently serving a 14-18 year prison term. http://www.colorlines.com/articles/crystal-gail-mangum-isnt-innocent-shes-victim-just-same
The case became a shitstorm because of several issues.
(1) The liberal/feminist reaction on the Duke campus, which occurred because the story seemed to fit so neatly into a familiar pattern. I have to admit that if I had been there at the time, I would have been just as wrong as they were. The lesson is that things are not always what they appear to be.
(2) The police assigned to investigate had a history of antagonism to Duke students. One of the principal investigators had a history of arresting students for minor alcohol violations rather than giving them citations, as was the usual practice. He had been accused of roughing up students he arrested, including women. He apparently had a particular problem with white women in the company of non-white men; on one occasion he threatened to have deported a US citizen with a foreign-sounding name who probably appeared to be non-white to him.
They violated normal police procedure in a number of ways. Most striking was their “photo lineup,” in which they showed Mangum ONLY pictures of the team members, not mixed in with other random people as is the normal practice, meaning she could not choose clearly wrong people. (She did identify one player who could prove he was not at the party as having been there.) The two players she evenually identified as her attackers had both left the party early and could prove (with the metadata from digital photos that one of the party-goers took and credit card receipts, cab records, Duke’s dorm key card swiping records, etc.) that they were elsewhere at the time any attack COULD have occurred. She claimed that the third attacker had a beard, which Duke lacrosse players were not allowed to have.
(3) The DA, Mike Nifong, was facing strong opposition in his re-election bid from well-qualified black candidates (Durham is majority black). He saw this issue as a chance to ingratiate himself with the black community. The media in general assumed that he would not prosecute a case so vigorously unless it was air-tight — that’s where they went wrong. The DNA evidence he hid showed that the vaginal samples from her rape kit contained DNA from at least four men, none of them team members or the few others that had been at the party. Despite Mangum’s claim of a 30+ minute multiple orifice rape by three men who she claimed (at least at first) did not use condoms, no trace of any team member’s DNA was found in the rape kit.
Mangum IS a victim, no question. What really depresses me, however, is the thought of what her three children have been through. One can only hope that they have not been permanently damaged. It is hard enough growing up black in America without that kind of additional burden.
PS: Roy Cooper, who as NC Attorney General issued the unusual statement exonerating the players, was elected Democratic Governor of NC last November — and is now fighting not to hasve most of his powers of office taken away by the state legislature.
*She has published her side of the story, The Last Dance for Grace: the Crystal Mangum Story, so her privacy is no longer an issue.
now fighting not to have most of his powers of office taken away by the Republican state legislature.
Thanks for the lengthy post.
One big issue was that Mike Nifong had been appointed as interim/acting DA and decided he should take the opportunity to promote his career and win the next election. He would tell reporters as a statement of fact that the defendants were guilty (without a “We believe the evidence will show” qualifier), so reports assumed he must have overwhelming evidence.
Duke at the time was supposedly one of the “whitest” universities in the country, while Durham was one third black. Nifong and the police probably thought aggressively pursuing the case would give them a better reputation in Durham, at least in the black community.
Miller and Spencer both did a good job engaging the media because they stuck to the facts and didn’t let ideology influence their rhetoric. They’ve both gone way down hill since then, of course.
Hey, quick warning: Stay the fuck inside on the 4th of July. There’s a rumour going around from both sides that the NRA’s planning to go from “Cold civil war” to “Open slaughter on the streets” on that day; even if it’s not true, better safe than sorry.