One dead in white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville: Today in Tweets

Just checked out Trump’s twitter. Still making mealy mouthed requests for us to all just hold hands and get along!

What a fucking idiot.

People who call Trump a racist are mistaking him for someone who has beliefs and principles. He would be just as quick to endorse anti-racists if he thought he could get more votes/make more money that way.

I’ve run out of tears.

Basically, the white nationalists can see the future (Multiracial multicultural Obama is more the future than they are) and it scares the living shit out of them. No more do you automatically get a comfortable life style and lots of respect just for being a white male. (It doesn’t automatically get you a good job at Google either, and that stings.)

Shoot this filth into space. The lot of em. May the comments policy fall as it may ?

@Grumpy

People who call Trump a racist are mistaking him for someone who has beliefs and principles

No, people who’re calling him racist know who he is, know who he’s always been, and believe him when he confirms it. White muffugas really need to stop dismissing/downplaying/excusing racism. From Trump and all his deplorable cesspool. Aggregate patience is running quite thin for such talk…

ETA: ninjad by WWTH

Funny how there was a complete lack of riot police with teargas and truncheons and rubber bullets brutalizing nazis the way they always do BLM…

@Grumpy
Trump is a white supremacist. All Trump voters (yes, all of them, every single last one) are white supremacists. Most white Democrats are also racist as hell. Racist as hell is the default state for US white people, and Republicans (yes, all of them, every last one, including the ones who are your family, friends, and/or coworkers) are not just racist, they are fascist white supremacists. People who act as though they have legitimate points, are expressing legitimate grievances, or ought to be allowed to organize, gather, march, etc. are fascist sympathizers or quislings. Full stop.

Oh my god. My sympathies to the victims, their families, and everyone in the States – and, indeed, out, because we know these arseholes are all connected and cheering one another on online – who is feeling vulnerable, threatened, frightened or marginalised in the wake of this despicable rally and attacks.

This is horrible. Every day brings something more horrible. I’m starting to think about the draft. #45 wants a war. How about the draft for these young white males? Young males, I read years ago, are the most expendable members of a community and, to be crude, have excess testosterone. They’re full of energy and want to fight. So let’s not have a war but prepare for one with the draft. Use up that energy in boot camp, stop beating up people of color and human rights activists.

My earlier post about Trump’s racism was intended mostly to be a snarky comment on his lack of any core beliefs beyond his narcissism. I truly believe that he would be a vigorous anti-racist if he thought he could get adulation or votes that way, and he would BELIEVE in that message. Note how his campaign promises on health insurance were basically single payer in everything but name — he was going to repeal Obamacare but provide much better coverage for everyone at a lower price — but now he’s angry that the Senate didn’t pass a bill which was nearly the exact opposite of what he promised.

When I was young nearly everyone was a total homophobe; nobody thought about it much, it was just so. But then more and more gay people came out of the closet, and straight people began to find out that people they liked and respected were gay. The country then flipped on gay marriage and gay rights in an astonishingly swift manner. There are still a lot of people who are deeply committed to homophobic ideas, but they have much less power over gay people’s lives than they used to have.
In particular, the African-American community used to be strongly homophobic because of their religious beliefs, but when it was pointed out to them that discrimination against gays had a lot of similarity to discrimination against them, a lot of minds were changed.

As a straight male, I had some small participation in the gay marriage situation — I testified at a state senate hearing — and my daughter was quite possibly the first person to be gay-married in New Hampshire. So the question occurred to me: as a white person, could I help with racism in a somewhat similar manner. Now I understand that from a person of color’s standpoint, racism is racism, and since all white people have been raised in a racist culture, none of us has been able to avoid having some degree of racism instilled when we were too young to know better. The question is: granted there are some people, like the neo-nazis in Charlottesville, for whom racism is so much a part of their core beliefs that — like the remaining homophobes — there is no real hope of changing most of them. But I happen to believe that there are a lot of whites who could be brought over to the anti-racist side with the proper approach, but unfortunately the Right has been better at reinforcing their racism than liberals have been at combating it.
I had this experience in my own family. When I was in college 50 years ago, I used to have fairly combative arguments with my father over whether or not black people were inferior. I didn’t change his mind, but Martin Luther King did. My father was a person who was willing to change his mind in the face of evidence, and Dr. King proved to him that blacks were not naturally inferior.
One of the problems we have is that respect for diversity speaks in calm, gentle tones, while hatred and bigotry scream at the top of their lungs. I can readily understand how people of color think that racism is so powerful among all whites, because it’s the screaming of the loud proud racists that they mostly hear. I would hope that black people could take some hope from the fact that if you take away the four still Confederate states of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the majority of US white voters chose a black man for the highest position in the country (and would have re-elected him in 2016 if they could). It isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing either.

So the question for us white people is: is there some way for us to speak to other white people who have at least a semblance of an open mind to try to accomplish the same sort of thing that happened with gay rights. I spend a lot of time on other blogs arguing with people who say that Liberals need to get away from “identity politics” (as if white identity was not identity politics) and multiculturalism, but I’m not sure it has any effect. I mean, does it do any good to argue with someone who claims that the primary purpose of BLM is to murder police? What I do know is that calling people racists when their racism is something they really aren’t conscious of — because they believe right-wing propaganda, and have been convinced that white people are the primary victims of racism — doesn’t work.

If you accept the idea that the vast majority of white people are incurable hard-core racists, then it’s difficult to be optimistic about change.

@JS
Neo-nazis have been known to join the armed forces so they can bring that training to the streets.

Fucking hell . So sorry to hear this. And angry too. Love to all affected.

Today, Bleeding Virginia. Tomorrow, Civil War II.

If you look at the history in the South during post-war reconstruction… you might be forgiven for thinking the South WON the Civil War.

the US government did an absolutely terrible job of managing the situation after the war ended.

making a new civil war inevitable IMO. I’m surprised it didn’t happen in the 1960s, frankly.

well, if it happens again, just make sure to finish the job this time.

I cannot believe these people are proudly displaying Nazi symbols in 2017 and getting away with it. In Germany, this would be illegal! How is this a thing? How? I don’t even know what to say.