Gettin' cancelled

In the summer of 2020, Americans took to the streets in droves to express their anger at a criminal legal system that makes perpetual victims of the poor and allows police to brutalize and murder people, especially black people, with total impunity.  In response to this massive national wave of protest, police everywhere took the streets and punched people until they went home. This resulted in mayors, councilmembers, congresspeople, and the President all demanding that those police be given more money.  

Somehow all of this gets filtered through our political media discourse to read as "The tyranny of Cancel Culture has come for our beloved cops and institutions!"  I thought Atrios, as is often the case, had a nice succinct way of explaining where that comes from.   

Lots of things can be said about the "cancel culture" nonsense from the most privileged people with giant microphone sinecures, but one simple way to see it is as a contest between those who think normal people having some freedom to engage in "punching up" is the important part of any concept of "free speech" (very broadly defined, not just 1A), and those who think that, ACTUALLY, it's punching down (by them) that's important.   

Journalists who think their role is to hold the powerful to account versus those who see their role as holding the public to account.

There's nothing I love more than journalists holding the public account when it "goes too far" in criticizing the powerful for doing things like, say, sending a bunch of cops into the streets to punch people. Or maybe I love it more when the courts do that.  

A ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday adds to a string of developments following 2020’s George Floyd protests that threaten demonstrators with harsh penalties for the actions of others.

The court ruled that an advocate who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally could be sued for events that took place during that rally, even though he was not involved. The case arose after a police officer was injured during a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 and filed a lawsuit against DeRay Mckesson, a national advocate who had amplified and joined the demonstration. Mckesson rejected liability, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled against him in Friday’s 6-1 opinion. 

Of course it might be too early to decide which of these we love most. Probably need check back on this once we've been held accountable by vigilantes with the tacit approval of the state legislature. That's a whole new level. 

HB 101, filed by Republican Danny McCormick, would justify homicides committed by people under the guise of protecting property from being damaged “during a riot,” and critics stress that this is a term with a low threshold. “A riot is three people under Louisiana law,” Landry said. “That’s a wide open hole for someone to kill people, like teenagers and children who might be just trespassing or breaking into a car.” McCormick did not reply to a request for comment on the bill, which echoes laws passed in recent years that grant immunity to drivers who run over protesters who were blocking a public street.

So there's all sorts of new and exciting ways to get cancelled. We've really barely scratched the surface.

Whatever you do, don't ever commit to changing anything

This is how elites talk about the rest of us when they coach each other up behind the scenes.

The memo, which describes BLM as a “radical movement” that aims to “end ‘anti-black racism,’” lists several suggestions for how Democratic congressional candidates should handle an encounter with a Black Lives Matter activist.

“If approached by BLM activists, campaign staff should offer to meet with local activists,” the memo reads. “Invited BLM attendees should be limited. Please aim for personal or small group meetings.”

“Listen to their concerns,” it continues. “Don’t offer support for concrete policy positions.”

Remain calm until the rubes go away on their own.  Continue business as usual.  

Happy Hostilidays

The arms race in the  War on and for Christmas is escalating.



Still liked it better the first time I saw it



Meanwhile, blessings to you and yours.

A cafeteria worker in an Idaho middle school said she was fired for giving a free meal to a student who told her she was hungry and didn't have money to pay for it, The Idaho Statesman reported Wednesday.

Human resources for Irving Middle School in Pocatello sent Dalene Bowden a termination letter that stated she was fired for stealing school district property and for inaccurate transactions in serving food, according to the report.

Bowden told the newspaper that she offered to pay $1.70 for the 12 year-old student's meal, but her supervisor declined the money.

God bless us every one. 

Food stamp benefits for childless, able-bodied people under the age of 49 are set to expire Jan. 1, with the first stop of payment to take effect Jan. 6. A spokesman for Gov. Bobby Jindal said the Department of Children and Family Services still plans for that to take place.

Jindal's communication director, Mike Reed, said in a brief interview Monday (Dec. 21) that the only way the Jindal administration would extend the food stamp funding to beneficiaries early next year is if a federal judge orders it. A New Orleans-based advocacy group has filed a motion for a temporary restraining order to do just that, but the case has not yet been heard in U.S. District Court. br/>
"The best way to break the cycle of poverty is for individuals to get a job and get off of government assistance. Having a job is empowering," Reed said in a statement. Edwards' "decision will mean more able-bodied Louisianians will be dependent on the government and discouraged from joining the workforce."

Everybody be safe.

Especially if you're out doing some last minute shopping.

Old school has no chill!!! #BlackXmas2 @mallofamerica pic.twitter.com/Sq143XXdWU

— highguy (@BJSolomonCarson) December 23, 2015

Marty McFly life preserver

Great segment on CSPAN's Washington Journal this morning with Deray McKesson.



You might be aware that McKesson will speak at this year's Rising Tide Conference Saturday August 29 at Xavier University.

The curious way in which #BlackLivesMatter to Mitch

On Tuesday this week we learned, as we expected to learn, that the police convicted of the Danziger Bridge shooting and cover-up will be granted a new trial because the US Attorney's office happened to have been run by NOLA.com commenters for a while during the past decade.  The circumstances that allowed this to be so are their own strange and complicated sideshow. Sadly, it is less strange to us that justice in a case of police violence against young black men would prove to be this elusive for any reason. In fact, it's almost to be expected.

The Black Lives Matter movement grew out of protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the murder of a young black man by police. Over the past year, the movement has grown as it continually shines a light on the regularity with which such horrifying violence is committed by police all across the country.

The British newspaper The Guardian, combining traditional reporting with "verified crowdsourced information," has counted 704 people killed by police in the United States this year, including 150 that the newspaper classified as unarmed.

Among The Guardian's other findings was that blacks have been killed by police this year at a rate two and a half times that of whites.

This is a protest movement against structural racism and its ugliest expression in the form of habitual murder of black people by police. In response to this outcry, conservative pundits and other racists have reflexively pointed fingers directly back at the victims.

For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?

There was a time, in another surreal reality not so long ago, when conservative pundits reflexively grimaced at even the mention of it—and, oh, that whole notion that black people were unjustly shackled or slaughtered in advanced Western societies.

Now black-on-black crime is a thing, with famous heavy-right rags embracing it as frequently as they knock the black president. It’s a fresh, new, nasty, stick-your-tongue-out retort to shut down any justifiable complaints from grieving black communities.

Which means, sure, we can talk days on end about being black ... so long as it pertains to black people hurting other black people. Others have signed on, too, including some prominent black celebrities and half-intelligentsia feeling ignored or irrelevant as the #BlackLivesMatter banner passes them by.

"But what about black on black crime?"  You hear it every time someone wants to deflect blame away from systemic racism.  It is a disingenuous, innumerate, bullying,  misleading and imperious way to engage with a direct cry for justice.

It's also Mitch Landrieu's go-to. This recent Atlantic puff piece about the courage of his "risky" defiance of oppressive "liberal" convention attests.

It is politically (and intellectually) risky to attribute the weaknesses of a historically besieged group to the shortcomings of its culture. In the years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was an assistant secretary in the Labor Department, released his seminal report on the fragile state of black families in 1965, many conservatives came to argue that what would save African Americans was not government programs but rather the development of a culture of self-sufficiency and self-improvement. Some liberals, in contrast, came to believe that the near-exclusive conservative focus on bootstrapping (something also emphasized periodically by prominent African Americans, including President Obama and—now notoriously—Bill Cosby) was a way to absolve the country’s white majority of responsibility for the conditions that led to hardship in the first place. “Landrieu is a liberal making a conservative argument that was once a liberal argument—he’s trying to reappropriate it,” says Daryl Scott, a professor of African American history at Howard University. “He’s arguing for structural reforms and personal reforms all at the same time.”

It is "risky" to shout down at the poor and desperate that they need to fix their "culture" and be more "self-sufficient."  What a bold position Mitch has staked out for himself  It takes a real trailblazing visionary to stand up and proudly march urban social policy right back to 1994.

Paternalistic Democrats like the Landrieus and the Clintons have been at this game for decades. It's only this year, as Hillary anticipates criticism from Black Lives Matter activists, that Bill Clinton has begun to acknowledge the damage his wrongheaded "tough on crime" policies wrought on the generation who lived with their consequences.

Even Bill Clinton now says it's time to revisit those laws and policies. In the foreward to a new book on criminal justice reform, the former president concedes that " ... plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long — we have overshot the mark."

Bill Clinton was still able to win reelection with the strong support of black voters. Virginia Sapiro and David Canon, in their book “Race, Gender and the Clinton Presidency,” cite the former president’s cultural fluency with African Americans, as well as his having appointed a record number of black cabinet members and vocally defending affirmative action, for his ability to keep that important bloc of Democratic voters. They also said that he counted on “structural dependence” – the notion that black voters were unlikely to vote for the GOP candidate anyway, to allow him leeway to take positions that would signal to white voters that he could stand up to black leaders. One such instance was his condemnation of the rapper Sister Souljah over comments she made two months after the L.A. riots that seemed to dismiss the slayings of some white people during the six days of violence.

If Clinton has begun to reconsider the choices he made out of political expediency during the 90s, it's worth noting that he's mostly doing so because that is politically expedient for Hillary now. Mitch, on the other hand, is still having his "Sister Souljah moment." 

Landrieu told me he understands that he would be on safer ground if he limited his analysis to, say, the impact of discriminatory housing policies born out of white-supremacist ideology. “You know what? The culture developed out of a particular history. But I can’t reverse history. I can work on the problem right in front of me. So what I’m saying is, if I knock you off a chair, that’s on me. If you’re still on the ground a week later, that’s on you.”

That's on you, says Mitch.  Why aren't you bootstrapping yourself up, welftard? Please stop whining to me about history and fancy "intellectual" concepts like structural racism and get back up on that chair I knocked you off of.

Last month, the New York Times' resident personification of white privilege, David Brooks, wrote a widely rebuked response to Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, Between the World and Me in which Brooks chastises Coates for "distorting history" and abandoning the "American Dream." 

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Astonishing. Brooks asserts that it is not so much the centuries of struggle and injustice that "trap generations" in a cycle of destitution but rather Coates's "excessive realism" in addressing those circumstances. In other words, "If you're still on the ground, that's on you."

Mitch had already addressed this remark to Coates himself, in fact. Here is the video of a remarkable conversation between the two this summer at Mitch's second home, The Aspen Ideas Conference.



Here is a pretty good write-up of the exchange by Gambit's Alex Woodward.

The audience and Coates questioned Landrieu about the chair analogy — which was interpreted as Landrieu pointing the finger at African-Americans for cultural violence and oppression. Landrieu clarified, "If all you do is sit on the floor and you do nothing and you stay there waiting for the person to come back and pick you up, and nothing changes, the laws of nature are that you're going to wind up staying there. You've go to do something to get up."

"I don't think that's actually what's happening," Coates later said. "Black people are struggling mightily in a situation that was put upon them. ... The people who have lapsed, in terms of their debt to African-Americans as citizens, is us as a society and as a government. There's no history of a lack of responsibility among black folks."

"I did not say nor did I try to intimate that the black community is sitting on the ground doing nothing," Landrieu said. "Let's say together as a country that we want to save the lives of young African-American men and figure out how to do it, and how to talk in a way that gets us into a positive place so that we can find specific things that all of us can do on the ground."

Mitch and the crowd go around in circles like that a few times. Mitch says a thing. The audience asks, "Hey what did you mean when you said that thing?" Mitch responds, "I did not say nor did I try to intimate" that thing. He then says the thing over again.  The audience gets upset again. Mitch concludes, blah blah "both sides" need to be positive. It's fascinating to watch.

It's also incredibly frustrating to watch in the knowledge that this behavior is what is winning Mitch Landrieu applause from elites across the country for his innovative expertise in crime fighting.  Especially when his most serious initiatives in that regard are the dubious slush fund of patronage known as NOLA for Life and the even more dubious scheme to hand law enforcement duties in the French Quarter over to a quasi-private police force run by an eccentric millionaire.

Landrieu conceded, though, that Torres was the ‘‘impetus’’ that led to many of the current measures falling into place. ‘‘We have a way here of reaching out to the private sector in everything that’s happening in the city,’’ explained Landrieu, who has accepted on his city’s behalf more private grants than any mayor in the nation, including $4.2 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2011. Noting similar arrangements in areas like the city’s sewage department and its recreation programs, he said, ‘‘It’s a new government model that’s emblematic of what the rest of the country should be doing.’’

If you want to know what makes a meathead like Mitch a celebrity on the national neoliberal circuit it's in that paragraph. Mitch's enthusiasm for talking about even the most vile notion of libertarian dystopia such as a privatized police force like it's a triumph of reason is what's going to punch his ticket to post-mayoral success. Or so he thinks.

Mitch has a few options available after 2018, perhaps in tourism promotion or in Aspen making speeches on "resilience" for the next 20 years. But an even nicer plum might come in the form of a federal appointment by, say, a future President Clinton, as some sort of "urban crime czar."  But for that to be a possibility a lot of other things need to happen first.

For one thing, Hillary needs to become President which is no simple matter. For another, the city of New Orleans has to maintain the illusion that it serves as an example of law enforcement progress rather than.. well...  

By now, most New Orleanians know the broad strokes of what happened the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina when those police officers – who wrongly believed officers had been shot at the bridge – killed two innocent people, wounded four innocent people and immediately went into cover-up mode.

But it's the finer details provided by Associated Press journalist Ronnie Green – a tightly-knit family's hunt for nourishment for an ailing diabetic, two buddies horsing around and racing, the police stomping the camera of a hotel maintenance worker caught photographing the bloody bridge scene, JJ's mother growing sick with worry over his unexplained absence – that give power to Green's new book: "Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-up in the Wake of Katrina." Published by Beacon Press, the book goes on sale, Tuesday, Aug. 18.

Not only is there a new book out this week about Danziger, but also we now know for certain that the cops convicted in the case will be granted a new trial.

Hours before this ruling was announced, Mitch Landrieu was in Washington D.C. "thanking America" for helping to rebuild New Orleans and, of course, talking about his work crusading against the "culture of violence." Notice the rhetorical flourish he's added to his act. 

The Democratic mayor said crime and racial divisions remain, not only in New Orleans but other communities, too, and that America needs to find a way to talk about those challenges.

"This year, unfortunately across, the nation and in New Orleans murder is ticking up," Landrieu said. "And with nearly 15,000 Americans lost every year to murder in this nation, a disproportionate number young African-American men; it is clear that this crisis goes well beyond New Orleans. It is a national disgrace and stopping murder should be a national priority. Black lives matter."

That line brought the mayor applause from the several hundred people at the luncheon

A full year into this national protest movement against racially motivated police violence, what Mitch Landrieu has learned is that if he appropriates the words ‪"Black Lives Matter" and uses them to talk about the murder rate in general, then a room full of Washington political and media elites will applaud.

Mitch is literally answering "Black Lives Matter" with, "Well, actually, it's about black on black crime." Conservative pundits like David Brooks are regularly excoriated for this precise dick move. But Mitch does it here... and he actually is doing something worse by twisting the words of the protest itself in such a way that they blunt its purpose.  And the important people applaud him for it.

Mitch Landrieu's star is rising among the important people. And why shouldn't it? There aren't many establishment white politicians who can willfully sanitize "Black Lives Matter" and get away with it in the current environment.  At the moment, in fact, I can name only one.

Threat level up

New York Times: They Helped Make Twitter Matter in Ferguson Protests 

A year ago, these three activists were ordinary Americans: a teacher, a school administrator and a temporary government employee. Like many others, they found a voice on social media to comment on the news, describe their personal experiences and relate the everyday struggles of blacks in America.

As their social media following soared during the Ferguson protests, so did their belief in the power of Twitter to dispute official statements that did not ring true. Eventually, they used Twitter and Tumblr to fund and mobilize protests and make demands on police departments and government officials. Their high-profile status also made some of them targets of intelligence monitoring and threats.

Attached to that article is a video where,

Johnetta Elzie, DeRay Mckesson and Zellie Imani read their tweets from the past year and discuss how social media boiled after the fatal shooting by a police officer of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., turning the nation’s attention to race and police conduct, and in the process changing their lives.

On Monday, Elzie and Mckesson, along with several other prominent civil rights leaders were arrested in St. Louis during a protest marking the anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson Missouri last year.  A week prior to this, we learned that the two had been marked by a cybersecurity contractor as "threat actors"

The report identifies DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, two prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who took part in the Baltimore protests, as "threat actors" for whom "immediate response is recommended." It describes McKesson and Elzie as "high" severity, "physical," and "#mostwanted" threats and notes both have a "massive following" on social media. It says that ZeroFox was engaged in "continuous monitoring" of their social media accounts and specifies their geographical locations at the time of the report. The report does not suggest that the pair were suspected of criminal activity but were "main coordinators of the protests."

Yikes. The NYT story where Mckesson and Elzie  read their tweets also describes their lives before the Brown incident and how they came to be subsequently honored as "threat influencers" by cyberspooks like ZeroFox.

But on Aug. 8, 2014, the day before Mr. Brown was killed, Ms. Elzie was 25 and living in St. Louis. She had just finished a job as a phone interviewer for the United States Department of Agriculture and was considering going back to school. She had a community of friends and maybe 2,000 Twitter followers, and used social media to comment on topics like makeup, movies and sports.

On the day Mr. Brown died, Ms. Elzie drove to Ferguson and started tweeting and posting photographs and videos to social media. She has not stopped. A year later, she has more than 57,000 followers on Twitter. She is now an organizing member of the group WeTheProtesters.org, along with Mr. Mckesson.

Mr. Mckesson, 30, monitored Twitter during the first few days of last August’s protests from his home in Minneapolis, where he worked as a school administrator and had 1,000 or so Twitter followers. But after watching protesters in Ferguson clash with a militarized police force, he packed his car and tweeted, “En route to Ferguson.” In the months since, Mr. Mckesson has become a full-time protester and organizer, and a go-to source for reporters covering protests around the country. He has 200,000 Twitter followers.

While few of us in New Orleans can relate to the experience of being marked as "threat actors," some of us have been referred to on occasion as "dangerous people from the internet."  What many of us can relate to is the experience of organizing a broad online support community in the wake of a national tragedy.

After the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, the internet became a vital connection among dispersed New Orleanians, former New Orleanians, friends of the city and of the Gulf Coast region. A surge of new blogs erupted and, combined with those that were already online, a community of bloggers with a shared interest in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast developed. In the summer of 2006, after the success of the first Geek Dinner, and to mark the anniversary of the flood, the newly formed NOLA Bloggers organized the first Rising Tide Conference, taking their shared interest in technology, the internet and social media and turning advocacy for the city into action.

Which is one of many reasons we're proud to welcome Deray Mckesson to speak at the tenth Rising Tide conference this year. The kind of grass roots organizing through social media Mckesson has excelled in really exemplifies the spirit of what brought Rising Tide together in the first place. At least that's what we've been writing on the website all these years.

Leveraging the power of bloggers and new media, the Rising Tide Conference is a launch pad for organization and action. Our day-long program of speakers and presentations is tailored to inform, entertain, enrage and inspire.

We come together to dispel myths, promote facts, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels. We aim to be a "real life" demonstration of internet activism as we continue to recover from a massive failure of government on all levels.

Giving a platform to "threat influencers" since 2006. Maybe should add some language in there about that too. 

Rising Tide X is August 29, 2015 at Xavier University. Check out the rest of the website for details about the extensive program. You can go for free this year but please register here. If you'd like to help defray the cost of production or order swag, there's a separate GoFundMe page here.