An organization, seeking to foster a real conversation about our history of violent racism, lynching in particular, had the funding (from Google) to shoot me a compelling video ad on youtube that led me to explore their website. From their report:

When the era of racial terror and widespread lynching ended in the mid-twentieth century, it left behind a nation and an American South fundamentally altered by decades of systematic community-based violence against black Americans. The effects of the lynching era echoed through the latter half of the twentieth century. African Americans continued to face violent intimidation when they transgressed social boundaries or asserted their civil rights, and the criminal justice system continued to target people of color and victimize African Americans. These legacies have yet to be confronted.

The organization is called The Equal Justice Initiative.  Their project is of crucial importance, in a country being made great again by people who deny our ongoing bloody history, and climate disruption, our 2500% higher rate of mass killing by gun than any other nation and many other horrors that are denied at our peril.   The website is very well done.  The historical section I read is clearly and beautifully written.  

When I was in law school, twenty years ago, a case called U.S. v. Cruikshank was mentioned in a one sentence footnote in the casebook for Constitutional Law.   As I began researching what happened to enforcement of the amendments intended to outlaw slavery, guarantee full citizenship to former slaves and give black men the right to vote, I stumbled on more details about the little known case.   After reading the lower court decisions, and the Supreme Court’s final word, I came to understand that Cruikshank, as much as the aptly named Slaughterhouse cases (which gave a miserly reading of the rights of federal citizenship that would be our law for almost a century), was actually the death knell for the new rights of citizenship for black people in America.

When an organized, torch carrying crowd marched and chanted recently in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the proposed removal of a monument to the slaveholders’ armed rebellion against the U.S.A., the stink of an undiscussed history hung over that procession.  There was the occasional shot of a screaming chap wearing a swastika, a chant about Jews, delivered by the marchers without love or irony, and also those carrying and wearing the symbols of those who enslaved and terrorized blacks.  There was a near century, after the Civil War, of often public lynching that extended to twenty states, walking with these angry white men.

Most people, on many sides, many sides, have a revulsion for the symbols of racist regimes of the past, however little they might actually know about these notorious regimes.  These symbols stand for a time when violent hatred ruled the day.  That’s kind of the point of bringing these potent symbols to a rally.  They are used to rub people’s faces in an easily recognizable worst case scenario for a minority, when the violent racists of the day ruled and the government smiled on the murderers.  

Cruikshank was one of the leaders of a mob of angry whites, defeated Confederates, who swarmed into Colfax Louisiana on Easter Sunday 1873. They came heavily armed, on horseback, with at least one cannon.  The whites were there to see that Negros did not get the final word on the vote, that no Negro take power over any white. They attacked the black Civil War veterans who were guarding the courthouse, defending the county seat of newly renamed Grant Parish after a bitterly contested election won, on black votes, by Republican advocates of black rights.    

It was a slaughter, pure and simple.  As many as fifty black men were killed hours after surrendering.   The whites, who had overwhelming numbers, killed every black they came across, left their corpses rotting on the field on the day Jesus was resurrected and rose up to heaven.  The failed federal prosecution of the perpetrators of what Eric Foner called the worst instance of racial violence of the Reconstruction era   would, more than a century later, become a one sentence footnote in the Constitutional Law casebook. [1]

The federal prosecution over Cruikshank and his comrades was ruled unconstitutional by The Supreme Court.  It said, amid pages of legal analysis that drily took the indictments apart point by point, that the Constitution protected former slaves only from government action– not from the actions of a private mob.   It left enforcement of such crimes up to each individual state to deal with as they saw fit.   The case quietly closed down all federal prosecution of outfits like the Ku Klux Klan.  

The decision was a stinking piece of legalistic cavil, like other racially driven decisions over the years, but you can’t appeal that decision anywhere, of course, even if the Court is demonstrably sympathetic to the former enemies of the U.S.   The ruling in Cruikshank led to all the defendants walking, triumphant as that iconic grinning Southern sheriff with his Red Man chewing tobacco pouch almost a century later, into a long period of unrestrained, often deadly, brutality against former slaves.

Here is a historical marker, put up by the state of Louisiana in 1950, photographed by Billy Hathorn (photo credit here). 

At the end of the twentieth century only an enterprising law student with an overriding interest in history could find out anything more about the case, about the then largely unknown Colfax massacre, about any of this shit.  As we march along in the twenty-first century, this is the kind of history we need to be learning from together. This website is an excellent tool for learning.

As the director of the Equal Justice Initiative writes:  

We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it.

True dat, as my father would say.

[1]  how’s this for a footnote?  

Opposition among white Democrats to suffrage for blacks resulted in 1,081 political murders from April to November 1868. Almost all of the victims were black, and some of the whites who were killed were Republicans.

source

In our Free Market, where unfettered competition (LOL) for higher profits is the only order of business, those corporations who manipulate their customer base the best are the most successful.   If sharks are in charge of all public policy, it is not surprising their only priority will be meat.   If maximizing their supply of meat depends on intimate knowledge of the habits of those they eat, they will get that competitive edge, whatever it takes.   Data collection and sophisticated data crunching are essential to wholesale meat-eating in our complex, digital world.  

The genius of that twat who invented Facebook, for example, was to combine the essential loneliness of disconnected people, their hunger for connection, and a seamless way to harvest the essential data and psychological profiles user-expressed preferences provide.  This valuable data can then be sold to shrewd data-mining operators.  No wonder the fine fellow is a multi-billionaire.  The valuable real-time marketing research information revealed to a company like Facebook is incredibly useful commercially and politically, as the recent American presidential election demonstrated.

Now we come to Cambridge Analytica, a company that specializes in data-driven results, commercial and political.  From its inception it engaged in psyops, psychological warfare, using whatever means were necessary to win hearts and minds to persuade the persuadable towards the wishes of their clients.  It is owned by reclusive billionaire and Trump savior Robert Mercer, no slouch in data analysis himself.  The company began with a huge cache of psychological user profiles obtained from Facebook.  As an article in the Guardian states, in connection to Cambridge Analytica’s major role in determining the outcome of the Brexit vote:

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.    source

From that same article, a description of the company’s mission, by an ex-employee:

“Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

If you want to throw up in your mouth a little, all you need to do is read this Wikipedia entry.   It is not long, but it is perfectly chilling.  I’ve never read a Wiki more horrifying.   Then, if you want a real shiver of horror, click here.   All you need to do is click “political” on the home page, right there next to “commercial” and look at the first screen that pops up.  I watched the images on that screen loop for a minute, words failing me, unable to click any further.  As a service to my reader(s) I revisited the site.  A click-through of the CA Political menu, accessed through the three bars top right, was grimly rewarding. 

Data drives all we do, yo.  Persuasion vs. Manipulation– who is to really say?  Isn’t it really a matter of opinion?   Opinion is as American as apple pie and a bloated military budget.   “Manipulate” is such a poisoned and judgmental word.   Is it even against the law to manipulate people?  If so, a lot of our largest, most lucrative businesses would have to close shop. LOL!

Secretive billionaire computer genius Robert Mercer bought the company a few years ago, fair enough.   Oh yeah, his friend Steve Bannon partially owns Cambridge Analytica, or owned it, or at the very least was until recently vice president of the sophisticated propaganda machine– at any rate, he disclosed $125,333 in income from the firm last year.  And Kellyanne Conway’s consulting firm did work for Cambridge Analytica in 2016.  The company is now reportedly getting military contracts from the Department of Defense under Trump.   Yeah, so what?  Your point is?

It is well known that this most excellent president we have now was the first American president elected by smart social media use, a constant stream of tart tweets and fierce facebook postings, as well as incendiary stories about his enemies on the internet and television, that galvanized his supporters.   What is less well known is how exactly this media tsunami was accomplished.   Answering that question, including whether any illegality was involved, is part of the ongoing investigation against this persecuted public servant, victim of the greatest American political witch hunt of all time, according to him.

There was a perception in the summer of 2016 that Trump would lose the general election, in spite of his easily bumping off one after another of the Republican contenders and winning the nomination at the convention.  A reclusive right wing billionaire, formerly a Ted Cruz supporter, threw his support behind the controversial Republican nominee and had his daughter make some introductions to the candidate, including Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon.  Trump hired them both and the rest is history.  Steve Bannon is, among other things, an expert in the field of galvanizing young white men via social media.   Robert Mercer, the billionaire who financed Bannon, Breitbart News, and later Trump, is a well-documented genius in data analysis.  After Trump’s Electoral College victory, Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, became an executive on Trump’s transition team, advising him on cabinet picks. 

Facebook, recently revealed (involuntarily, as it turns out) that it took $100,000 in ad buys from Russian troll farms.   Trolls are those who live to stir up shit on the internet, make people angry, muddy conversation, make rational exchange and civility impossible.   These facebook ads directly targeted those who hated Hillary.  They were then blasted out by hundreds or thousands of ‘bots’, mechanical devices that mass deliver thousands of copies of things like tweets and facebook posts.  You see numbers as part of each tweet showing how many times it was shared, how many times it was liked, how often it was retweeted.  Trump’s incendiary tweets were always liked and shared by millions.  Turns out many of those likes and shares were generated mechanically, by troll bots, here, there and anywhere.

A BBC reporter, in March 2017, ran down how the internet sensation was whipped up.

This all seems to make a sinister kind of sense, if you proceed from the proposition that a winner will do whatever is necessary to win and that no trick is dirty or clean, unless you lose, or get caught.   But what is this shit about online voter rolls?

That makes sense.  You want to target people who may be leaning your way.  It’s basic marketing.  Confirmation bias and all that.  Voter rolls would also be helpful in knowing exactly which districts to put ad resources into.  It is well-known that the president’s people very effectively, one might say ingeniously, micro-targeted the exact precincts the presidential candidate needed in three swing states to win all those Electoral College electors by a total of 78,000 votes.  

He’s not to everyone’s taste, though Sekhnet always gets a kick out of him, and I find him bright and credible, but the source of the screen shots above, and the full story, is here. 

If you add up Sheriff Joe’s accomplishments, the list is pretty impressive.   So what if so many of them were inhuman, vicious and unconstitutional?   That’s what the president’s power to pardon is for, if the president is cut from the same highly refined cloth as the superior, contemptuous guy he’s pardoning. 

Here is a link to a capsule summary of some of the pardoned unrepentant contempt of court master’s achievements in Maricopa County, Arizona.   Impressive, no?  Our current president pardons the BEST people, the BEST people, no?

The recent record flood from a “500 year storm” in Houston, as well as storm-produced rivers raging in the streets of Istanbul and Mumbai, has, according to some unaccountably powerful American idiots, absolutely nothing to do with catastrophic androgenic climate change.  That Houston has experienced three “500 hundred year storms” in the last three years proves nothing, to these rich men who make no money from having inconvenient things proved to them.   That three major cities, on three continents, are now largely under water from catastrophic storms?  Shit happens, eh?

In the case of Houston, it’s a major refinery of fossil fuels.  One of their professional football teams used to be called the Houston Oilers.   Jeeves tells us that team now plays in Tennessee, with an oil rig as their logo.  Much of that toxic sludge, the tar sand that billionaires are intent on piping to refineries to be reduced to poisonous air, poisonous gasoline and poisonous waste, is targeted for refinery-rich places like Houston.   There is an ecological disaster, on top of the historic natural disaster, as tons of toxic chemicals were released into the air over Houston when the refineries “burned off” certain chemicals as they were shutting down in preparation for the flood.

It is an irony too grotesque and obvious to point out, that the mega-storms produced by the unabated use of carbon-producing non-renewable fossil fuels rain down biblical retribution on the city that is its capital.  I’m not sure what Mumbai and Istanbul did to deserve their present fates, but that’s part of the nature of the beast.   When I shit in the stream for years, those downstream will eventually drink water I wouldn’t drink.  Of course, I live upstream and I have no pity for those too stupid to drink my God-given toilet water.

2

When the U.S. ended the failed prohibition of alcoholic beverages after a decade-long, disastrous experiment that resulted only in the enrichment of a violent criminal class and an explosion in lawlessness, a racist zealot named Harry Anslinger, realizing his job in Prohibition was over unless he found a new target, made it his mission to spread the terrifying truth about the murderous drug favored by Mexicans and Black Jazz musicians.  White girls who smoked this drug had wild sex with Negroes.  White boys who smoked it became merciless ax murderers, often gleefully killing their own families.  He spent his life rooting out cannabis (which he branded by its Mexican name, marijuana, or sometimes with an even more threatening, alien hiss: marihuana), heroin and cocaine.  Alcohol, meanwhile, continues to kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine, and pharmaceutically produced opioids combined  (and, sporadic interracial sex aside, documented marijuana deaths per year remain at zero) but what does that have to do with anything?

One of Anslinger’s proteges, we learn to our great surprise, was the 25 year-old Joe Arpaio, the former racist sheriff, now 85, that our current president unceremoniously pulled out of hot water for his long-running, violent, self-described “concentration camp” for suspected undocumented aliens and drug addicts, and for his repeated contempt of court.  

A trillion dollars spent trying to enforce unenforceable drug prohibition laws identical to the ones we saw fail in the 1920s, and millions of lives ruined or lost as violent criminal cartels rake in billions in several countries to supply the lucrative U.S. drug market.   Our diminutive racist attorney general calls for stepped up enforcement to ensure the capture and imprisonment of marijuana users.  OK.

So we all have these massive institutional stresses on us, things we can do nothing about, and a president who makes it clear he will shit anywhere he fucking pleases, any time he pleases, in your mouth if possible, if you’re a nasty fucker.  

3

Then you get a letter from your landlord, that, after some research at the bank, might have more accurately read:  We waited three weeks to cash your check this time, instead of our customary next day deposit.  When we cashed July, it cleared, but August bounced.  We are assessing a $25 fine for the returned check and we have redeposited that check, which bounced again, another $25.  The bank assessed a $35 fee the first time the check bounced, and another one when they redeposited the check.  All this took place over a matter of almost a month and the first I heard about any of it I was $120 in the hole for fees and fines.   A bit of added stress, as it is now August 30 and August’s rent is unpaid, I learned yesterday.  First bounced check in over forty years of banking, but the fees are the fees.  Unfair, perhaps, but not illegal, don’t close your mouth, we are still not done emptying our bowels.  My problem, of course, I’ll figure out how to avoid being dragged to Housing Court for nonpayment.

4

I overpaid my health insurance by $220 a month for six or seven months while the New York State of Health Marketplace was fixing its simple mathematical error.  By the time their mistake was fixed I had overpaid by about $1,400.  When I called in July, credit from my overpayment was applied and I was told I had credit going forward to pay the next few months of premiums.  

In August I got a bill, showing a $1,310 past due payment made on my behalf (they cut you off if you miss one month of premium payments, that number represents several months of nonpayment) and claiming I owe $28 for September.  Reminding me I will lose my health insurance if that is not paid nice and timely.  When I called the insurance company I was told I actually owe $38 for September.

If I have a complaint about this seeming chicanery by the insurance company, I must take it up with them, as I have.  I am still waiting for their written accounting.  No government agency oversees this kind of thing.  Why would they?   

Which reminds me, I have to deposit another month’s rent in the bank and arrange to get them a check for August and September, to avoid whatever the corporate slum-lord has planned for me.    

I have to keep reminding myself, whatever stress I may be feeling is nothing compared to the stress of people who are angry almost all of the time.  My relative comfort living an extremely modest life-style, leaving aside the many additional ways someone who lives this way is typically sodomized, is nothing to sneeze at, I suppose.   It often must be my consolation, after all, and it would not do to sneeze at it.

Vice President Mike Pence responding, apparently without irony, to Trump’s equating white supremacist hate groups and anti-Nazis:  “We’re also praying that in America that we will not allow the few to divide the many. “

If the stakes weren’t so high, and the angry rhetoric of intolerance not turned up to ten by a man who rose to power by playing to the division of the many, that remark would be droll.   The extreme right wing Vice President, a publicly pious Christian, proponent of gay conversion therapy,  funerals for aborted fetuses, voter suppression laws in Indiana, also offered this glittering statement in defense of the president he is patiently waiting to replace, when nature takes its course. 

“The strength of the United States of America is always strongest, as the president has said so eloquently, when we are united around our shared values, and so it will always be.”

Might I squeamishly suggest that “eloquently” is probably not the best word, ironic or comedic effect aside, to describe the utterances of our increasingly peevish Winner-in-Chief. 

In a culture that believes “time is money,” excessive time spent reading, pondering, discussing, is money wasted, I suppose.   That’s an arch way to put it.  There is nothing inherent in reading, thinking or discussing that puts any premium on the development of humanity, decency, correct action.   Humanity, decency and correct action are all matters of opinion that people of good will can discuss; things angry people, who are always certain of everything, can tell you to fuck off about.  

People read Mein Kampf, for example, ponder it, discuss its arguments, arguments that speak directly to their rage and sense of injustice, find inspiration in its author’s passion.  Humans, as a group, are famously challenged by the gentler and more difficult messages of people like Jesus and Buddha.  Killing, torture and persecution done in the name of Jesus have been, sadly, arguably as common as the merciful acts he exhorted his followers to perform.  Jesus weeps.

Let’s skip the philosophical argle-bargle, and talk about tabloids and the real world.  Back in the day, you could buy a newspaper, like the New York Times, page after page of fine print, with news and analysis of world events.   That newspaper cost a nickel, more than the other papers.  Whatever its limitations and hidden biases, reading it was a commitment of time that required some concentration.  After reading an article in the always measured New York Times you had something to think about– even if for a critical mug like me it was often about the things the otherwise nuanced article had neglected to make mention of.  

Next to the Times on the newsstand were more compact papers, only folded once, not twice like the fancier publications, with blunt, colorful headlines like Nazi Kills at Klan Rally.  These tabloids cost maybe two cents.  The headline was a teaser designed to grab your attention, make you buy the paper, there was usually a dramatic photo under the headline.  The tabloid delivered selected highlights dramatically and entertainingly.

Readers of the tabloids would get the unapologetically opinionated news delivered to them in short, digestible chunks.  There were plenty of pictures, often catching the subjects in undignified moments, many ads, comics, a word puzzle, a colorful and detailed sports section and, on good days, a picture of a pretty, scantily clad young woman on page six.  The tabloids were the newspapers of the masses, as today FaceBook and shit like that are the news sources for most Americans.  The publications eggheads read were full of complexity and nuance, the tabloids were bold and simple.  You want a complicated non-answer, or a simple, convincing, actual answer?  Hmmmm? 

During the start of the Cold War, which extended from the end of World War Two until the Age of Reagan, an angry demagogue named Joseph McCarthy, senator from Wisconsin, aided by a pugnacious, closeted gay lawyer named Roy Cohn, bullied and prosecuted suspected Communists in a Senate Committee often confused with the similarly anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  The always-above-reproach Richard Nixon was a member of HUAC during McCarthy’s time.  

McCarthy’s ruthless tactics, often victimizing innocent people with little or no evidence, outside of suspicion and personal rancor, gave rise to the term McCarthyism.   He was eventually discredited, after pissing Eisenhower off when he turned his red-baiting on the U.S. Army and the Army fought back in nationally televised hearings.  He was censured by a large bipartisan majority of his Senate colleagues.  He died during his second term in the Senate, of liver disease at 48, in 1957.   Before his downfall Joseph McCarthy wielded enormous power, harnessing the fear and hatred of Communism to advance his own career.  

While he was the nation’s chief red-baiter, McCarthy was urged by the young Roy Cohn, his legal aid (later fierce defender of Carlo Gambino, George Steinbrenner and other notorious luminaries), to use the Court of Public Opinion to level his charges and prosecute his cases against suspected Commies.   The lesson was the same one demonstrated in previous decades by other totalitarian regimes:  the truth is what people believe is happening, not what may be actually happening.  Control the perception of the masses, you control “reality”.  If the cover of every tabloid said so-and-so denies being Red, with a picture of him looking like a guilty goddamn Commie — well, that was most of the battle right there.  Cohn later became good friends with tabloid king Rupert Murdoch, a man he could rely on for an inflammatory series of tactical headlines.

Fast forward to 1973 and Fred Trump’s legal battle to defend his good name against federal charges of racial discrimination, systematic violations of the Fair Housing Act in the rental of his apartments.   Roy Cohn was the Trumps’ lawyer, and young co-defendant Donald Trump learned a lot at his knee.   You can read about the lawsuit here.  It was brutally fought by Cohn, who countersued the government for $100,000,000, comparing their persecution of his clients to tactics used by the Nazis.  The judge threw out his countersuit but the case dragged on for twenty months.  

“Trump and his father settled the case in 1975 without admitting wrongdoing, but they were required to take out advertisements saying they welcomed renters of all races.”  (source)  

More importantly, Trump learned, from his mentor Roy Cohn (not a very nice man, by most accounts) how to use the tabloids to advance his case, his fame, his fabulous career.    Keep it short, spicy, bold, don’t fuss about if it’s true or not.  When attacked — hit back harder — brutal’s fine, make it work for you. Those lessons would come in handy, as history has brought us, truly, our first tabloid president.