Mediaboss Marketing

As protesters massed on the streets of Phoenix, President Trump on Tuesday unleashed a vitriolic, 76-minute speech mocking those who considered his response after the Charlottesville white supremacist march as racist, adopted racially charged language and hinted that he would pardon former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, long accused of brutality against Latinos.

He re-read for more than 16 minutes the remarks he had uttered after violence in Virginia claimed the life of a woman protesting the white supremacists, omitting his remarks in which he said that both sides were to blame and occupied the same plane in his view.

The words were perfect, he said.

But even as he sought to dismiss one racially fraught controversy, he ignited another with words that seemed to promise a pardon to Arpaio, who last month was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to halt his habit of stopping Latinos based solely on a suspicion that they might be living in the United States without proper papers.

Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe? Trump asked a crowd of thousands in the Phoenix Convention Center of Arpaio, who served 24 years as Maricopa County sheriff before being defeated in November. So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?

But you know what? Ill make a prediction: I think hes going to be just fine, Trump said, eliciting a roar. But I wont do it tonight because I dont want to cause any controversy. He added that Arpaio should feel good.

Trumps words on Arpaio, as well as his repeated suggestion that it was time to return to law and order, carried the whiff of past campaigns, such as those carried out by George Wallace, the segregationist presidential candidate and governor of Alabama.

And they suggested that it was folly for Republicans to wish for the one thing many keenly wanted for Trump to revert to the moderate, sober president who only 24 hours earlier had acknowledged the need to change his mind on Afghanistan with a patient speech. It was clear on Tuesday, in both Trumps rhetoric and his freewheeling, far more enthusiastic visage, that the president who came to office tossing jaw-dropping assertions at voters would continue to favor that approach as president.

He saved his greatest criticism for the media, whom he blamed for misconstruing his remarks after Charlottesville. His supporters backed him up by screaming at reporters at the rally.

Its time to expose the media for their role in fomenting divisions in the country, Trump declared.

They are trying to take away our history and heritage were smart people and these are truly dishonest people.

He added: I really think they dont like our country. The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself.

For all the mockery and bluster the president put forth, however, there was a subtext of political fear.

Recent polls have indicated that even among Republicans, Trump is losing strength. The president was introduced Tuesday with a bevy of friends Vice President Mike Pence, preacher Franklin Graham, Martin Luther King Jrs niece Alveda King and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

Their multiracial tableau seemed intended to bolster the presidents image. When he took the stage, Trump took pains to try to recreate the silent majority who he has long said delivered him the presidency.

The media can attack me, but where I draw the line is where they attack you, he said, after almost half an hour of defending himself.

He described his supporters as honest, hard-working, taxpaying Americans whose dreams he shared.

You always understood what Washington, D.C., did not our movement is a movement built on love, he said.

The protests that greeted Trump in Phoenix were largely peaceful, although later in the night the actions grew more violent and tear gas was fired.

Still, the signs of division were many. When Trump traveled from his first stop at an immigration facility in Yuma to Phoenix, Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey greeted him at the airport. But he did not attend the rally.

Gov. Duceys focus has been working with law enforcement toward a safe event in downtown Phoenix, his spokesman said in a statement to the Arizona Republic.

Trump did his best to sow division elsewhere in the states politics.

Beside the explosive possibility of pardoning Arpaio, Republicans here feared that Trump would use the occasion to endorse a challenger to GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, a longtime nemesis.

Trump last week praised the sole Republican challenger at the moment, former state Sen. Kelli Ward, and many worried that he would ignite an internal party conflagration that would deliver the Senate seat to Democrats.

He did not endorse Ward or any of the other candidates considering the race but mocked Flake and the states senior senator, John McCain, even after the Republicans recent diagnosis of brain cancer.

Raising the subject of the failed GOP effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump repeatedly noted that the Senate fell just one vote away from victory after seven years of everyone proclaiming repeal and replace. One vote, he said, referring to McCain.

At that, a member of the audience screamed traitor, seemingly referring to the Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam War prisoner before going into politics.

Trump, adopting a sarcastic tone, characterized Flake as an inconsequential senator.

Nobody wants me to talk about him, Trump said. Nobody knows who the hell he is. See, I havent mentioned any names and now everyone is happy.

The president arrived in a state he won handily nine months ago with his administration reeling, most recently at his own hand.

The president, top aides and family members remain embroiled in a special prosecutors investigation into Russian influence in the November election. Unified Republican control of Washington has led to few if any major legislative victories, although he claimed again Tuesday to be the most successful president considering his first six months.

A poll released in Arizona this week said 74% of Republicans supported Trump, meaning he has lost a significant quarter of his own party base.

For any previous president, that would have meant buckling down and working with Republican leaders in the Senate and the House.

Instead, true to form, Trump on Tuesday criticized the GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, obliquely. He also did something worse: Not until more than an hour into his speech did he mention with any detail his own partys prime desire this fall tax reform.

It was a passage replete with the Trump approach. First he blasted a threatened Republican senator, Flake whose loss would give Republicans only 51 seats, the thinnest majority and then he suggested that Capitol Hill do his bidding.

We need the help of Congress, he said. Delivering no detail, he added, Were giving you the biggest tax cut in the history of the country.

Kurtis Lee and Jaweed Kaleem

Times staff writer Kurtis Lee contributed to this report from Phoenix.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

@cathleendecker

The latest from Washington

Updates on California politics

UPDATES:

9:50 p.m.: The article was updated with details from Trumps rally in Phoenix.

3:25 p.m.: The article was expanded and updated with additional details of Trumps visit to Arizona.

The story was first published at 9:30 a.m.

Go here to see the original:
Trump fills Phoenix with racially charged language, accusing media and fellow Republicans of failings - Los Angeles Times

Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? News & Observer The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag gained prominence on social media after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was charged in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teen, in Florida. The first Black Lives Matter protests came after the shooting ... and more »

Read the original here:
Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? - News & Observer

1. Look back and examine how your earliest racial attitudes were formed. If you are an oldster like me, you enjoyed Seor Wences & Speedy Gonzales. Since you were just a kid, you didn't know these caricatures shaped how you saw people of color. You also grew up loving What's Happening, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Jackson Five, and Stevie Wonder. They were easy to love because they were happy and entertaining as opposed to those angry fist-raised Black Panthers. What were they so mad about? No one told you.

1 (a). You also went to all-girls religious school where there were only two Black girls in the whole school. You and your friends never spoke to these girls, because it was easier not to mix or even try. Now you wonder what school must have been like for those two invisible girls in a sea of white girls.

2.You learned about the Civil War and the Holocaust and learned slavery and anti-semitism were evil and wrong. But then a family friend casually says, "Blacks just aren't as smart as whites." You feel uncomfortable, but since your parents don't say anything, you ignore it. In the car on the way home, your parents tell you, like it's a secret, that the man was wrong, and that all people are equal. But no one wanted to be rude, so no one said anything.

3. You love I Love Lucy but can't imagine dating someone Hispanic because they are uneducated, lazy and drink a lot. You know this because of Speedy Gonzales and Slowpoke Rodriguez. Or you are told to lock the car doors because you are driving through a Black neighborhood. When white people impersonate Black people, you laugh, because you might be poor, weak and scared but least you aren't Black or have an accent. You have a single solitary black high school friend but dating outside your race doesnt even occur to you.

4. Then you move away, go to college and make new friends. Your world view expands as you meet people of other cultures, races, and gender preferences. Since you never tried to get to know people of other races, you fear saying something offensive or ignorant, so you don't interact as easily as you do with white people. With people who are just like you, white folks from the burbs, there is some kind of easy code, where if you make a cultural generalization, you all laugh because you know it's just a joke and you aren't really racist, because you are creative and liberal and evolved. (But if you have to look around before you make a joke, to make sure no one Black is listening, chances are the joke is a teensy bit racist. Harmless racism... you tell yourself)

5. Then someone (maybe your father) mocks your new gay friend. And it bothers you enough to defend your friend. This is the beginning of understanding the equality that your parents mentioned in secret in order to not offend a racist. You might use this newfound sense of injustice to defend gay people. You watch (and join) protests for gay rights. You realize that progress and equality and allowing people to be different scares a lot of people who think giving minorities equal rights somehow means less power for them. But when watching TV and a relative asks, 'Why do Blacks have to talk like that?', you feel angry inside but say nothing.

6. Then you get a job with Black and white people. At lunch, the white people sit together and all the Black people sit together. But not together. Everyone works hard to integrate. Everyone respects everyone else but silent segregation is deeply entrenched. You don't even realize that you invite the white people from work but not the Black people, because you never really were that close. The door was there and you failed to open it.

7. You are older. You finally meet your life partner, who is not the person you married in Step 6. But you can't make a baby. You take classes to become foster parents. The brilliant, hard working Black course instructor, teaches Black, white, Hispanic and mixed race people how to be foster parents.

Foster parent classes inadvertently teach you more about white privilege than they do about anything else. White people constantly raise hands to answer the questions. The people of color dont even try. You know everyone in this room is as smart as everyone else, but you begin to wonder if they feel inferior, less educated, or dont want to appear ignorant. You stop raising your hand in an attempt to level the playing field. But that also feels wrong.

8. Your child is Black. Her birth family's day to day reality exposes you to life without a safety net. You stay close to your child's birth mother and learn how hard it is for Black people to succeed when economic, medical, educational and legal institutions stack the decks against them. You watch this woman try to do the right thing for her family. Her struggle becomes personal. Then Trayvon Martin is shot and George Zimmerman is set free and you begin to learn how much you never knew.

9. You read Nurture Shock to learn about how to not fuck up your kid. Chapter 3 rocks your world. Chapter 3 is "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race". White parents are uncomfortable discussing race with their kids, but families of color have to discuss racism when their children are as young as three, because they know their kids will be discriminated against, cursed at, bullied or worse.

If you have a daughter, you instill in her the belief that she can be anything, a doctor, lawyer, President of the United States. That's the same way to discuss skin color. Studies indicate that if white parents don't talk with their children about race, kids will learn it on their own, quite possibly not from credible or empathetic sources. The earlier we teach our kids that there are brown, white and blue eggs, but inside we all look the same, the easier. By third grade children have pretty much self-segregated based on looks.

10. When you do have the race chat, and you discuss how theres brown and white bread but its still bread. Or that there are white, brown, blue and spotted eggs, but inside its all the same it can really be that simple. So-and-so might have different color skin, come from a different culture, a different faith, a different language with different food, but we are all people with feelings who deserve love and respect.

Challenge yourself to go one step further. Ask your kid questions. Make race and equality an on-going dialogue, because as your children grow, so does their comprehension of what is happening around them. See Charlottesville and racism and Neo-Nazis and the Presidency as your opportunity to grow a compassionate, informed, integrated citizen of the world.

11. At the park or playground or through preschool, you make Black friends, and you learn to shut up and listen. You learn to not say things like "You're so articulate!" to a Black woman because she hears the silent "For a Black person" at the end of your alleged compliment. You learn to not tell Black people how much better it is nowadays then when you were young. That doesn't help Black lives right now. Your Jewish friends hopefully learn to not say, "We know about suffering and prejudice." Believe me, it's different when you are judged just by turning a street corner.

PS: And you brace yourself for the day you have to explain racism to your tiny, shining, bright, life-hungry three year old Black daughter.

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

Go here to read the rest:
How To Not A Raise A Racist - HuffPost

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its style guide to change the standard usage of the term alt-right. The guide, widely followed across the US media, first added the term in November of last year, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, revealing the alt-right to be more than an electoral flash in the pan.

The update added anti-Semitism to the original definition. It now reads:

A political grouping or tendency mixing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and populism; a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.

Both the original and updated AP definitions resemble early attempts to explain fascism in the decades following the second world war. Like the style guide versions, early writers focused attention on regime or movement attributes. This approach, often employing lists of various sizes, proved either too inclusive, or not inclusive enough.

Subsequent attempts to define fascism can be divided into two rough camps. One, now associated with Robert O. Paxton, explained fascism in terms of its ascent to social and, eventually, political power. The other, generally attributed to Roger Griffin, explained fascism as having a minimal ideological essence.

Both approaches can be useful now, to look beyond haphazard attempts to keep up with the various hatreds and styles of the alt-right (ideological sexism and transphobia could be added to the above definition, for example) to distill the ideological commitment around which the alt-right centers: namely, eugenics.

By now, the genesis of the term alt-right is well known: it originated around 2008, when either Paul Gottfried or Richard Spencer employed the term to describe the wide array of right-wingers who saw themselves as outside of, and marginalised by, the conservative mainstream. That same year, Spencer, Colin Liddell, and Andy Nowicki received $5,000 from hate site VDARE to start a blog.

When alternative-right.blogspot.com launched in 2010, the groundwork had already been laid to constitute the alt-right into a cohesive, if not coherent, movement. In the early 2000s, the paleoconservatives with whom Spencer cut his teeth had ushered libertarians towards their platform against free trade and immigration. At the same time, white nationalists whom Spencer eventually joined in their call for a white ethnostate were signing the New Orleans Protocol, a pact between previously bickering factions to never punch right and to maintain a polite and non-violent decorum.

By 2010, a vast infrastructure of blogs, think-tanks, and civic organizations had been built up. This network facilitated a coordinated far-right response to the building of an Islamic Center six blocks from the former World Trade Center site, which included sustained anti-mosque protests and Quran burnings across the United States.

The viciously sexist manosphere began establishing its own web presence, through The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) among others. Meanwhile, the Tea Party was vociferously protesting taxes and defending the for-profit healthcare system, while sharing artistic Hitlerisations of Obama and shouting racial slurs at congresspeople.

In 2012, a year after Spencer was appointed head of the National Policy Institute, a 17-year old boy named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a known racist and self-appointed armed Neighborhood Watch patrolman. Right-wing and tabloid media sought out photos of Martin in macho poses, described his demeanor as thuggish, and implied that the hoodie he was wearing on the night of his murder made him look suspicious, demonising the teen with racist dog-whistles. When Zimmerman was acquitted a year later, protests reignited around the country.

By 2013, the relentless murders of Black people by police carried momentum from Trayvon Martin rallies into the Black Lives Matter movement. As the protests escalated to highway blockades and property damage, opponents called for and committed vigilante violence.

As the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Renaissance churned out stories and statistics of Black criminality, many on the right, including Dylann Roof and Chris Cantwell, were radicalised into white nationalism.

Meanwhile, though receiving less media attention, the manufactured Gamergate controversy prompted men to harass women through rape threats, doxxing, and swatting campaigns.

Having built up a white nationalist and paleoconservative milieu around the sleeker contraction alt-right, Spencer and others sought to harness the masculine internet rage of Gamergate. A Silicon Valley-based movement called Neoreaction, which extended the logic of libertarianism to argue that a single corporation ought to run a racial slave state, bridged the ideological gap between Gamergate and the alt-right. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and former Business Insider chief technology officer Pax Dickinson are just two high-profile figures associated with Neoreaction.

In 2015, after the intentionally offensive Draw Mohammed contest in Texas was disrupted by armed men claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, various independent militia members organised another wave of anti-mosque protests this time with rifles and white nationalists.

Then, one day after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black parishioners. While most recoiled in horror in response to Roofs crimes, a far-right conservative movement was galvanised against subsequent calls to remove the Confederate flag from public spaces. The combined messages of free speech, heritage, and racial bigotry created just the platform for the increasingly broad alt-right to catapult themselves into the centre of conservative discourse.

By Halloween 2015, the National Policy Institute had a record attendance at its increasingly frequent conference, selling out of discounted tickets for attendees under 30.

After Hillary Clinton delivered a speech denouncing the alt-right as a basket of deplorables in August 2016, Google search trends for alt-right increased exponentially. They peaked again when Spencer delivered a speech in Washington DC, shouting Hitlers invocation hail victory in response to Trumps election win, as his audience gave Nazi salutes.

As this potted history reveals, the alt-right, fractious as it may be, was the result of numerous fragile alliances and unlikely coalitions. While white nationalists ultimately united the alt-right, that work did not necessarily translate into support for white nationalism, as internal denunciations of its origins reveal. The alt-right is, however, united in its commitment to eugenics.

Eugenics, the infamous Nazi-supported pseudo-science, is a belief that data proves biological or cultural explanations for differential social outcomes. The term is only explicitly embraced by the alt-rights racist core, which publishes academic books through a variety of financially-connected publishing houses (including the National Policy Institutes own Washington Summit Publishers). The historical eugenics, however, also extended to theories of gender and economic status, which have been embraced by the other segments of the alt-right. Eugenics theory posits that race, gender, and class determine intelligence and that any attempt to balance social outcomes for example, through affirmative action upends the meritocracy of natural selection.

These three axes, race, gender and class, can be seen in the alt-rights three major segments: the white nationalist-fascist nexus, the manosphere-tribalism nexus, and the libertarian-neoreactionary nexus. Although these movements are ideologically distinct, they converge when taken to their conclusion: domination through triumph.

Until the massacre in Charlottesville, the alt-right had managed to put aside its glaring differences in the conception of political praxis because of this shared faith in eugenics. In theory, fascists, tribalists, and libertarians should not get along. Fascists detest the chaos of the market and love futuristic technology. Tribalists detest social contracts of any sort and reliance on anyone, much less the government. Libertarians detest any sort of government planning and acquisitive violence.

Yet despite different theories of ideal governance circulating within the alt-right, each of the overlapping factions believes that its preferred social configuration can ensure a eugenic society: fascists through state intervention, tribalists through physical struggle, and libertarians through market forces. That the alt-right was ever able to manage to get these disparate factions to support each other (and further blend together) is an incredible feat.

The constant flux among these groups within the alt-right is something definitions like the APs style guide fail to capture or anticipate. The ever-changing list of bigotries espoused by the alt-right are not its defining characteristic. Each emerges from the core commitment to eugenics, which operates as the basis of its recruiting strategy.

The framework of eugenics allows a shifting of focus from particulars about governance or bigotry to innate ability and natural hierarchy in the abstract. The danger in merely listing what the alt-right has been is losing sight of where its going next.

Mike Isaacson is a lecturer at John Jay College and an anti-fascist researcher. Download his latest zine, You Cant Punch Every Nazi.

Link:
The 'alt-right' is an unstable coalition with one thing holding it together - Red Pepper

LinkedIn is primarily used as a business networking tool, or to find a job. While LinkedIn refreshed its entire site earlier this year, most users dont use it for daily social networking updates like they might on Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn is trying to tempt users to share more on the site by adding video support today.

Video testing began last month, and now all LinkedIn users can upload videos to the social network. LinkedIns Android and iOS apps support video uploads, but theres no live streaming support available at launch. Microsoft is rolling this out globally to all LinkedIn users over the next few weeks, and members will be able to access analytics on locations of viewers, the amount of comments, likes, and views, and the ability to see what companies are viewing videos.

LinkedIns video addition follows the Tinder-style launch of a feature for pairing mentors with people looking for professional advice last month. While Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion last year, the software maker has largely rolled out features that were already planned ahead of the acquisition. Microsoft did release a new Windows 10 app for LinkedIn last month, complete with notifications for the notification center.

See original here:
LinkedIn adds video support to become more of a social network - The Verge