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Stacey Abrams in All In: The Fight For DemocracyPhoto: Amazon

Note: The writer of this review watched All In: The Fight For Democracy from home on a digital screener. Before making the decision to see itor any other filmin a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Heresan interview on the matter with scientific experts.

The agitprop documentary All In: The Fight For Democracy presents itself as an urgent dispatch from the frontlines of the voting wars. The movie is so up to date that its opening minutes include footage from the summer of 2020, referencing both the state primaries that have taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic and President Trumps recent warnings that enforcing existing voting laws could be catastrophic to Republicans. The bulk of the story that directors Lisa Corts and Liz Garbus are telling has its roots in the past 150 years of American history, from the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement. But more than anything, All In is the story of the rise of Black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, and young adult participation in American democracyand of how the powers that be have scrambled to change the rules of the game to keep those blocs from winning.

B-

B-

Lisa Corts, Liz Garbus

Select theaters September 9; Amazon Prime September 18

The most persuasive voice in All In belongs to Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose close 2018 loss to Brian Kempthe man who was, at the time, in charge of the voting process in the stateraised a higher-than-usual state of alarm among those whove been tracking the recent decay in our democratic institutions. Abrams herself refused to concede that shed lost, pointing to the myriad constitutionally questionable ways that Kemp made it easier for his supporters to vote and harder for hers, including reducing polling stations and auto-purging registration rolls. Much of All Ins final thirdthe films most gripping sectiondetails how Abrams worked extra-hard to get out the vote, while all the most egregious voter-suppression tactics were brought to bear by her opponent.

Throughout, Corts and Garbus use Abrams case as a frame, starting with a moment where Abrams discusses her personal experiences as a Black woman growing up in Georgia, seeing her credentials questioned and her opportunities curtailed. All Ins central argument is that the advances made during the civil rights movement are being rolled back across the country perhaps because, ironically, the narrative surrounding public figures like Abrams has changed. Successes like hers are now often held updisingenuously, depending on whos doing the holdingas an example of the end of systemic racism, not as an example of someone battling to overcome it.

The larger story All In tells about the difficult process of making American democracy more democratic is supported by archival footage, personal anecdotes, and a lot of dot-connecting between different recent national news stories, from the rise of local authoritarians like Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the multiple recent Supreme Court cases dealing with gerrymandering and ballot access. Corts and Garbus draw a line between Jim Crow America, which has been the backdrop to so many feel-good stories of civil rights triumphs, and the America of today, which seems to be retreating rapidly to that past.

Frankly, All In would be better if it were less expansive. A more straightforward bio-doc about Abrams, with extended digressions about the larger history behind her voting rights activism, mightve been more powerful. Instead, the absence of one clear narrative through-line makes the movie feel more like an aggregation of alarming incidents than the richer piece of contemporary journalism it should be. All In is still plenty effective, but it lags behind the likes of social media and late-night comedy shows, which have presented a lot of this same information in packages that are more emotional and entertaining.

That said, the film does have real resonance, even beyond its original intention of promoting voting and cautioning about voter suppression. This summer of unrest has been a reminder that the United States has for decades grappled withand failed to resolvequestions about who really gets a voice in the grand democratic experiment. In All In, clips of President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-60s calling for a reckoning with the crippling legacy of bigotry and right-wing pundit Ann Coulter just a few years ago calling for the return of Jim Crow voting restrictions is a reminder that no matter how far weve come, we can always turn back.

Continued here:
The alarming documentary All In offers a possible preview of Novembers election - The A.V. Club

During her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., found herself at the center of a controversy about which Americans can claim to be Black, or Black enough because of both her biracial identity and her immigrant parents.

Born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris was subject to a smear campaign insinuating that she was not Black at all which began anew immediately after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced she was his pick for the vice presidential nomination. After a July 2019 debate, critics took issue with her for discussing a topic they viewed to be most relevant to American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) busing to racially integrate schools. Although Harris was bused to a majority white school in California as part of a desegregation campaign, her lineage didnt include enslaved African Americans, the group such efforts targeted, her detractors argued. (Harris' father, Donald, wrote in 2018 that his research suggests he and his daughters are descended from Black people enslaved in Jamaica.)

To have her Blackness questioned in this way mustve been jarring for a woman who graduated from the historically Black Howard University, was born in Oakland, California hometown of the Black Panther Party and has likely been viewed as Black by a majority white society.

But the questions about what constitutes Blackness arent new.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama also faced questions about his racial identity, having grown up outside the continental United States without his Kenyan father. And when he identified as solely Black on the 2010 census form, some mixed-race activists openly expressed their disappointment with his decision to exclude his white heritage even though he did not have the option to identify as biracial until a decade before, in the 2000 census, which took place well into his adulthood (and three years after he had begun serving in the Illinois state Senate).

Until 2000, the federal government hadnt allowed members of the public to identify as two or more races on the census. For most of the 20th century, Americans either had to pick one race or "other," a shift from even the late 1800s when the census included racial designations for people with fractions of African ancestry."

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After the 2000 census gave mixed-race people more options, civil rights groups for African Americans and Asian Americans challenged the move, fearing the voting power of people of color would be diluted if the multiracial category reduced their counted populations during the congressional apportionment process. But it was already evident that multiracial people were increasingly choosing not to identify as any one race: Two million Americans selected the other category on the 1990 census.

It was for that reason that multiracial activists had spent the next decade campaigning for the government to allow for multiple racial identities on the census form and succeeded.

The multiracial option isnt the only way that the census, which also included the term African American for the first time in 2000, will have complicated Black identity. Black people from immigrant backgrounds may now specify their ethnic origins on the 2020 census, which owes a debt to the same campaign two decades ago to differentiate the types of Blackness in America.

The change coincides with the rise of the ADOS movement, which seeks to prioritize the socio-political goals of African Americans whose families have lived in the United States for generations, rather than their counterparts whose families arrived recently and voluntarily. Black immigrants to the United States enjoy higher household incomes and rates of educational attainment than U.S.-born African Americans, a trend that gets overlooked when the Black experience is universalized. (However, some Black immigrants, such as Afro-Latinos, are speaking up about the marginalization they face in society.)

The ADOS movement includes supporters as wide-ranging as Harvard philosophy professor Cornel West, who has said that it is giving working-class Black people a voice, and white conservative political commentator Ann Coulter. But the movement has many detractors, some of whom view it as divisive at best and xenophobic at worst. Others have argued that it ignores the long history of African Americans with immigrant roots, including black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who was Jamaican, and Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, whose mother was Grenadian.

Similarly, the idea that multiracial people are distinct from other Black people overlooks the history of mixed-race civil rights activists such as Homer Plessy, Walter Francis White, Adam Clayton Powell and Diane Nash, all of whom couldve "passed" for white.

Still, 20 years into the movement to allow mixed-race Americans to acknowledge their differentiation from Black Americans, the multiracial demographic is one of the fastest-growing groups in this country. And it's fair to say that the oldest Gen Zers and the youngest millennials are unfamiliar with a society that deemed someone wholly Black and nothing else for having a trace of African ancestry.

Today, its not uncommon for young people with two Black parents to view themselves as completely distinct from those with just one hence, the outcry that the new show BlackAF didnt exclusively star actors with two Black parents, or the recent charges of anti-black racism leveled at the biracial rapper Doja Cat.

And Meghan Markle born to a black mother and a white father exactly 20 years after Obama has consistently identified as biracial, reinforcing the generational divide in perceptions of Black identity.

Or take singer-songwriter Kehlani, who has white, black and Native American ancestry: In May, she give fans permission on Twitter to call her mixed. For a multiracial woman, thats not exactly a groundbreaking announcement, but the reasons she gave for doing so reflect a shift in how black identity is viewed today. The 25-year-old R&B star explained the importance of recognizing that she does not face the same issues as black women w 2 black parents" and that to suggest otherwise perpetuates the erasure of these women.

Generations ago, when the archaic one-drop rule which declared that a drop of African blood made one Black still shaped African American identity, these discussions about authentic representations of Blackness werent as likely to occur. In 1982, Susie Guillory Phipps, who didnt realize until adulthood that she was 3/32nds Black under the law, fought the state of Louisiana to have the race listed on her birth certificate changed from colored to white. She lost, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

As recently as the 1990s, mixed-race people were typically encouraged to identify or simply identified in society as Black, even if they looked racially ambiguous (see: Mariah Carey). And it was considered laughable, if not unthinkable, that a darker-skinned multiracial person would reject the Black category in favor of identifying as multiracial. Golf star Tiger Woods is a case in point: In 1997, he was widely ridiculed for saying that he didnt consider himself as Black but cablinasian, a portmanteau of Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian, representing the entirety of his racial background.

Just three years later, Woods and other mixed people who didnt want to be boxed into one racial category would be vindicated by the census. And today, Blasian is an acceptable way for people of mixed Asian and Black heritage to refer to themselves.

Unbound by the one-drop rule or even by the broad term African American, Black people in the United States have more freedom than ever to identify themselves as they choose. For some, that means not describing themselves as solely Black; for others, that means specifying their ethnic origins, embracing the ADOS label or taking none at all. Each choice is potentially controversial but more important than how any one person identifies is that Blackness in this country has long been nuanced, and always will be.

Related:

Nadra Nittle is a Los Angeles-based journalist. Her writing has been featured inVox, The Guardian, Business Insider, KCET and other publications.

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Kamala Harris is Asian and Black. That shouldn't be confusing in 2020 but it is to some. - NBC News

This is an opinion piece.

These soldiers are disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued the officers of Hitlers storm troopers.

-- The president is substituting military dictatorship for the Constitution of the United States.

-- My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory.

All this because, after 50 days of raging violence, President Trump has finally sent federal agents to restore order in Portland, Oregon.

No wait. Different Democrats and different president.

Although all those quotes are indeed from Democrats about a Republican president, it wasnt Trump. They were Democrats Richard Russell, George Wallace and Orval Faubus, denouncing President Dwight Eisenhower for sending troops to enforce desegregation at a schoolhouse in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In 1983, Faubus was warmly embraced by Bill Clinton at his gubernatorial inauguration. Todays Democrats are Orval Faubus.

In Portland, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Atlanta and elsewhere, children are not merely being blocked from the schoolhouse door -- theyre being killed. Theyre being maimed. Citizens are having their property looted and their public spaces destroyed, all with the connivance of local Democratic officials.

And once again, the Democrats are championing states rights to protect domestic terrorists.

Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped. -- Nancy Pelosi

Democrats and the media want the federal government to brutally crack down on people who dont wear masks -- whatever the states say -- but faced with an actual violent rebellion, the feds are supposed to stand back and let the governors lead!

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler called the federal officers protecting American citizens an attack on our democracy. Yes, Orval, Portland is occupied territory -- just like Little Rock in 1957!

Democrats dont care that they are mimicking monstrous figures from the nations history. They dont care that they are taking sides with Antifa, whose express mission is to kill police officers and destroy America.

Oh, well get away with it. The media wont report on the violent rioting that the federal government is quelling.

Boy, are they right.

If Faubus had had MSNBC, CNN and The New York Times covering for him, Americans wouldnt have had the first idea why Eisenhower was sending troops to Little Rock.

Until the feds arrived in Portland last week, the Times most expansive description of the riots was this aside in a chipper article about Seattles autonomous zone: Perhaps taking a cue from Seattle, demonstrators in Portland, Philadelphia, Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere have tried to set up protest sites of their own.

The media pitch the Lesbian Motorcycle Collective as Portland Moms.

When reporting on the protests, MSNBC and CNN invariably feature some area of Portland far from the carnage, showing people strolling, the sun shining, and not a single building on fire!

Youll never see the part of the city -- a little area called downtown Portland -- where thousands of black-clad Antifa have been laying waste to everything in sight.

You wont see the miles of charming graffiti spray-painted on every vertical surface [such as] Abolish America, No Good Cops.

Trump should say nothing about Portland except: Look at the videos. I recommend you start with journalist Andy Ngos Twitter feed: @MrAndyNgo.

After hiding the truth for 50 days, this week, Democrats and the media have been gasping in horror at the sight of federal law enforcement agents appearing in such a bucolic little burg.

Heres some of whats being hidden from you:

Night after night, the peaceful protesters have thrown bombs, bricks, frozen water bottles and cement blocks at the Portland police, whom they vastly outnumber. Theyve fired mortars, marbles, ball bearings and commercial-grade fireworks at officers, sending dozens to the hospital.

They have blinded police with laser guns, slashed their tires, assaulted journalists, and set fire to buildings, statues and homeless peoples belongings.

So far, the rioters have done millions of dollars in property damage. In the first few days of July, shootings were up 240% compared to the same period in 2019.

Portland police precincts and the federal courthouse have been under constant siege -- windows smashed and people barricaded inside as the buildings are set ablaze.

Or, as summarized by Ali Velshi on the Antifa Channel: While most protesters are peaceful, small groups have clashed with authorities.

Look at the videos.

Once federal officers moved in, the Times finally decided to tell its readers about Portland. For an accurate portrayal of the protests, the Times interviewed local reporter Robert Evans, who has tweeted:

-- I feel like tonight Portland finally joined the pantheon of cities that are Good At Rioting

-- One of Portlands lessons for the Left is that, sometimes, if you meet liberals in the right way, they wind up wanting to break down the doors of a federal building with sledgehammers.

So you know youre getting the straight poop from one of Portlands leading antifa cheerleaders.

I dont care if you havent heard about whats happening in these cities. I dont care that their governors and mayors dont think its a problem. Unless youre Orval Faubus, its the federal governments responsibility to quash insurrections and protect the rights of American citizens.

The very reason we have a Constitution (instead of the Articles of Confederation) is precisely to allow the federal government to put down rebellions. It wasnt a federal school in Little Rock. Its the presidents job more vital than randomly bombing Syria! to suppress domestic insurrections.

This is not the first time Republican presidents have had to deal with terrorist-supporting Democrats. It probably wont be the last.

New York Times bestselling author and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter is a graduate of CornellUniversity and the University of Michigan Law School. She was a law clerk for the 8th CircuitCourt of Appeals, legal counsel to Sen. Spencer Abraham on the Senate Judiciary Committee, andpracticed corporate law. She was a political pundit for MSNBC from 1996 to 1999. In addition to her newspaper column for Andrews McMeel Syndication, Ann is a regular contributor to conservative news sites Human Events and Breitbart. She is a native of New Canaan, Connecticut.

See original here:
Ann Coulter: Democrats are the Antifa Party | Free Share - Sand Mountain Reporter

These soldiers are disregarding and overriding the elementary rights of American citizens by applying tactics which must have been copied from the manual issued the officers of Hitlers storm troopers.

The president is substituting military dictatorship for the Constitution of the United States.

My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory.

All this because, after 50 days of raging violence, President Trump has finally sent federal agents to restore order in Portland, Oregon.

No wait. Different Democrats and different president.

Although all those quotes are indeed from Democrats about a Republican president, it wasnt Trump. They were Democrats Richard Russell, George Wallace and Orval Faubus, denouncing President Dwight Eisenhower for sending troops to enforce desegregation at a schoolhouse in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In 1983, Faubus was warmly embraced by Bill Clinton at his gubernatorial inauguration. Todays Democrats are Orval Faubus.

In Portland, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Atlanta and elsewhere, children are not merely being blocked from the schoolhouse door theyre being killed. Theyre being maimed. Citizens are having their property looted and their public spaces destroyed, all with the connivance of local Democratic officials.

And once again, the Democrats are championing states rights to protect domestic terrorists.

Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped. Nancy Pelosi

Democrats and the media want the federal government to brutally crack down on people who dont wear masks whatever the states say but faced with an actual violent rebellion, the feds are supposed to stand back and let the governors lead!

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler called the federal officers protecting American citizens an attack on our democracy. Yes, Orval, Portland is occupied territory just like Little Rock in 1957!

Democrats dont care that they are mimicking monstrous figures from the nations history. They dont care that they are taking sides with antifa, whose express mission is to kill police officers and destroy America.

Oh, well get away with it. The media wont report on the violent rioting that the federal government is quelling.

Boy, are they right.

If Faubus had had MSNBC, CNN and The New York Times covering for him, Americans wouldnt have had the first idea why Eisenhower was sending troops to Little Rock.

Until the feds arrived in Portland last week, the Times most expansive description of the riots was this aside in a chipper article about Seattles autonomous zone: Perhaps taking a cue from Seattle, demonstrators in Portland, Philadelphia, Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere have tried to set up protest sites of their own.

The media pitch the Lesbian Motorcycle Collective as Portland Moms.

When reporting on the protests, MSNBC and CNN invariably feature some area of Portland far from the carnage, showing people strolling, the sun shining, and not a single building on fire!

Youll never see the part of the city a little area called downtown Portland where thousands of black-clad antifa have been laying waste to everything in sight.

You wont see the miles of charming graffiti spray-painted on every vertical surface: Fk Cops, Fk ICE, Abolish America, No Good Cops, Kill Cops, Cops = Bastards, Pigs!, Yes All Cops, Oink, Oink, Fck Trump, Kill the Police, Dead Cops, Pigs, Slaughterhouse Die Piggie Die, Burn Pigs, and of course, the antifa slogan, ACAB, or All Cops Are Bastards.

Trump should say nothing about Portland except: Look at the videos. I recommend you start with journalist Andy Ngos Twitter feed: @MrAndyNgo.

After hiding the truth for 50 days, this week, Democrats and the media have been gasping in horror at the sight of federal law enforcement agents appearing in such a bucolic little burg.

Heres some of whats being hidden from you:

Night after night, the peaceful protesters have thrown bombs, bricks, frozen water bottles and cement blocks at the Portland police, whom they vastly outnumber. Theyve fired mortars, marbles, ball bearings and commercial-grade fireworks at officers, sending dozens to the hospital.

They have blinded police with laser guns, slashed their tires, assaulted journalists, and set fire to buildings, statues and homeless peoples belongings.

So far, the rioters have done millions of dollars in property damage. In the first few days of July, shootings were up 240% compared to the same period in 2019.

Portland police precincts and the federal courthouse have been under constant siege windows smashed and people barricaded inside as the buildings are set ablaze.

Or, as summarized by Ali Velshi on the Antifa Channel: While most protesters are peaceful, small groups have clashed with authorities.

Look at the videos.

Once federal officers moved in, the Times finally decided to tell its readers about Portland. For an accurate portrayal of the protests, the Times interviewed local reporter Robert Evans, who has tweeted:

I feel like tonight Portland finally joined the pantheon of cities that are Good At Rioting

One of Portlands lessons for the Left is that, sometimes, if you meet liberals in the right way, they wind up wanting to break down the doors of a federal building with sledgehammers.

So you know youre getting the straight poop from one of Portlands leading antifa cheerleaders.

I dont care if you havent heard about whats happening in these cities. I dont care that their governors and mayors dont think its a problem.

Unless youre Orval Faubus, its the federal governments responsibility to quash insurrections and protect the rights of American citizens.

The very reason we have a Constitution (instead of the Articles of Confederation) is precisely to allow the federal government to put down rebellions. It wasnt a federal school in Little Rock. Its the presidents job more vital than randomly bombing Syria! to suppress domestic insurrections.

This is not the first time Republican presidents have had to deal with terrorist-supporting Democrats. It probably wont be the last.

Ann Coulter is a regular contributor to conservative news sites Human Events and Breitbart. She is a native of New Canaan, Conn.

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Ann Coulter: Democrats: The party of Antifa | Opinion - Today's News-Herald

Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is seeking the GOP nomination to replace retiring Republican Pat Roberts in this year's race for Roberts' U.S. Senate seat. And he has to thank for his campaign's viability an $850,000 investment from controversial tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

"I think the money that that super PAC is putting into the raceprimarily through this one rich guyis absolutely the lifeblood of the pro-Kobach campaign at this moment," Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas, told Recode. "You take that money away and Kobach doesn't have a lot of campaign left."

That Thieloften identified, including by himself, as a libertarianis dedicating himself to a candidate whose primary obsession is immigration restriction is a further sign of the tumultuous swirl of hypernationalism pushed by and surrounding Thiel (and discussed at length in a story in the August/September issue of Reason, now available online to subscribers).

Unnamed friends of Thiel tell Recodethat Thiel "has a really strong preference for people who stick their middle finger up to the status quo and conventional wisdom. There is nobody who I think was more obviously sticking his middle finger up at conventional wisdom quite like Kris Kobach."

Thiel back in 2016 shook up some of his libertarian fans by becoming a Trump delegate and hyping him onstage at the Republican National Convention. Thiel went on to become a poster boy for the new conservative nationalism and has been reported to be disappointed in the president lately and so far sitting out this presidential race.

Thiel had, however, reportedly began donating to immigration-restrictionist causes at least as far back as 2008, and over the years he's given to a wide variety of GOP candidates and PACs, including $2 million to a Carly Fiorina PAC.

Thiel's interest in Kobach is likely rooted in the same reasons he was enthusiastic about Trump. Kobach was one of the minds behind Trump's Muslim registry and his unrepentant anti-immigration views mark him as perhaps Trumpier than Trump. (Kobach believes COVID-19 death numbers are being manipulated up to harm the president, for one.) Trump endorsed Kobach in his failed attempt to become governor of Kansas in 2018, and Thiel began funding Kobach during that race. Fellow disillusioned Trump superfan and immigration-hater Ann Coulter co-hosted a Kobach fundraiser in Thiel's New York apartment.

Recodereports that Thiel has "cut at least three successive checks to [a pro-Kobach PAC called Free Forever], the most recent for a half-million dollars last month." The PAC has "spent more than four times what Kobach's campaign itself has spent on television and radio adsThe heavy amount of mailers sent by the PAC have run the gamut of attacking [Republican challenger Roger] Marshall as 'anti-American' for being insufficiently tough on immigration, alleging that he voted to fund 'Rosie O'Donnell summer camp,' 'global warming musicals,' and 'transgender plays,' and promising that Kobach will 'stop the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.'"

Thiel's other candidate donations this year are going to another super immigration hawk, and advocate of sending in federal troops to quell protesters, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.

Kobach is also one of the leading voices claiming American elections are rife with fraud and had his attempt to fight it when he was Kansas' secretary of state overturned in 2018 by a federal judge who questioned the reality of the problem Kobach was allegedly solving.

The primary election for the U.S. Senate seat Kobach is vying for will be held on August 4.

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Immigration Hawk Kris Kobach's Senate Campaign Is Heavily Supported by Peter Thiel - Reason