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No wonder Trump is preemptively depicting himself not as a loser, but as the victim of a rigged election. You know he won’t go away quietly. Nor will his base, whose fire he has recklessly stoked. I can’t believe he’d give a gracious concession speech, a call to come together and support the one president our nation has. He’s more likely to summon a retributive movement – a fifth column of Trumpistas.
Hearing her biography over and over during the Democratic convention confirmed one undisputed fact about her: she’s not only “from the Sixties,” as she said at a Democratic debate last year, but she’s of the Sixties. And she’s of a very specific side of the Sixties, the earnest activists who wanted to transform the world by digging deep into policy and challenging outdated norms and practices. For these activists, the popular phrase “question authority” had both a political and personal meaning.
All successful people, particularly those in the public eye, have a sneaking suspicion that they’re really just frauds, and that when the public takes a closer look and stops praising their “genius,” then they’ll be found out. For most high achievers, that bit of insecurity is a motivator, the drive that allows them not to settle for the mundane and to keep the bar high for everything they do. But that’s not the same for mediocre people like Trump, the ones who lack the tools to reach that higher bar. So, in lieu of reaching high, they go low.
In the next few weeks, Aug. 5-21, the city of Rio de Janeiro is going to host the 31st Olympic Games. Like a mother preparing her home for 500,000 tourists, Rio has swept the city’s poverty under the rug by increasing police and army presence in favelas. As a result, part of the local population isn’t that anxious about the games. Militarized police presence and violence are only some of the issues that have affected the Afro-Brazilian population.
There’s the Hillary Clinton who is and always has been an activist, advocate, and idealist determined to advance civil rights, promote women’s equality, champion the strivers, and upend the status quo by using the levers of power to effect political and social change. But no, there’s another Hillary Clinton, a calculating, privileged member of the elite who is too cozy with power, condescends to ordinary Americans, sees herself as above the law, and manipulates every word and sentence for political, personal, and financial gain.
When GOP presidential contender Donald Trump shouts that he’s the “law-and-order candidate,” he is pilfering the line that George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton worked to death during their White House bids. The law-and-order line is heavy with racially coded images of rampant black crime, and this is a surefire way to pander to fearful suburban whites.
Labeling is a social construct. Words derive their strength only from the power given to them by people, but the implication of an empathetic void or even malicious intent for fellow members of society elicits a visceral and very human response from target and spectator alike. It is used by varying entities consciously and unconsciously, offensively and defensively, but on all fronts requires little effort to create, is self-sustaining and occurs virtually unnoticed.
On July 6th, 2016, in an especially horrific and egregious case that gained national attention Philando Castile, a black man, was killed while allegedly complying with police officers in Minnesota. It was the second such incident in two days, following the public outrage the previous day due to the shooting of another black man, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. Sterling was shot while being pinned down by police officers on the ground. Castile was killed while sitting in his car.