Taking a knee, inter-ethnic distrust, and the culture war

Recently Trump sparked a firestorm of controversy about race when he called the few NFL players that were taking a knee during the National Anthem sons of bitches for their lack of patriotism.  This is similar to many outrageous things that Trump has said about race, such as in Charlottesville when neo-nazis and white supremacists held a rally, and clashed with counter-protesters (some of whom were from antifa, a far-left aggressive movement that sometimes uses intimidation to attempt to silence its enemies).  Trump then said there were good people on both sides, and seemed to repeatedly waver when condemning the neo-nazis and white supremacists.  

This isn't just symbolic politics.  He is working to cut resources for minority communities, such as by working for some horrible changes such as massive dumping of toxics into their water, air and land in ways not seen in decades, cutting government services, responding with weak emergency funding for minority communities, cutting medical care, along with a host of other real policy issues that are disastrous for African American and Hispanic communities.    

But the symbolic politics is hard to ignore.  It is so energizing.  It gets everyone involved in discussions about social issues.  What is legitimate protest?  Where do we have the right to free speech?  How bad is the problem of police brutality?   How can we address issues of police brutality?  etc.

The president insists that people died to fight for our flag and anthem. 

And he insists that kneeling during the anthem is disrespecting the flag. 

Lets not just accept this – people did not die for the flag.  They died because politicians decided we needed another war.   And there is no reason to say that the only way to respect the flag is to stand during the anthem. In fact, if you love something you won’t just shut up when you see something wrong.  And taking a knee isn’t even close to disrespectful.  Taking a crap on the flag would be disrespectful.  Kapernick has made it clear that a veteran told him that the military often takes a knee out of respect, and thus Kapernick chose to take a knee rather than just sit on the sidelines as he had been doing.  Why Trump and others think they have a corner on the only way to be patriotic is beyond me.  Its just as true to say that people died for the right to disrespect the flag.    

Its interesting to see someone like the president who has bucked repeated patriotic traditions tell private businesses how to make personnel decisions to demand more patriotism among its employees.  If Trump is our employee, then perhaps we could demand he act more traditionally patriotic.  

The first amendment does not apply to private citizens restricting speech of other private citizens.   So of course, any business owner can restrict the speech of its employees.  This likely won’t happen in the NFL because of the union. 

But the 1^st amendment does protect people from restrictions on their speech and assembly by government employees. Obviously, the president cannot legally restrict free speech, but he can have an opinion and create a controversy, which he has done.  Perhaps he had an effect in blackballing Kapernick.  He advocated such behavior before and again last week.  If Trump had an influence in getting him blackballed for his speech, then perhaps there is a lawsuit here?

This really isn't about patriotism, but about stoking distrust and responding to fear of a powerful minority among his base of supporters.  Criticizing protesters  -- especially people protesting against him -- has been common for Trump.  He's advocated violence against them and said repeatedly that they should leave the country if they don't like it.  

This motivates Trump's base. 

I know that there has been a shift in strategies used by the political parties when I see the new republicans are wading so heavily into the culture wars.  They are acting like liberals.  For decades it was only the democrats and those on the left that would demonize outsiders (and insiders) for their political speech.  There still remains that streak of anti-tolerance among the left.  You can see clearly amplified among the Antifa activists and other far left or anarchist activists, many of whom are on college campuses such as Berkeley, where the intolerance has grown to the level of self-justified violence: If you represent speech we disagree with, we call that violence and thus your violence justifies our preemptive PHYSICAL violence.  There is no doubt that this ideology of intolerance is a huge problem.  It may be hard for us to address, because there are worse problems on the far right, such as neo-nazis and white supremacists who are responsible for a large portion of homegrown terrorism and most of the citizen militias, most of whom are not patriotic in the traditional sense, and many of whom are ready to overthrow the government through a race war.   But their existence does not negate the problems of intolerance on the far left.  

In Charlottesville, where a white supremacist terrorist killed a peaceful counter-protester, not every person on either side was in alignment with the most radical of their own allies.  Not everyone there on the right was a white supremacist/neo-nazi, and not everyone there on the left was from antifa.  Protests are diverse.  There are always people there just for curiosity sake, legal observers, medics, journalists, undercover police, etc.  Of course there were good people there on both sides.  Of course the aggression and violence by the left is a problem.  We need to acknowledge that.  But lets not get off track here.  Acknowledging that does not negate the much larger problem of the rising white supremacist threat in the US and around the world.  

  In the USA, since the rise of Trump, there has been a massive increase in hate crimes against Muslims, as well as a huge rise in white supremacist groups, many of whom have made it very clear that they feel emboldened, and have gained membership, because they believe they have a friend in the White House.  Trump has repeatedly faltered to condemn them and has repeatedly avoided disavowing their support.  They represent a huge proportion of all homegrown terrorism.

The comments after Charlottesville were just some in a long history of his refusal to clearly criticize the KKK and other white supremacist groups when he is asked if they are a problem or if he disavows their support.   We are seeing the rise of these groups also around the world.  

Earlier this week, Germany for the first time since WWII has elected dozens of members of far right parties that promote xenophobia, forgetting the holocaust and celebrating war and non-war achievements of Hitler and the German army during WWII.  This of course is skirting with legality, as there are laws in Germany (and a dozen other European countries) that outlaw the promotion/denial of the holocaust. 

Yes, the antifa folks are a problem because of their intolerance for ideas with which they disagree. Over the last few months, we've seen this repeatedly on Berkeley campus again and again, but also at Trump rallies.  There does seem to be a desire to silence the right, especially to silence the far right who espouse radical or controversial views.  This really isn't that surprising, as we know over the last few decades there are many examples of the left and members of the democratic party and their attempts at silencing or firing or shaming people for saying something offensive based on race, gender, or sexuality.   For decades its been only the democrats that seemed to have thin skin. 

 In the last few decades, conservatives typically have had much less concern for using symbolic politics as a way to motivate their core supporters.  We have to go back to the 1990s to see conservatives getting involved in the culture wars.  Back then, one of the most important core issues to the culture wars was morality, and it was the republicans that tried to play up symbolically and with policy, their traditional morality against obvious ongoing changes in attitudes and behaviors toward less traditional attitudes and behaviors.  They were stoking fears of the rise of new sexual attitudes, behaviors, and communities.

Couple this with the repeated "bad behavior" of republican politicians that showed the conservative sexual ideology and policy was not something they believed in personally, and it was clearly a losing game for the right.  They could not reach enough of their voters with such old-fashioned views, especially when the advocates themselves didn't even believe in the cause.  But while traditional views of sexuality have become too unpopular for effective politicking, patriotism is still a potentially powerful issue for the republicans.  

Is Trump a racist for so thoroughly condemning the NFL players (most of whom are Black) for merely silently taking a knee in protest while refusing to clearly condemn white supremacist who commit acts of terrorism during a protest?  

Well, first racism is the belief that one race is naturally superior to another.  There is no direct evidence of that in Trumps response, but it surely looks sympathetic to white supremacist and antagonistic to African Americans.  

Why would Trump do this?

Is he a maniac?

Hardly.  He makes calculated political decisions to keep his base on board.

This taking a knee controversy started for most people last week in Alabama when Trump spoke at a rally and got a tremendous response from the crowd when he said the Sons of Bitches should be fired.  Perhaps they were reacting to his catch phrase "You're Fired!", but he took it to mean that his base hates the NFL protest.

His supporters are now calling Trump intuitive for hearing that excitement and then spending the next few days wading into the culture wars of race and patriotism through repeated inflammatory tweets toward the silently protesting players.   He's now tweeted over 20 times on this issue.   While he was doing that he was ignoring the Puerto Rican people -- citizens of the USA -- who are living on an island devastated without power for weeks if not months.  How would you survive without power?  Yet Trump spent his only tweets about Puerto Rican hurricane to condemn them for their problems before the hurricane.  

Is this a sign of racism that he ignores or dismisses issues important to Black and Brown people?  No but it says a lot about Trump's base and definitely shows Trump is taking sides in a culture war.  Trump is using race and patriotism for political purposes.  Trump does not have to be a white supremacist to know that his supporters -- his "base" -- will be politically motivated to support Trump and vote republican if they see a rising left wing state with empowered minorities and people that would rather protest their issues than praise the flag.  Fear is a great motivator.

Every time there is another protest against Trump or against the neo-nazis, or against police brutality, Trump does not ignore it for a reason.  It is good for him because it motivates his base.

  Trump brought up Charlottesville several times after being widely condemned by almost everyone in the mainstream.  Why would he do this? Is he insane?  Insane like a fox, maybe.  

Making sure his base sees these protests and race issues are going on around them, then the base is politically motivated to support trump and vote republican.   If they all vote, and we operate in a two party system, they can win elections, as they have already showed.

Some say that perhaps the biggest problem with what Trump is doing is that the attempt to motivate his base -- only about 1/3 of the country -- has moved sports into a higher political realm that it has been.  Traditionally sports has been a unifier.  Sports was one of the first institutions to integrate racially.  And people who hold racially prejudiced views still root for African athletes.   So sports has been a unifier across race lines.   Trump has disrupted that.  Of course, Trump didn't bring politics to sports.  The anthem is political.  And athletes have a long history of activism, perhaps Ali being the most famous case of athlete who put his career on the line for his activism. 

Using fear of a protesting, powerful minority has worked in the past.  This is a longstanding, winning strategy for Trump.  

Recently Facebook did an about face after months of denials -- now they have uncovered 3000 fake ads purchased by Russians to help Trump before the election.

Lets stop for a second and acknowledge what has happened.  Facebook was paid by Russians to purchase fake news, and that was then used to help the Trump campaign.   Facebook became an agent of a foreign government, and was weaponized as a tool to infiltrate and influence our elections.  

Facebook is a behemoth like a bank too big to fail. How bad would they have to get before they were abandoned, criticized or even fined?

My guess is Facebook will suffer zero penalties for their collusion with foreign governments to influence our elections.  Sad.

We don't know the full content of the ads, but some information has been released.  The general trend is that these were ads promoting black lives matter and other left-wing events.  What?   Why would Russians buy black lives matter ads to help Trump?  

Remember. This is the culture war.  

The ads were targeted not at democrats, but at republicans.  The Russians understood the culture war.  If you can get the republican base to become afraid of the rise of minority power, they will be motivated to support the opposition party (i.e., republicans).  They will buy into the slogan to "make america great again" and vote republican.   The million dollar question is how did the Russians have this same strategy as the Trump campaign?  I suppose figuring this out isn't rocket science, but the connection between the Russians and the campaign in using such an odd and sneaky campaign tactic does warrant further investigation.  I'm sure Mueller's team is looking deeply into what ads were bought, where they were displayed, and if somehow the Trump campaign had any input into this strategy. 

Regardless of the investigation about Russia, Trump is no fool.  He knows how to stoke the culture war for his own benefit.

All of this culture wars conflict also has the added benefit of drawing attention away from the Russian investigation that is plaguing Trump's whole administration, along with drawing attention away from his failing approval ratings, the escalation of conflict with N. Korea, and the failure to accomplish his core campaign promises such as healthcare repeal, the border wall, or tax reform.  

However, wading into the culture war may do more harm to Trump than he thinks.  Likely if we talked a lot more about his failures he would work harder to overcome these failures.   If we don't acknowledge the failures, perhaps he will work less hard to overcome them.   If you don’t support Trump’s policies, perhaps you should actually support these forays into the culture wars, at least until the next election.