October 16th, 2016
10-16-2016It's About Race, Stupid
Dylan Matthews contests those who say that those voting for Donald Trump are from the economic fringe. In fact, 50% of Trump voters are simply Republicans, and vote Republican in every election. The average income of the Trump voter is $72,000 per year, well above the average in the United States. So why are these voters supporting Trump? Matthews says its simple: Race.
“So what is driving Trump supporters? In the general election, the story is pretty simple: What’s driving support for Trump is that he is the Republican nominee, a little fewer than half of voters always vote for Republicans, and Trump is getting most of those voters. In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up. UCLA's Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents' racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too. In April, when the Pew Research Center asked Republicans for their views on Trump, and their opinions on the US becoming majority nonwhite by 2050, they found that Republicans who thought a majority nonwhite population would be "bad for the country" had overwhelmingly favorable views of Trump. Those who thought it was a positive or neutral development were evenly split on Trump. By contrast, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 got less primary support from voters with high racial resentment and anti-immigration scores than they did from less racially resentful or anti-immigrant voters. Those two primaries were lost by the white nationalist wing of the Republican Party at a time when that wing was gaining in number. As New America's Lee Drutman has found, Republicans’ views of blacks and Latinos plummeted during the Obama years: The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump. Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant. The message this research sends is very, very clear. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is opposed to racial equality. It has increased in numbers in reaction to the election of a black president. The result was that an anti–racial equality candidate won the Republican nomination.”Form more information visit: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/15/13286498/donald-trump-voters-race-economic-anxiety
Mainstreaming Hate Groups
“To understand how Trump's unspoken alliance with the far right has really worked, take one instance that caused a fleeting uproar last November, when Trump retweeted a graphic falsely claiming that black people were responsible for 81 percent of white homicides. Its source was a white supremacist Twitter feed whose logo is a modified swastika. Politifact and others quickly documented how "wildly inaccurate" the racist graphic was. After a quick round of fact-checking and rebuke, however, the media moved on. But white nationalist news sites and radio programs were transfixed. "Now, you've touched the third rail of American politics by starting a real dialogue on race," Paul Kersey, of the racist blog Stuff That Black People Don't Like, wrote on VDare.
Trump had done the politically unthinkable - and then he doubled down, declining to delete the tweet (which remains live as of this publication) and asking rhetorically on Fox News, "Am I gonna check every statistic?" Even when Bill O'Reilly urged him, "Don't put your name on stuff like this," Trump didn't back down, saying, "It came from sources that are very credible, what can I tell you." "I don't know how much more explicit you can get," said James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool, a radio program that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls racist and anti-Semitic. "I mean, what other candidate would do that?... We certainly can take a lot of pride in, and what we can certainly invest a lot of hope in, [is] the fact that Donald Trump is saying a lot of these things very similar to the way we present them on the radio, and he is leading the field big-time. That is something that you can absolutely take to the bank." Trump's big social-media boost for the phony black-crime stats was further proof that Trump had "laid out the red carpet for all those who want to move beyond the last 20 years of internet isolation and anonymity," as Brad Griffin, who blogs on Occidental Dissent, wrote after Trump announced his immigration plan. "All those people, long laughed at and excluded from the 'mainstream,' who were cast out beyond the wall of 'respectability,' are now in the tank for Donald Trump."”
Commons Rights
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By Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand - Lake Waikaremoana, Urewera, New Zealand, 13th. Dec 2010, CC BY 2.0[/caption] Chip Colwell has an unconventional environmental proposal:
"In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. Following rulings in cases such as Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, U.S. law has established that companies are, like people, entitled to certain rights and protections. But that’s not the only instance of extending legal rights to nonhuman entities. New Zealand took a radically different approach in 2014 with the Te Urewera Act which granted an 821-square-mile forest the legal status of a person. The forest is sacred to the T?hoe people, an indigenous group of the Maori. For them, Te Urewera is an ancient and ancestral homeland that breathes life into their culture. The forest is also a living ancestor. The Te Urewera Act concludes that “Te Urewera has an identity in and of itself,” and thus must be its own entity with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Te Urewera holds title to itself. Although this legal approach is unique to New Zealand, the underlying reason for it is not. Over the last 15 years I have documented similar cultural expressions by Native Americans about their traditional, sacred places. As an anthropologist, this research has often pushed me to search for an answer to the profound question: What does it mean for nature to be a person?"Form more information visit: https://newrepublic.com/article/137668/corporations-rights-not-nature