Since the beginning of the Trump presidency, white-supremacist groups, including self-described neo-Nazis, have increasingly and boldly appeared in public. They have killed counterprotesters, beaten people, and fired guns into crowds. White supremacists have clearly been energized by the president and his agenda. And rather than distancing himself from their bigotry and violence, Trump has refused to specifically and unequivocally denounce them. Instead, the president seems intent on portraying them as generally good people with a few bad apples among them.
The role that Trump has played in fanning the flames of this violent hatred became a major discussion in the world of professional sports over the past week after comments from a popular ESPN host, Jemele Hill. In several tweets, she criticized Trump and bluntly labeled him a “white supremacist.” Her comment spurred calls for her to be fired and on Friday, the president himself tweeted: “ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!” His press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Hill’s comments were a fireable offense, saying ESPN “should hold anchors to a fair and consistent standard.” The First Amendment implications of the president and his administration publicly attacking the free and constitutionally protected speech of a member of the news media are vast. Hill’s comments and the president’s response come amid a political debate consuming the world of professional sports about athletes engaging in protest.
The NFL season is now underway. There’s a lot of discussion about the political stance that a handful of athletes have begun taking, namely protesting during the national anthem. Some players have raised a black-gloved fist. Others have sat or knelt during the national anthem, and several of the players who have chosen to protest have said that they’re doing it in response to racism and police brutality.
“I won’t stand until everything’s equal. I won’t stand until everybody has justice. I won’t stand until everybody has freedom,” Seattle Seahawks star defensive end Michael Bennett told CNN in August. “The things that America has built on, I think protesting the national anthem begins a conversation about the truth of America. I’m not protesting the flag. I’m actually trying to honor what we’re supposed to be honoring: the freedom of America, the equality of America, the justice for all, and the liberty. Those are things that I’m trying to remind people that we all fought for.”
Just days after that interview, Bennet was attending a boxing match in Las Vegas. And after the match there was an incident in a casino where Las Vegas police responded to what they say they thought was a shooting incident. And in their response, they went after Michael Bennett. They pointed a gun at him. They ordered him to the ground. And they handcuffed him as he protested that he had done nothing wrong. And parts of this were caught on video tape.
After the incident, Bennett released a statement saying that an officer told him that if he moved, the officer would, “blow my fucking head off.” Bennett said that the excessive use of force was unbearable and he wrote in a statement that he released, “I felt helpless as I lay there on the ground, handcuffed, facing the real-life threat of being killed. All I could think of was: ‘I’m going to die for no other reason than I am black and my skin color is somehow a threat.’”
After Bennett went public with this story, the Las Vegas police attempted to get the NFL to punish Bennett, saying that he had unfairly accused them of racism. The league said it wasn’t going to do that.
Bennett’s teammate, NFL star Richard Sherman, spoke to reporters about the incident. “Mike is literally, you know, sitting, taking a stand, protesting, and doing everything he can to combat the exact thing that he experienced,” Sherman said. “And people are so worried about him sitting down during the national anthem that they completely missed that message a lot of times. They want to be more angry at the action than the message, and that’s an important part in part of the world we live in nowadays. I wish that people would take it for what it is and make a difference and go out there and try to combat against racism, fascism, unnecessary violence.”
The current media discussion of athletes daring to engage in protest seems to completely ignore several crucial points. First, NFL games are already dripping with politics and militarism, and they encourage a worship of the military and weapons of war as the one true form of patriotism. Second, they ignore the historical roots of athletes protesting. The black fist raised at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Muhammad Ali’s resistance to the war in Vietnam, and on, and on. And third, these commentaries act as though the First Amendment has some secret clause that says athletes cannot engage in nonviolent protest as though they’re supposed to surrender their humanity or their principles when they put on their helmet and uniform.
This debate isn’t new but it’s flared up over the past year because of an action that was taken last year by then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He refused to stand for the national anthem and then had the audacity to speak out about racism and other systemic injustices when asked why he did it.
Colin Kaepernick explained his motives last year, saying: “Yes, I’ll continue to sit. I’m going to continue to stand with the people that have been oppressed. To me this is something that has to change and when there’s significant change and I feel like that flag represents who is supposed to represent and this country is representing people the way they’re supposed to, I’ll stand.”
Kaepernick’s action sparked reaction from pundits, celebrities, President Obama, and of course Donald Trump. “There was an article today that was reported that NFL owners don’t want to pick [Kaepernick] up, because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump. Do you believe that? I said if I remember that one, I’m going to report it to the people of Kentucky, because they like it when people actually stand for the American flag, right?”
Trump was also joined by his ally and apparently rising GOP political star Kid Rock, in attacking Kaepernick at a concert, yelling, “Man, fuck Colin Kaepernick!”
Kaepernick was a highly ranked quarterback in the NFL, yet he no longer has a team. In fact, he wasn’t even invited to training camp. His critics say it’s because he had a bad season last year, which is debatable: the 49ers were terrible, but Kaepernick’s stats were pretty solid. But others say it’s because he is a liability because of his politics.
During a recent episode of FOX News’s show The Five, Jesse Watters said, “The guy’s a loser on the field, he’s a loser off the field, bottom line,” adding, “Everybody hates him.” Co-host Greg Gutfeld chimed in, saying, “I feel like this is another arena where identity politics invades and divides, because it creates a prism that only allows for one perspective. It’s got to be racist, if they do this, you’ve got to you have to hate this person because of their skin color, that’s what identity politics does.”
Supporters of Kaepernick, including the NAACP, have alleged that the reason the Colin Kaepernick is not currently on an NFL team’s roster is because of racism.
Last weekend, activist and columnist Shaun King issued a public call for a boycott of the NFL, and he spent NFL Sunday hanging out with Colin Kaepernick. On this week’s episode of Intercepted we aired an excerpt of our interview with King. Below is our complete conversation where we had a wide-ranging discussion on his boycott campaign, the Trump presidency, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and the violence of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
Listen to the interview here:
Extended transcript:
Jeremy Scahill: Shaun King, welcome to Intercepted.
Shaun King: I’m glad to be here, man.
JS: So I want to get into a number of things about Hillary Clinton and Steve Bannon and politics in general, but I want to start off with the most recent campaigns that you’ve been spearheading and you’ve been involved with. First, let’s talk about the NFL. The season has just kicked off, a lot of excitement across the country for football, you, over the weekend called for a boycott of the NFL, including don’t even watch clips of NFL games.
SK: Right.
JS: And part of your analysis centers around what happened to the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Colin Kaepernick. Explain why you’re calling for a boycott of the NFL.
SK: Well I decided several months ago that I wasn’t going to watch any of the games, in huge part because I’ve become friends with Colin, and it was just painful personally for me to see what I thought was a grave injustice happening to him. It was really like a friend seeing a friend lose, not just his job, but his dream. This is something he’s fought for his whole life, he’s in the prime of his career, he’s 29 years old. And he had just fought back through several injuries, and is feeling great and is healthy, and he took this peaceful stand against injustice, which I encouraged him to take. Like, I supported him through it, encouraged him personally and directly to continue doing it, not thinking that he would be blacklisted from the league. Like, I thought it might change his reputation. I thought he might get a cold shoulder. But my thought was he’s too big to fail, in a sense.
And a lot of athletes who I believe, who I’ve become friends with, said the same thing. A lot of guys who had rookie contracts were wondering like, “Hey, I might lose my job. Surely they won’t do this to Colin. Quarterback is the most in-demand position. He’s solid. He’s smart. He has great character.” And even though I knew there was a possibility that he might struggle to find a job, I didn’t think it would come to this. And when I saw over and over again teams kind of strangely contorting themselves to justify not giving him a job, even though they desperately needed a quarterback, I made the personal decision in June, like, “Ok, I can’t watch this. This is, I don’t support how they’ve done it. I don’t support how they’re treating him.”
And I had other issues with the league, be it CTE, or how they were, would constantly give other guys a pass for genuinely horrendous behaviors. And so I made the decision but I wasn’t really ready to ask other people to follow me. And there was a part of me thought from June until September that, that he would get a job, and I think it’s the foolish optimist in me that thought people would be able to look past his protest and the few things that he said to the media, and look at their need as a team. Be it the Jets, or twenty different teams in a league that at least need a strong backup quarterback.
And, here we are in September and he didn’t have a position and it looked like he’s not going to get one. And I literally made the decision at the last minute, just maybe three or four days ago, that I wanted to encourage people to take this stand with me. And for me, there are many, obviously I speak out a lot against police brutality, and for me, while there are many reasons, for me it’s very personal. And it’s that we live in a time where a man very quietly peacefully and intelligently just stated his problems with police brutality and injustice in America, and had his career taken from him because of it.
JS: Now for people that didn’t follow this closely explain how this started with Colin Kaepernick. What action he took, why he took it, and then what he’s done since then?
SK: So, I spent most of the day with Colin yesterday, and my wife and my mother-in-law were there. So while I obsess over the details, they didn’t and my wife asked him that same question. Like, “Colin, can you tell us how this happened?” And Colin said he’s always you know he’s always been bothered by police brutality but he never understood it as the systemic problem that it was. And he’s a young guy, he’s 21 when he came into the league, and he literally started auditing a few classes at Berkeley, and from those classes began understanding what systemic racism was. Began understanding the systems behind mass incarceration or white supremacy or police brutality. And he was doing this with very few people, including myself, not knowing. I had no idea he was auditing classes. He was kind of undergoing a personal metamorphosis, and he was doing it while he was recovering from the surgeries that he had had.
And it just caused him to be more acutely aware and sensitive to it. And during last summer he saw the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and they just affected him personally. And really without talking to anybody, he decided at a pre-season game that he wasn’t going to stand up for the national anthem. And so Colin and I had been talking for couple of months at that point, and I think it really was a spur of the moment, gut decision, where he heard the anthem and just decided like, “I’m not going to stand up for that. I don’t feel like it. I don’t believe it.” And he did that for two weeks before anybody even noticed. These were just preseason games. And when they noticed, a local reporter asked him about it at the end of the game, and that he hadn’t prepared any bullets and he just said: Listen, I’m disturbed by the crisis of police brutality in America. I don’t believe that America keeps its promises to black people in particular. And, you know he was doing this to be in solidarity with victims of police brutality.
And I was working with those families: Philando Castile’s family, Alton Sterling’s family. And they were deeply moved by it. And I think when he learned that these families who rarely get anything that resembles justice, when he learned that they were touched by his demonstration, I think he decided to stick with it. And what could’ve just been, yeah I did a couple of weeks and I’m moving on, when he saw that it mattered to everyday people and it mattered to families of victims, he decided to double down and stick with it and very quietly, peacefully, he shifted from having a seat to taking a knee during the national anthem, and it became a national conversation where after games there be dozens of reporters there just to ask him what he was thinking. And people were taken aback because what they found was a bright, brilliant young man who had ample reason to do what he was doing and could explain it very articulately. And I think people thought maybe there was no depth there, like a stereotype of an athlete.
But I — he had a 4.0 in high school, he was a college graduate, he’s a bright guy, who if he didn’t play football could’ve gone on to do many things with his life, and through all of this he’s been very thoughtful and sensitive. He was adopted when he was a baby, his adopted family is completely white. And they love him, you know, in amazing ways, but he grew up seeing and hearing from his white family things that have helped inform him to talk about this in a way that I was blown away by. That disarmed people. And I had the thought, man, that he was so careful and methodical about how he handled this that, not that the country would change, but I had never thought he would be, in essence, banned from the league. And that’s that’s what we have here, a guy who, in the prime of his physical career, was not even brought in for a serious look from many teams. The Ravens and the Seahawks mentioned that they considered him, but it was never really serious.
JS: And I want to talk about that, because the flip side of this argument, I don’t mean to say that there’s only two ways of looking at this, but you have NFL commentators and others who are saying, “Look at the stats that he put up last year, he had a terrible season.”
SK: He didn’t, you know?
JS: I’m saying, but this is what is said. That he clearly had peaked, and was on his way down. What’s interesting is that you have, I’m from Wisconsin, so I’m biased, the best quarterback in the country, Aaron Rodgers, who is not known for being a political guy, actually very recently came out and said, “No, I think that Colin Kaepernick should be on a team, and that this is political. This is not about his skills.”
SK: Yeah, you know when I saw Aaron say this, like, I like Aaron a lot, and like you, like he’s not a guy that takes hard stands on political issues. And so when he said something I was very curious as to what he was going to say. He’s got a great football mind. He’s been a competitor of Colin’s for years. They’ve had amazing games against one another. And he said emphatically, without hesitation, like, no this is not a football decision, that had he not taken the stand that he that he took, he would be on the team right now. He would be the quarterback of the 49ers, and he is, he is a franchise quarterback. The offered him $120 million deal. He took the team to the Superbowl. He took the team deep into the playoffs. He made the probowl. Even last year, he had 18 touchdowns and four interceptions. He had a 90.1 quarterback rating, which is one of the best in the league. And so, he was on a terrible team. And any expert would tell you that the 49ers have badly mismanaged there. Yesterday they lost by 40 points without him.
And yet he still found a way to have good stats. He was voted by the players on the team as the best player on the field and off the field last year, which was a huge honor for him, and I think his thought was, talent, his talent and character would get him a position. He believed that. And so he works out six days a week and has been. He’s in incredible shape. He’s, he could start for a team right away. Yet, here we are. He has not even been given a backup position. and so there have been a lot of lies about him, like people said that he wouldn’t take a backup position. That’s a lie. He would. People said he also would not even accept a smaller contract. That’s a lie. He also hasn’t even been offered any contracts. And so, people have found all types of ways to say that he’s not good anymore. But here he is, 29 years old, injury free, with a great record.
He set multiple NFL records that still stand. He set several college records that still stand. He’s not just a runner, which is a stereotype of black quarterbacks, that people sometimes put on him. He’s a great passer, he’s a team guy. He is, in essence, being blacklisted from the team.
JS: And you, and you have guys who have criminal convictions.
SK: Yeah.
JS: Who have done time in prison, I mean Michael Vick and the whole, you know, dog torturing thing, and he you know he comes back into the league and there is there was also a lot of racism in the way that Michael Vick was covered. But, but these guys, and some of them are white players who have all sorts of trouble with the law.
SK: Sure.
JS: And we’re not talking about a guy who broke the law here, we’re talking about a guy who nonviolently took a political position.
SK: Well, that’s what’s disturbing man, is he is the stereotype of what black men are told they have to be to be successful. Like he, he is quiet. He literally stays in at night, he doesn’t party or go to the clubs, he’s never been in legal trouble a day in his life. He’s a college graduate, a bright guy, he’s in a committed relationship with an upstanding woman. I mean I hate to even list these things, but he is everything young black men are told they will need to be to rise up any type of corporate ladder. And —
JS: Well, except —
SK: Except black. Yeah, and here’s the thing that other black men in the league, as you noted, have done horrific things. And I think it gets to the fact that the decision is actually extremely political. I tried to lift up the fact that at least seven team owners in the NFL have given a million dollars or more to Donald Trump’s campaign. People can universally agree that NFL ownership is the most conservative ownership group of any sports league in the world.
And I think what they’re trying to do is to make an example of Colin. And I think it’s working. Last year on any given day, you would see dozens, as many as 50 people demonstrate. And, now, yesterday I think there were five. Now that the season has started, that number may even go down to four, three. And I think guys are spooked. Guys have told me, particularly guys on rookie contracts, guys that don’t have Colin’s name or reputation have told me, “I can’t do this man. If they do to me what they did to him, I haven’t made the money he’s made and I have no backup plan.”
So it effectively did what I believe those owners wanted to do. It spooked the majority of guys, with a rare exception of guys who have marched to the beat of their own drum their whole life, like Marshawn Lynch. I know Marshawn. Like, he says what he wants, like I saw him before a game last week like literally eating chicken wings on a field. Like he eats skittles before plays, when he gets a touchdown, he does a flip and grabs his balls. Like, (laughs), that’s Marshawn Lynch. So he doesn’t care what people think. And so, so he took a seat yesterday.
So basically the only guys who are doing it at this point are guys who are firm in their position. But all the other guys who are doing it, they’ve been spooked and they’re backing down. I think that that was what they wanted, was to freak enough guys out that they’ll back down. The only people that are left are kind of revolutionary guys, guys who, you know, are radicals at heart. And a lot of them, ironically, are all from, all born and raised in Oakland or in the Bay Area, so they grew up with this spirit of Black Panther education, that’s Marshawn, he, a kid mentors is Marcus Peters from the Chiefs, also grew up in Oakland, and he, you know he took a seat. So a lot of these guys know each other.
JS: You know, it’s also interesting, this kind of mealy mouth line, “Well, that these guys shouldn’t be political.” The entire framing of the NFL for many years has been overtly political in celebration of the U.S. war machine. You have the jets that are flying overhead, Ted Cruz was at a game this weekend celebrating with this American bald eagle that went over a huge American flag tarp.
SK: And it was like a bald eagle on steroids, it was the largest bald. Like, when I first saw it I was like, “Is that real?” Like he was but he was bragging because the flag took up the entire field from corner to corner. I think they literally found the world’s largest bald eagle, and the world’s largest flag. And there’s money being exchanged here between the military and the NFL They actually are paying for a lot of these demonstrations that people didn’t even understand that marketing dollars are at play.
JS: Also Lockheed Martin, which is one of the biggest war contractors, perhaps making more money than almost any corporation off the US War Machine, major sponsor, they have their, their commercials there. You have the presentation of the colors, the national anthem. Also, and it’s not like, “Oh look, we’re all coming together to celebrate our country.” It is overtly about celebrating the part of our country that wages wars.
SK: Yeah.
JS: That increasingly a majority of people are against. So the politics is already drilled. into the whole apparatus. It would be one thing if we had some massive celebration of the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, you know, as part of the patriotism, but it’s just one part of America that’s being honored and that is the militaristic component of this country.
SK: Yeah. Yeah, I agree, and in spite of that people. aren’t looking at the nuanced nature of really what’s at play here. Even the fact that they brought back Hank Williams, Jr., who for the first time in almost six years will be doing his Monday Night Football anthem. Literally, the literally waited until President Obama left office, because he said horrendous, racist things about President Obama, they waited until Obama left office and they brought him right back to open up for Monday Night Football, so for anybody to say, “Hey, Colin shouldn’t be bringing politics to the field.” It’s already there.
And I think the we have crossed a point where if nine months ago people were saying, “He shouldn’t be political,” or other people are saying, “This is just a football decision.” I think with comments from guys like Aaron Rodgers, but a few dozen athletes across the league, many of them who have been lifelong competitors of Colin, have all come out to say, “Listen, cut the crap. This is just about him not liking his politics and not liking the stand that he took.”
And that’s why I thought a boycott was necessary. Like that’s not ok. It’s not ok for a place like this to boot a man in the prime of his life because he took a peaceful stand against something that millions of us believe we should all be taking a stand against and that’s police brutality. It’s not a stand against police, but a stand against police brutality, it’s a stand against injustice.
JS: Is your position as of now, that you would call for an end to the boycott if Colin Kaepernick is signed, or is it, do you feel that the issues are deeper and that that wouldn’t be enough of an action — I mean, I’m sure you’d want to watch your friend play football.
SK: Yeah, you know, well for me, personally, my personal motivation is that the league has made an enormous mistake like I — my relationship, I’ve been a lifelong football fan. I’ve watched it little since I was a young boy.I’ve probably watched every Super Bowl I have been alive to watch, I’ve done fantasy football, I’m a huge sports junkie. So I missed it yesterday, like it was not a small thing for me personally.
But this my relationship and love for the league is like irreparably harmed. Even if he got hired tomorrow, I would be glad for him but the NFL has soiled this for a lot of people. I think I would call for an end to the boycott if he got signed. But there are many other things that we are calling for in this week and next week will will begin to add to what it is we hope the league will do.
We’ll also begin, as uncomfortable as it will be for all of us, we’ll begin to call out a lot of the sponsors as well. And I think when the league I think will see the ratings go down they went down for the first Thursday night game, I think they’ll be down significantly for the games yesterday. And as we continue to do that, I think that will have one impact but I think when we start to target sponsors, We’ll see how that has an impact as well.
JS: Well and just as we wrap up this subject, I find it utterly despicable the way that the name of Pat Tillman has been invoked as a, as somehow a response to people supporting ColIn Kaepernick. The people, you know, Pat Tillman, of course, was an NFL player who then enlisted in Special Forces, he became a Green Beret in the aftermath of 9/11 and that’s largely the end of the story as it’s told by the NFL and by many of these white players who are saying I’m going to have Pat Tillman’s name on my shoes, that’s my political stance.
Pat Tillman, though, went through an incredible transformation post-9/11, he was corresponding with Noam Chomsky he was writing letters about what he saw as the moral bankruptcy of U.S. foreign policy. He had actually come to oppose the very war that he signed up to fight post-9/11 because of what sounds like a similar process process to Colin Kaepernick.
SK: Absolutely.
JS: Where he studies these things, he starts reading, he’s actually there. And of course his death in Afghanistan which was written off to friendly fire is still the subject of intense investigation by people who are close to him, and some of the people that served with him.
SK: Yeah, you know when you even compared him I think people who knew Pat well and people who know Colin well, think they’re a whole lot alike. And they both had a fierce love for this country, and Colin, a lot of what Colin does is because he wants to see this country get better. And people who try to people use caricatures of Colin and of Pat that don’t represent like the fullness of who they really are and were.
And it’s ugly to see people use this, like, moment in time of Pat’s life to try to bash Colin over the head and say this is what a real NFL player does and even when you present to them the facts of what Pat was saying about about the wars and about the, the unjust nature of them, people don’t even care.
JS: Well, it’s, you know, we had Tavis Smiley on the show a while back and he wrote this excellent book about the last year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life.
SK: Yeah.
JS: And one of the things that Tavis Smiley said was that Martin Luther King wouldn’t be allowed to attend the Martin Luther King Day celebration in modern times, because he was, he had become a militant anti-imperialist and he is remembered only for, “I have a dream and I want my children to be able to go to school.” You know? If he was known for why I oppose the war in Vietnam, it’d be a very different story.
And I think there is an analog here where it’s like as long as the black athletes are doing the bread and circus and they’re making a lot of money for a lot of corporations and a lot of white owners, then they’re good black people. Bt as soon as they acknowledge the reality of so many black and brown people in this country, then they become unacceptable and they can’t, they can’t go in the league that they’ve actually ascended to the throne of being in the Super Bowl in.
SK: Yeah and you know the other person that we should look at would be Muhammad Ali. And how we view him today versus how he was truly viewed in the time and like I saw an interview with him recently when he talked about how he struggled to get any endorsements. Like, right now, we think you know Muhammad Ali Must have been the Michael Jordan of endorsements in the sixties or seventies. Quite the contrary. He was, in the interview, he was talking about how he was struggling financially. Not only because he had been banned from boxing, but no one would touch him with a ten-foot pole. Like he couldn’t do, he literally was doing random local advertisements to pay the mortgage and we view him now retrospectively as the greatest of all time but how he was viewed in history is totally different.
So it’s, it’s disturbing and Tavis is right, you know, that we we sometimes take a slice of someone’s life and then kind of reduce their entire existence to that tiny sliver of who they were.
JS: Well and that sliver has to comport with our idea of how those people should be remembered in order to preserve our standing in society, so, you know, when you hear Republicans talk about Martin Luther King it’s you know it’s the classic, you always hear, you know, they’re always just talking about like Martin as though Martin Luther King was a precursor to Rodney King, “Can we all just get along?”When in reality anyone who knows, who has spent even a few moments studying you know who Dr. King really was, knows that none of this. It’s sins of omission.
SK: Yeah you know sure and then. And not just that, it dehumanizes Pat Tillman, it dehumanizes Martin Luther King. Like, his best friend, Ralph Abernathy, in the late eighty’s wrote a biography and in the end in the book, he referenced the fact that they smoked weed. And you gotta realize this is in the eighty’s, the way that people thought about marijuana is very different even than it is now.
JS: Well, except Jeff Sessions.
SK: Right, right. But people people like hated Ralph Abernathy for that. Even like other leaders in the movement couldn’t believe that he alluded to what at that time was seen as an imperfection. Like he, you know, he obsessively smoked a pack or two of cigarettes a day, Dr. King did, you can actually see a few, there are very few pictures of him smoking cigarettes because the people around him never want those pictures taken. But I love those pictures. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t smoke cigarettes, but when I see these pictures of him I realize like there’s a, there’s a version of this man that we’ve been told about the doesn’t represent fully who he was.
I read this letter recently from, where he’s talking about really basic marital problems that he was having with his wife and they were and they were awful like he said they’d gone months and months without talking. And I read that as like any married person should read these letters because for me it immediately made him relatable. Like he was having the same problems that every married person has, but we reduce these people to statues, to memorials with, with a few catchphrases and it strips them of something that that makes them relatable and we make a huge mistake when we do that.
JS: And, speaking of memorials, I want to talk to you about Charlottesville and about this what has become a very widespread campaign to try to take down these memorials of Confederate figures, which many of them, as you well know, do not date back to the time of the Confederacy, they were built at key moments in much more recent American history as a way of directly confronting demands for equal rights or progress that was made on local levels in some of these municipalities.
But I specifically want to ask you about this campaign that you spearheaded that seems to be gaining traction. And that is to identify and have charges brought against some of the men who were involved with this beating of a young black man named Deandre Harris in a parking garage.
SK: The parking garage of the Charlottesville Police Department, which is crazy. Like they were literally adjacent to the Charlottesville Police Department.
JS: So, start from the beginning here. Explain the context of who Deandre Harris is, what he was doing there, and what happened.
SK: Yeah, so let me break it down. Deandre Harris, a great kid, 19 years old, he serves as a special assistant in a special education classroom at a local elementary school. I hate to say it like this, but no criminal record, you know, great reputation and like thousands of counter protesters who wanted to just go there to show white supremacists who have showed up in huge numbers in their home — he lives in Charlottesville, he’s from there. And all these protesters who came there to demonstrate as white supremacist, as neo-Nazis but came from out of town, they came from all over the country, literally flew in from I’ve counted as many as 25 different states. This was a huge gathering.
JS: Well, and the car that killed, the car that was driven by the man who killed Heather Heyer was from, it was an Ohio licensed plate a car.
SK: Absolutely and so these guys came in from out of town and so Deandre and Heather and others who lived there locally just said, “Hey, we have to show up.” And they had no plan, no strategy, they had never seen, like most of us, they’d never seen something like this with their own eyes, but they just wanted to be there to let people know, “Hey, this is not OK.” So there was a march of white supremacists who were going through the streets of downtown Charlottesville and Deandre and a group of others were also walking on the sidewalk alongside them, constantly yelling back and forth at them and one of the white supremacists had a flag or flag pole with like a speared tip on the end of it. And these were things that a lot of guys, a lot of guys had throughout the downtown area.
And not Deandre, but another guy and a white supremacist started wrestling over that flag. And the white supremacist who we have not been able to identify, gets the flag and gets ready to ram the tip of it into Deandre’s friend. And as they do that, Deandre takes a swing at a guy and misses.
And all of a sudden, in an instant, a group of guys who are marching, many of who didn’t even see what I just described to you. Like, all of this is on film in four different angles, you see it literally from every side, they just converge right on Deandre. And one guy knocks him to the ground, and then at least five guys maybe six, just began to pummel him and literally jumping in the air, coming down with their feet, their fist with pipes, flagpoles and just mauled him for what Deandre said felt like minutes but in a probably being more like twenty seconds.
But it was twenty seconds of nonstop beating. And, he finally was able to scramble out and he literally falls on his face even as he stumbles down in the parking lot again, and he stumbles literally right to the doorsteps of the police department. At that time, he didn’t even know where he was being beaten was the parking lot for the Charlottesville Police Department.
And you see, in the videos, the police are right there. They saw the incident unfold, and if you see any videos from that day, police had taken such a hands-off approach, that they were letting almost anything go, to the point that we saw just a few weeks ago another member of the KKK literally pulled out a gun and shot at someone and the police were right there and just let him shoot. And he just kept on walking. Just an insane, an insanely mismanaged moment.
JS: How many of the individuals who beat Deandre Harris have been charged?
SK: So this is what’s crazy. So the day it happened, people from Charlottesville started messaging me right away and saying, “Listen, there’s a guy who was very badly beaten.” And several guys even said, “Hey, I’ve got photos, I’ve got videos.” and I posted the first images that I found on my timeline on Twitter and Facebook, and said, and it was, to me, what will become an iconic image because you see him on the ground, you see two men whose feet are completely off the ground as they jump up to come down on top of him, you see two weapons in mid-air coming down on him. And I just tweeted, “Let’s find out who these guys are.”
My thought was because of the size of my network and as tense of a moment as our country was in, that it would probably be a few days and we would find everybody there. Because within three days I had clear pictures of almost everyone involved.
JS: Some of them had some obfuscation of their face, but most of them were just openly —
SK: Yeah there’s one guy who has on really heavy goggles and a hat and ironically he is that, we’re now closer to finding him, but the first man that we found was a young man named Dan Borden, also from Ohio, a lot of these guys did come in from Ohio, and Dan Borden, it was actually a member of his family who contacted me and said that, “I know who that is.” And several of his high school classmates, he literally just finished high school year ago. And people pointed out several identifying objects, he had very distinct moles on his face and neck, and at that time all of his, of his social media profiles were still up. These guys had not thought through quickly enough to remove those things. And so once we clearly identified it was Dan Borden I tweeted, “Hey, we have identified Dan Borden.”
And probably, I mean, three days after we’d identified Dan Borden, several people began saying to me personally that they knew who another guy was and his name was Michael Alex Ramos. And they, people who knew him personally, people knew him when he lived in Florida, they knew him when he lived in metro Atlanta, and they sent me videos of him saying that he was a part of it. And we also had a video of Dan saying he did it. And so I felt very comfortable identifying Dan Borden and Michael Alex Ramos because we had videos of them admitting it. We had a treasure trove of photos from their own profiles of them there. Other videos of them there. I mean we looked at the style of their shoes, their shirts, identifying objects. So we identified them.
And several days later, someone from the Charlottesville Police Department contacted me and asked me if I would give them all the information I had and I did. A few days after that, some people, two different agents from the FBI reached out to me and asked me if I would give them everything I had and I did. And still, it was probably a week later and they had not arrested Dan Borden or Alex Ramos, and finally they issued arrest warrants, first for Dan, then for Alex and arrested them and charged them. And what was disturbing about it was that it’s clear that the only people they have identified are the people that we have identified. And, even in my conversations with the FBI agents, it was clear like they explicitly told me that everything they knew about the incident that they got from my timeline.
JS: Shaun King has more than three quarters of a million people following him on Twitter. And I remember when this started, you were basically crowdsourcing an investigation that should have been taking place on the part of law enforcement, particularly because this happened in the garage of the police department there, but just in general, when you have a gang beating of someone of this nature and it’s clear that the people who are doing it are motivated by racial hatred of the man that they’re beating.
But you crowdsourced it and people started coming to you with more photos, and people are looking over Facebook. I mean, to me it’s evidence of what Twitter is best at. You know, obviously it’s a cesspool of awfulness in some ways, but what you did there was you basically did this networked autonomous network of people that were investigating it.
SK: So yeah, so that can go wrong in a thousand different ways.
JS: And it does. Like, Reddit. Reddit is like, constantly identifying the wrong people.
SK: And so I knew that. And I also had a friend of mine, who was identified as the shooter of police officers in Texas, he was there in Dallas and he was a peaceful protester, but he had an AR-15 with him and he was literally put on television stations all over the world including CNN for almost two hours as being the shooter who killed multiple police officers there in Texas.
His life has never recovered from being misidentified as that. He has been — he had nothing to do with the shooting. He never knew the shooter.
JS: Well, same was true in Boston Marathon bombing, you know, you had the New York Post it with a very racist, not that it’s like uncommon for them to have a racist front page, but a racist front page completely flagrantly misidentifying a suspect.
SK: So, seeing all of that, I was extremely careful to not put out who I thought it might be or who it could be. So I literally, I kid you not, I Skyped with multiple white supremacists, who were there, who looked very much like the other guys, because I couldn’t, I couldn’t confirm if it was them or not. And I so badly. And there were two different guys, there was a man there with a red beard, and on two different occasions I was very convinced that we had found him. But all these guys at this point appeared to have deleted every trace of their social media existence. And so these other four guys we can’t identify at all.
And so I literally found guys, found their information, asked if they would FaceTime or Skype with me. And once, once they said yes, I assumed it’s probably not him. But sure enough, these were white supremacists who were there, who I Skyped with and interviewed to determine if it was them and it wasn’t. There’s a guy there who has goggles and a helmet on.
JS: You should do like a video series, Shaun King Skypes With White Supremacists.
SK: It was — the calls were terrible.
JS: I can’t even imagine.
SK: So they were — but was comical in this sense, that they were terrible guys who were there who were also very terrified at the idea of being misidentified. They didn’t have anything to do with it. And so, and to this day, their photos — I’m not too compassionate for white supremacists who are misidentified, I just knew I wasn’t going to be responsible for it. And so, I don’t know them man. And so, my mind is blown, that here we are, almost a month to the day and I have put these guys faces’ out. I even did the calculation. Those videos and their faces have been seen 10s of millions of times, and that, that, that I don’t have any warm leads on who these guys are, it just shocks the hell out of me.
JS: So as of now, you only have two, two of the individuals have been charged, and this was, and people can see the videos for themselves this was a gang beating of Deandre Harris, but only two of them are facing charges.
SK: Two have been charged, and there are at least three guys who faces we’ve put out. Two guys are very clear, and they both have very distinct looks, and I’ve shared, I’ve had every celebrity imaginable share these photos. I’ve had guys — I’ve shared them with the FBI, the local police, the state police. I even, people even said, “Shaun maybe these guys are, were not American, maybe they came down from Canada or something else.” But that we can’t identify them. People have even done for me photos where they change these guys facial hair and all that. I have no idea who these guys are. And I, I thought that once I shared the photos that it would take a few days, particularly once local, state and federal authorities got involved, here we are a month later and the only two people they arrested were the people we crowdsourced on Twitter. So crazy.
JS: Of course, Hillary Clinton’s memoir is out this week and that’s you know that’s the big the big topic of conversation in Washington etc. Steve Bannon just did his coming out moment on 60 Minutes to, you know, overtly say many of the things that people have been reading reports that he was saying internally in the White House. I want to start with Hillary Clinton. You were a big and prominent and early supporter of Bernie Sanders in his bid for the Democratic nomination in the primary process against Hillary Clinton. And, and right up to the end you were fighting to make that a reality.
And then when Hillary Clinton got the nomination, and I would say it was a pretty dirty process by which she got that nomination, I mean people talk about the the you know the e-mail scandals, one of the biggest scandals revealed by the Clinton campaign’s e-mails was the ways in which they were just playing completely dirty with Bernie Sanders. But you ultimately wrote a piece encouraging people who agree with you or are following you on social media to vote for Hillary Clinton. And you basically boiled it down to: Trump has to be stopped, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson can’t win, and, you know, you were very respectful of their campaigns, but you basically said, “I’m going to vote for Hillary Clinton and that’s the right thing to do.”
Describe that decision, because I think a lot of people are still very torn about that and this issue of, you know, Hillary Clinton certainly is you know a politician of empire, you know we see that from her time as Secretary of State, as well as her time in the Senate. She has a questionable record going back decades on issues of race and crime and punishment in the United States but to defend that that that decision and why you why you felt it was the right thing to do.
SK: Well, it is a very difficult decision to defend. I mean I definitely felt like I was in a rock in a hard place. I felt early into Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination that there was a very real possibility — I wrote almost forty articles about Trump’s campaign, I felt very early on there was a chance that he could get the nomination and when he got the nomination, I wrote several pieces about the fairly distinct possibility that he could win.
And those pieces were widely panned, by the main — mocked by The Washington Post.
JS: Well, remember the Keith Ellison appearance on one of the Sunday shows where he said that Trump’s going to get the nomination and everybody laughed, they literally laughed at him.
SK: Yeah, so Keith Ellison is on the panel and he tells them, “listen.” He like pauses and he says, “Listen, I really think he could win this and they bust out in this like gregarious laugh.”
JS: Like, guffaws, “Hahaha, so funny!”
SK: And, then he looks at them, doesn’t laugh he looks at them, and he goes, “No, I’m serious actually.” And so Bernie knew that. A huge reason, I mean Bernie campaigned his heart out and he worked literally morning noon and night the people on his team worked people people gave their money their time their effort in huge part, because I believed, and still do to this day, that to defeat Donald Trump took an anti-Trump.
And if you could literally go into a lab and create a human being that is the antithesis of Donald Trump, they might come out looking just like Bernie Sanders. I mean like, you know, he is firmly philosophically politically against so much of what Donald Trump is against and they are, they are very different in terms of, of their character, the trajectory of their life, their upbringing.
And so when I got behind Bernie it was one because I believed in Bernie, I liked a lot of his policies and principles and ideals, but I also thought that he had the best chance of stopping Donald Trump. And I was terrified of what Donald Trump presidency would mean for the very people that we see him attacking now: for immigrants, for people who would be affected by police brutalities,, for the militarization of police I was terrified of what they would mean for our safety around the world, be it with nuclear weapons or war.
And so in so many different policy positions that he would take, I felt like Bernie could win and win debates with him, that Bernie could win votes in states that, where Hillary Clinton could not.
JS: Do you think he would have won?
SK: Oh I believe it. I strongly believe it. And I would defend that privately or publicly with anyone. I think every poll bore that out. Every poll up until the moment Bernie about how consistently had him four to fourteen points ahead of Donald Trump all the way through the election, and they still do to this very day. Bernie has the highest approval rating of any active politician in America. And his approval rating is almost thirty points higher than Hillary Clinton’s.
And so I just feel like he would have been a force of nature. And Bernie understood, what Hillary does acknowledge in her book, is he understood that there were deep emotions involved in why everybody was voting in this election on every side. And so Bernie was appealing to massive crowds, and, and so he would fill stadiums up all over the country including in deeply conservative states.
So when he lost I was incredibly hurt. I fought really hard for his campaign, even kind of alienating myself at the Daily News where I was working. The Daily News wrote several op-eds blasting Bernie and I wrote a rebuttal pieces to those op-eds. I wrote several strong pieces why I didn’t think Hillary Clinton was the right candidate. So it’s not a copout, but I did wait, I wanted to see what Bernie was going to do because I thought there was a possibility that he would run an independent campaign and I learned like a lot of people did how the government works and I think he found that if you run independent campaign that he might get more votes than Trump or Clinton but in the end if no one crossed the 270-electoral vote threshold that it would be decided by Congress and Bernie knew I would seriously believe from people close to him inside his campaign that he considered running his own separate campaign, not a part of the Green Party or anything else, just an independent campaign. And I think he could have gotten more votes than Trump or Clinton, but he knew it would end in Congress making the decision, which would ultimately would have ended with Donald Trump being selected president. And would have made Bernie perhaps the greatest villain in American history, you know he would be seen as the scapegoat of all scapegoats.
JS: But depending who you follow on Twitter, he is.
SK: Right, and so and so he, he thought about it and decided to get behind Hillary Clinton because he believed it was the only legitimate option to stop a Donald Trump presidency. .And I believe it was as well. I shared his belief that he himself, he had, Bernie himself had the best chance of beating either of the two of them and since he did not believe there was a reasonable path to the presidency for him I didn’t believe it was possible for, particularly in the short amount of time, I didn’t I believe it’s possible for Jill Stein or anyone else to to defeat Trump or Hillary. And so I very reluctantly, painfully got behind her candidacy.
And it was, I mean, it was, no I wasn’t excited about it. I still believe to this very day though that she would would have been a better person in office than Donald Trump. Every beef that you have with her, I have with her as well but the attacks on same sex marriage, the attacks on immigration and others, I don’t believe she would be one hundred percent better, like on some, people don’t want to accept this, she may be on some things twenty percent better, thirty percent better but I believe it would have been better and safer for the people that I care about than having Trump in office.
JS: She’s writing her own version of what she, what seems to be what she believes her legacy should be interpreted as. What do you think spanning her career and the analysis you’ve done of it how would you describe Hillary Clinton’s role in American politics and, and in all of its complexities?
SK: Yeah, complexity is the right word. I mean she’s a she’s a complex person a complex political figure. And it’s — I haven’t given that much thought, not even even with her book coming out, I’ve read excerpts about it where she explains what happened in the election from her perspective.
You know, like when I look at the beginnings of who Hillary Clinton was she grew up in a Republican household supporting Republican conservative presidents, but then seemed to have a metamorphosis in college where she became compassionate about issues and work for the Children’s Defense Fund.
So I think she had this like amazing potential to be a particular type a leader, but you can’t separate who Hillary Clinton became, and she wouldn’t, from her marriage to Bill Clinton. And, so she marries this also deeply complex man, they moved to the deep south she, you know she of Illinois origin creates a southern drawl and and —
JS: Well, that southern drawl would often reemerge at black churches and in front of the NAACP.
SK: In her defense, in her, in her defense Barack Obama will also do that every now and then and both of them are widely criticized for it. And so there is something, you would have to be in a black church on the mike in the places that they’ve been in. Even Al Gore did it. And I think, like I knew I knew this comedian one time, he was telling his joke about it was it was a horrible deeply insensitive joke about when he is around Spanish-speaking people the way, and he was very serious and sincere about it, the ways he would start to change his voice and hearing, like him he would mimic it on stage and he was like, “What the hell? What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?”
So, I think sometimes people get in these environments including Hillary Clinton but also Obama, Gore, and others, and Bill Clinton is one of few people who would go into these environments and kind of keep his same consistent voice wherever he is. But, you know, I think she is the creation of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways as well. Like she, it’s hard to this very day for me to define what are the clear principles and values that she stands behind, what does she fight for, like what are the policies that she’s for. And so she’s she’s nebulous to me in a lot of ways because she shapeshifts what she does believe in and what she doesn’t as many politicians do and that’s a huge reason why I love Bernie, I felt like, with a few exceptions, he’s pretty much been the same guy for fifty years of public service.
And, you know. And I have many disagreements with Bernie, I feel like there are many things he did wrong in his campaign, but Hillary Clinton in her new book mocks Bernie’s call for universal health care. And here we are now his, the bill that he’ll be presenting this week is being co-sponsored by multiple people in the Senate.
Listen to the interview here:
JS: And and some prominent people, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, you know people that, whose names are being mentioned in the context of the 2020 presidential race. Do you think Bernie should run?
SK: I do. I do. You know, I wrote a piece. I actually, as crazy as this will sound, I wrote a piece and I even said I wished Hillary Clinton would run. I wish that maybe the ten most-known Democratic candidates would have a true primary.
I was working for the Daily Coast and this was during the Democratic primaries and many of my friends desperately want to Elizabeth Warren to run and I was told by Marcos, who started The Daily Coast, that she was told, and he told me that he was personal friends with Elizabeth Warren, that she was told not to run, that she could not run, that this was Hillary Clinton’s time.
And so here’s the thing: she’s 68 years old. Like, I think we see her in a very different light. But it was, it was indeed her and she should have you know been in that race. So they end up being this very weird problematic primary with Hillary Clinton and two people who were not even supposed to be credible opponents, Martin O’Malley, former governor Marilyn, and and Bernie Sanders who at the time had like a five percent shot at it even being competitive.
And what should have happened in this past one was Elizabeth Warren should have ran, Bernie, Bernie should have been there, you should have had the who’s who of the Democratic Party. And that’s what they need to do this time and my thought was I would love to see Hillary Clinton run again because of the attention she would bring. I don’t think she could win this time, but she just announced it seemed like yesterday that she will not run for political office again. I wouldn’t blame her. I think when they have this primary that. Bernie should absolutely run.
I don’t, I see some ageism with people saying that he’s old, but he’s just a few years older than Donald Trump. He’s spry and energetic you know. He’s sharp. And I would support that. But I also hope Elizabeth Warren and others run. I hope there’s a a a fierce competitive primary and that the person who comes out comes out with progressive ideals and policies and connects with enough people to win.
I would tell anybody who underestimates Donald Trump that they’re wrong, even now, with his approval rating as bad as it is. I compared Donald Trump, I used to watch the Rocky movies when I was a kid and there’s this scene where Rocky Balboa fights Hulk Hogan, and but he’s not Hulk Hogan, and he’s Thunder Lips. And Thunder Lips is just beating the crap out of him, like slamming him around everywhere. And I think Donald Trump is like Thunder Lips, like you get in the ring with him and he’s so he’s he’s, he’s not what you are used to. He doesn’t play by any rules, he, none of this the standards of morality or integrity apply.
He can shapeshift policies, he can he can tell a lie on stage, he can — anything that would typically cause you to win a debate when an election, they don’t stick on him and and he he won, we can we can fuss all we want about the popular vote, he won the Electoral College significantly, he won thirty states.
JS: Well, and in this, in this 60 Minutes interview that Steve Bannon did, you know, he basically said that at every turn Bannon Himself was telling Donald Trump, “double down on it.” In fact, they refer, they referred to they the Access Hollywood recording, you know, where Trump made, “the grab ’em the pussy comment,” they refer to it as Billy Bush weekend. He was just talking about it as though it was like you know the holiday they’re celebrating. Oh, “Billy Bush weekend was a turning point.”
SK: They do operate from the perspective of all press is good press, and he, if we haven’t learned anything he is a master manipulator of the mainstream media. He received the equivalent of a billion dollars of press coverage, around the clock coverage, and in the end the things that I am appalled by, I think we learned don’t appall a lot of people.
Like even, even that when I saw that video, I was horrified and my, my initial thought was because I was thinking of how I felt when I saw this video, his interview, his time with Billy Bush, I thought, “He’s done.”
And I didn’t take into the account that I think there are millions of Americans who saw it and liked it. I think that other people saw it and were envious, jealous that he could live — like the people who voted for Donald Trump voted knowing full well that he was a gross, horrible human being. And I think there was a part of those voters that not only did they not mind it, I think they liked it in ways that they would, would never admit on the mike.
JS: Well Steve Bannon said that. That’s basically what Steve Bannon was saying in his own you know Breitbart-esque way. But it was pretty blunt in this interview.
We only have a few moments left and I want to ask you and I don’t mean this in a, I don’t want to, I don’t want to make this a rhetorical back and forth between the two of us, I really just I want you to answer it from you know a serious liberal perspective.
SK: Sure.
JS: Do you believe, based on what we know about Donald Trump, his past, his public record and his nine months of the presidency, do you believe that he is a white supremacist?
SK: I do. Yeah, I really do. I don’t think he would, of course, he would never say that. I think, when we say white supremacists, we immediately get an image in our mind of someone in the KKK or we get a like a bearded redneck from Mississippi, but I think over the long haul of his life, dating back to lawsuits from the federal government in the 70s, he has consistently been racist.
And to me the foundation for American racism is this philosophy of white supremacy that some people are better than others. And even, there are some fascinating clips of him talking about some people are born better than others. And he’s talked about this on conference stages and others, that he believes that people are born with this or that. Like even, the, the women that he chose to have kids with and other things like I believe he chose people based on a certain grade of whiteness that he, that he liked that appealed to him in a way. So I do think he, it’s a new, it’s a new different definition of white supremacy, but I do think if you look at the long haul of his life, you’ve seen hints of it.
We had a writer, a gossip columnist at The Daily News, very fascinating, who has known him since the early eighty’s. And when I first started at the Daily News Linda Stasi she said, “Listen, guys, this is an act, this white nationalism piece, this front, it’s an act.” And then a few months later she says, “Guys, I’m telling you I know this guy, this is not, it’s an act, he’s embracing it, but it’s not real.” Six months into his you know his campaign she said, “I’m telling you, you have to believe me, I know him.” She done dozens of interviews with him, she said, “It’s an act.” And then it was about a year in where she finally said, “I think I was wrong, it’s not an act. Like I thought it was an act.”
In the way she described it was that she believed that he did have moments of bigotry throughout his life, clear moments of racism of insensitivity, be it thinking about the Central Park Five or housing tenants well the others, but she said that she felt like he, her conclusion was that he adopted this idea of white nationalism for convenience sake and then started believing it.
And in part, because he was greatly influenced by Steve Bannon and —
JS: Well, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, I mean he had he had some very radical committed, you know, the term du jour is white nationalists, but yeah, you know, when you put it bluntly, I mean if you, their policies, I think it’s perfectly defensible to say that what Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have represented in their publicly-known ideas is white supremacy.
SK: Absolutely and if you go all the way back to the Stephen Miller as a young guy, you can go back and find people who say he was an open flagrant bigot in middle school, that he was booed off of his high school stage by thousands of students and people have documented this and talked about it, because of bigotry that he was saying on the mic there. People said that he was openly racist and discriminatory and horrendous. People who knew him at Duke when he protested the presence of Maya Angelou on the campus. Like, anybody who protests Maya Angelou must, I got, I have I have a problem with you.
But, not just that, but that he was openly bigoted, said when they saw him first be —
JS: Maybe they thought she was actually Angela Davis.
SK: (laughs) Right, right, but when they, people who knew him from middle school on saw him get a position in the White House thinking, oh my god, several people said, “The worst human being that I ever met was just given a position as chief policy adviser in the White House.” He was one the first hires Donald Trump made, so was Bannon. And so, when you surround yourself with these men, keep them around, have them inform your policies.
Whether we use the term white supremacist, white nationalist, or racist or bigot, they all have distinctions that are important. But I do, I believe that he believes some people are better than others. I think it’s the foundation of his immigration policies, it’s the foundation of why he wants to build an enormous wall.
And, I believe his most devoted supporters, white supremacists think he’s a white supremacist, and they have openly said that over and over and over again. So it’s not me and you in a room guessing. Neo-nazis, Klan members and others see him and believe he is one of them. And he has not done nearly enough to dissuade them from their support. And many men, including David Duke were in Charlottesville saying, “We are here in Charlottesville doing Trump’s work.” They said that. And then he, Trump, basically gave them coded language that he supported them in so many ways. And so, I do, I think —
JS: Yeah, there were some good folks there.
SK: Yeah, and I think, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates, he has a new piece calling Donald Trump the first white president. And I first I didn’t know, I wondered, I wondered where Coates was going with it. I’ve disagreed with Coates on a lot of things, but I actually thought that piece was brilliant.
And he talked about how of course there were 43 white presidents before Barack Obama. But none of them ran on being white. Their whiteness was just inferred, it was just a part of who they were, they had power because of it, but they weren’t running on whiteness. But that Donald Trump in many ways was the first person to win the presidency off of whiteness. And I think Ta-Nehisi’s right. And I just hadn’t considered it in that way. And Donald Trump knew that and doubled down on it, saying he would, if people at his rallies injured protesters, he said he would pay for their legal defense. And so they did. And he didn’t pay for their legal defense, because he’s a liar, but he encouraged the violence. He even said he wanted to hit people. You know? And so he has appealed to the worst instincts of our country and I think we’re just now understanding the harm that he’s caused and I think it will be decades trying to work ourselves out of the damage he’s done.
JS: Alright Shaun King, we’re going to leave it there, thank you very much for joining us on Intercepted.
SK: Yeah, thank you man.
Top photo: Activists raise their fists as they rally in support of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick outside the offices of the National Football League on Park Avenue, Aug. 23, 2017 in New York City.
RIP, Intercept
update
12 year old kid yanked from school desk for failing pledge of allegiance.
8 year old takes a knee at illinois youth football game.
http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/09/20/8-year-olds-take-knee-protest-national-anthem-illinois-youth-football-game/
Forcing people to do things against their will is an act of slavery and or unlawful arrest.
Tom-
Suuuure. Blame whitey. “All NFL owners are billionaire right wing white guys that REALLY hate any person of color”
Don’t forget that most of THOSE racist white guys are “Jewish white guys”
You, and the ADL always forget to mention THAT specially privileged form of racism.
Why is that? Because everyone is afraid of the Jewish race gangs of lawyers who whinge on about “That’s Defamation!” and then, proceed to defame people?
Short list of “racist white men” who are Jewish owners/board members in the NFL ( and you can bet the ‘ownership’ is tilted much the way the SCOTUS is tipped as well):
Jim Irsay – Indianapolis Colts
Zygi Wolf – Minnesota Vikings
Board of Directors – Green Bay Packers
Randy Lerner – Cleveland Browns
Daniel Snyder – Washington Redskins
Jeffery Lurie – Philadelphia Eagles
Stephen Ross – Miami Dolphins
Robert Kraft – New England Patriots
Arthur Blank – Atlanta Falcons
Malcolm Glazer – Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Al Davis – Oakland Raiders
Chip Rosenbloom – St. Louis Rams
Steve Tisch – 50% of NY Giants
All NFL owners are billionaire right wing white guys that REALLY hate any person of color that fucks up their massive profit? Why is Kaepernick being blacklisted from the league? Because he’s a bi-racial guy who’s telling the truth. The owners will never tolerate an uppity n*****r. What are they really thinking? Goddamnit n*****r. You want your millions, fame, fortune and babes every night? Then SHUT THE F**K UP! But Kaepernick refuses to. And they can’t handle it.
Good for Kaepernick.
You’re pretending to be a 16 year old ‘activist’ at a family Thanksgiving dinner table, right??
..or trolling…
No wait, it’s the first one, isn’t it?
So King can make 50 grand by proving he’s black but won’t take up the offer.
Wish I had a chance to make that much that easy.
I can’t imagine who is encouraging all of this segregation….
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/09/16/new-segregation-signs-pop-leftist-establishments/
Maybe the Anti Defamation League could get on the case ASAP, and solve all of these problems for us, and take the garbage out!
https://psmag.com/news/kings-garbage-76228
The NFL’s evil in many ways. They don’t give a flying eff if their players – and the children who emulate those players in Pop Warner – suffer chronic brain trauma. They maintain their monopoly, extorting cities for the privilege of having a team play there. And now, they’re collaborators with white supremacism & fascism.
An NFL team could pick up Colin Kaepernick tomorrow and the league should STILL be boycotted.
Colin’s a gifted athlete. Maybe he should pick up a baseball bat, because pro football is broken, and the billionaires sitting on the porches of their plantation mansions sipping sweet tea have no intention of ever fixing it.
Great interview, through and through. I don’t agree with all of it but every point is explained pretty much perfectly .
Here’s a fairly strange picture of race relations in America from a 2013 poll. . .
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/july_2013/more_americans_view_blacks_as_racist_than_whites_hispanics
Not a very encouraging picture, really. Regardless, anyone who judges another person on the basis of something like skin color is racist, but also ignorant – ripe for being a victim of con artists of the same skin color as they are. So, there are a lot of fearful, ignorant Americans. . . Let’s blame the media, the educational system, and of course, the parents.
Wow. Spectacular point. I’ve never seen that data, but it reflects what I’ve encountered in conversations with whites, blacks, Dems and Repubs. Thanks for that.
I’d be curious if those numbers have changed since then. The intense stuff of the fear-mongering identity politics machine on the Left has been ratcheted up 1,000 fold since the recent presidential campaign started, and 10,000 fold since Trump was elected. Now the Left and the media would have us all believe that everyone on the right is a White Supremacist. Even Black republicans are white supremacists to them: http://www.dailywire.com/news/21160/according-chelsea-handler-ben-carson-black-white-frank-camp
But that’s Ok for her to say, because Ben Carson is not only stupid (dumb ass chief neurosurgeon at pathetic Johns Hopkins), but he’s not reeeeally black (because he’s a republican, so he doesn’t get to carry the “Black Victim” card that only the Dems can dole out, and is the only way to really be Black in their eyes).
Shaun King would benefit from a little less focus on his own “voice” and “visibility.” If he actually gave a shit about the treatment of black athletes in America he’d boycott every division of the NCAA. Yet…he’s silent. If he chose to be less reactive and more thoughtful he’d walk away from his social media accounts for a few months and dive deep into the trenches of gerrymandering, voter registration, redistricting, and every other element of *that* part of the process. Hell, he’d use his considerable platform and presence to build a coalition with the likes of Uber and Lyft in crucial counties and cities for cheap (or free) transportation to voting centers on election days for low income districts. If he actually cared about the long game and the reality of “one step at a time” progress he’d spend less time on Facebook. I also don’t recall King being all that vocal when the very real health risks associated with the NFL surfaced. He’s not following in the footsteps of the greats the way he thinks he is….
Boycotting the NFL is interesting, but not the answer, because boycotts are not the answer. Let’s invent something else, which we can call a girlcott. In a girlcott, we get people together in every town that doesn’t have an NFL monopoly representative, to put together teams owned by each town. Teams that will never, ever, EVER move out of town. Teams you can root for because they are your town, not some company. Green Bay did that much. But now we also give these teams a nonprofit status and community ownership not only as individuals, but as a league. Every logo, every shirt is free. The games pay only the players and a fair wage for administrators. THERE ARE NO OWNERS BUT THE PEOPLE. The people battering their bodies get whatever the people pay to watch them, no salary caps, no colluding conniving bunch of schemers on top. And the rules for what each team’s members have to abide by? They’re what the people of each town decide. If they say beating your wife is less serious than not standing for an anthem about killing slaves, that’s their call, but there’s another town waiting to take that player and clean their clock.
I think the press is erroneous in saying Trump did not condemn the Nazis and KKK. He did as I recall call them despicable. But I agree the language is coded and Trump is definitely sympathetic to those who do not want Confederate monuments removed. The biggest coded message seems to have been ignored by the press. What he gave them shortly there after in pardoning Joe Arpaio was a much more clear message to his fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville
A bald-faced lie in the very first paragraph. Nice. That’s how you stop objective and honest non-partisans such as myself form even wasting their time on reading your piece – just pass along straight up lies right from the jump.
I guess this will be my last visit here. It’s been painful watching this site slide straight into sockpuppet status, but here we are. The one major source which once bravely bucked the establishment to honestly cover subjects that embarrassed the powers-that-be now uncritically repeats every lie from the mass media and DC oligarchy. Out.
It would be informative to explain what statement is “a bald faced lie”, and then to provide a counter-argument explaining why it is a lie.
There is no lie in the first paragraph. Soberano is obviously a racist.
I re-read it to try and discover this ‘bald faced lie’. Couldn’t find it. Spin again Soberano. . .
Colin Kaepernick has been blackballed from the NFL because 1) owners consider their players to be their property (remind anyone of slavery?) and don’t tolerate players not doing what they’re told. Players are told to stand for the National Shit Music, and Kaepernick didn’t do so, defiantly no less; and 2) the racist owners absolutely hate the BLM movement, so they doubly hate Kaepernick for not standing.
This situation is really disgusting, but it’s what I’ve come to expect from these jerks. Owners of sports teams are horrible rich pigs, with all that entails.
If playing for the NFL is considered slavery, please please please take me away in shackles.
I could really use those 6 and 7 figure slave wages…
I didn’t say that being a pro athlete is slavery; far from it, we agree on that. What I said is that the owners’ attitude of considering their players to be their property is the attitude of slave owners.
Slavery?
Having the opportunity to be as rich as Croesus and getting to play a game is slavery?How does that work logically?You know many employers can fire you without cause right?
And BLACK lives matters isnt racist?You dont think poor white people arent murdered by cops too?Abused?
Apparently you have little to no understand of either slavery or racism and wonder why people get turned off.
Cops in America are trigger-happy, that’s certainly true. So my take is, Kaepernick protesting against police shootings isn’t just a “Black Lives Matter” protest, it’s about getting police to act like professionals.
This is also why Black Lives Matter is a silly name; but Poor Lives Matter – no, that wouldn’t have gotten any media coverage. The last thing the plutocracy wants is poor whites finding common cause with poor blacks, poor Latinos, poor Asians, and poor Native Americans. They’d start hyperventilating about socialism if that ever happened.
Divide and conquer is the name of the game.
Percentage-wise, Blacks are far more likely to be killed by cops than whites. Hence, the name Black Lives Matter. I see nothing wrong with that, and good white people recognize the extreme racism in this country and won’t be turned off by that name.
So this wouldn’t be a problem if everyone were murdered in equal proportion????
I think you just found out you’re morally bankrupt.
Neo-communism is not a solution to our nation’s problems. Under capitalism or under communism, there will be self-serving bosses, and they will not be me, or you. At least under capitalism we get some neat consumer products.
Second, equality and justice on one hand, and freedom on the other hand, are opposites. In a large, diverse country the government needs to not pick sides.
Mr. Trump reminds me of my dead dad, God rest his tortured soul. A money-worshipping, misogynistic, virulently racist, narcissistic, barrel-chested mass of the worst form of white “supremacy.” Just like a lot of other people I know. And the nation and world still belong to them, no matter how much reactionary rebels like me and my black, red and tan buddies crab about it. https://soundcloud.com/biff-thuringer/white-mans-world
Sounds like you need new friends…
BLM’s list of demands:
“We demand an end to the named and unnamed wars on Black people – including the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people.
We demand reparations for harms inflicted on Black people: from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance.
We demand investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people.
We demand economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership, not merely access.
We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us.
We demand full and independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society.”
_______________________________________________________
Thankfully we’re moving away from racial segregation, ammirite??
This is a pointless side show. In light of a rather pathetic false-flag terror attack on the London Underground which resulted in a few injuries and no real strategic advantage for the so-called “terrorists”, the British PM Theresa May is now calling for a clampdown on the Internet because she knows the alleged perpetrators – who they haven’t even caught – supposedly planned the attack using information gleaned from Google.
Should we control access to the wonderful Tube maps too? I assume they proved equally as useful. Also talking probably helped.
But hey, tut-tutting over a bunch of hillbillies and lefties fighting is far more pointless I guess. New labels, new clickbait, new outrage.
Anyone else tired of progressives and their fists?
I’m tired of my fellow Americans and their big stupid mouths, regardless of their political persuasions.
Racism is not a left right issue – it’s an American issue that keeps rising from the dead.
Repubs and Americans raise their guns to protest the gubmint attempts to kill the 2nd amendment.
Democrats and Americans raise their fists to protest the abuse of owners over employees.
Whores for wallstreet never raise their fists, aint got none.
Democrats and Americans raise their fists to protest the abuse of owners over employees.
Whores for wallstreet never raise their fists, aint got none.
I’m neither D nor R (former Dem, left the party after BO’s first term, when they blew their majority…purposely I might add).
The Dems, the real ones in charge, aren’t doing dick about racism. Quite the contrary, they’re helping pass laws that specifically target minorities.
Fists fists fists fists is the left.
Where to start? (a more readable, edited version)
1. Black identity politics in the US is little more than a misappropriation of the past. To think that, after two terms with a popularly elected black president in the US, anyone is still arguing that the prospects of black people are being limited by either systemic racism or white privilege is patently false. One only needs to examine the oft repeated conscious lie that blacks are more likely to be the fatal victims of police shootings than whites to understand the degree to which racially decisive movements like BLM are committed to advancing their own brand of deeply destructive race hatred at the expense of truth; BLM, alone, is responsible for setting race race relations back in this country by a whole generation. More pathetic still are their white liberal enablers whose long simmering hatred for all things American, compels them to embrace and nurture such lies at the expense of social cohesion and the common good. The irony of this retrograde pattern is that it is designed to feed into the neoliberal NWO agenda which mandates that nativist attitudes worldwide must be vilified as a necessary precursor to eroding the traditional social fabric of nation states – especially those of the west.
2. Unlike Obama, who claims that his birth certificate is proof positive of his bona fides, Shaun King claims that his is a lie as it reports that both his parents are white – thus his own seemingly specious claim of illegitimacy can never truly be resolved. However, this is the least of Mr king’s problems… a long trail of alleged racial, religious, and disaster exploitation has been accompanied by a relentless string of accusations concerning his chronic misappropriation of donated funds. So much so in fact that Daily Beast editor Goldie Taylor wrote a 2015 article entitled, “Where Did All the Money Shaun King Raised for Black Lives Go?”.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/goldie-taylorwhere-did-all-the-money-shaun-king-raised-for-black-lives-go
Of course, Mr King has yet to “open up his {financial} records” as Ms. Taylor suggested. Rather, he moved forward from that date to publicly endorse Bernie and then Hillary Clinton’s campaign while simultaneously calling for greater racial diversity of congress itself. Such pleas are standard fare for Mr King who would have us ignore the glaring fact that melanin alone is no guarantee of positive political change – Obama being a poignant and painful example.
3. Like all self-interested, politically motivated chameleons, King’s brand building strategies include aligning himself with purportedly progressive cause celebs like Colin Kaepernick. In the doing, Mr King is predictably averse to labeling Kaepernick’s hand biting stunt as misguided, short-sighted, and/or hypocritical. Even while King enthusiastically endorses Jeremy Scahill’s assessment that professional football consciously “encourages a worship of the military and weapons of war as the one true form of patriotism”, he fails to acknowledge his own glaring hypocrisy in calling for its boycott in support of Kaepernick’s reinstatement. Rather, he chooses to adroitly ignore the fact that Kaepernick is a multi-million dollar black exemplar of NFL endorsed militarism (and alleged racism) along with another 70 Percent of NFL players who are also black. When one stops to consider the degree to which millions of young Americans are influenced by such corporate media propagandic manipulations, the true nature of King and Kaepernick’s hypocritical brand building manipulation of social justice movements becomes plainly evident.
A repost from his September 17 2017, 10:11 a.m. Post
Hence the attached note: “(a more readable, edited version)”
I’m no fan of war criminal Clinton supporting liberals or the criminal military, but… so nice to see the half-wit lizard-brained racist moron’s point of view so well represented by this pathetic and wordy screed. Thanks for representing white privilege so well! You are a credit to “cracker-ass-crackers” everywhere.
Rather curious lead-in for a reply to a comment that has nothing to do with Hillary. Since the rest of your comment proved to be even more worthless, I am left thirsting for even less. Thus, I am painfully reminded of the totality of your past commentary. My bad.
“Rather curious lead-in for a reply to a comment that has nothing to do with Hillary.”
Really? From your post:
“Of course, Mr King has yet to “open up his {financial} records” as Ms. Taylor suggested. Rather, he moved forward from that date to publicly endorse Bernie and then Hillary Clinton’s campaign while simultaneously calling for greater racial diversity of congress itself. ”
Hilarious.
Again, you are just embarrassing yourself. It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to further speak and remove all doubt.
Classic projection by a pig-ignorant twat with pretensions of intellectualism. Thanks for the entertainment!
You know Karl, this disingenous BS is kind of tedious. The actual game those who cry about “identity politics” are really playing, most people are aware of the nature of it, it’s spewed out over and over again on Youtube podcasts by earnest PR monkeys of the Steve Bannon type. Here are the main points of the bullshit train you’re riding:
(1) All academic experts today are the products of Cultural Marxist infiltration of the university system and have been since the 1950s.
(2) All progress and development in human societies for the past 2,000 years is solely due to the “white race” making advancements, specifically the “white Christian race”.
(3) All other ethnic and religious groups are to be mistrusted and kept as second-class citizens, be they Jewish or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist, African or Asian or Native American, due to their inherent genetic and cultural inferiority.
(4) All evidence of things like the influence of Islamic scholarship on the European Renaissance, diversity in ancient civilizations, etc., is just ‘historical revisionism’ by the Cultural Marxists.
It’s a stupid game. What you and your ilk are really saying is that all minorities (and women) should just accept their second-class social and economic status, because you’re a bunch of fearful ignorant racists who believe in the genetic superiority of the white European male, based on discredited BS from 100 years ago, like phrenology and rigged IQ testing. Your greatest fear is coming in to work some day and finding that your new boss is a black woman. There’s not much more to it than that, is there?
Try growing up. Just because someone looks like you, doesn’t mean you can blindly trust them – and the opposite is also true. FFS.
Hey photosymbiosis, it is amazing how your screed so closely approximates that of Mona. That aside, I have a question for you:
How many straw men does it take to construct one Wicker man?
Straw men? Are you sure it’s not a red herring, non sequitor, distraction, whataboutery, Mona-ism, etc.? Why not just admit that you don’t want to talk about the substantive issues?
You give yourself away right here, you know, when you first state that, “arguing that the prospects of black people are being limited by either systemic racism or white privilege is patently false. . .” followed a bit later about how such claims are “. . .eroding the traditional social fabric of nation states“. Seems to be a bit of an internal conflict in the argument, doesn’t there?
The traditional social fabric is that of white Christian males running everything, with women and minorities kept as second class citizens – and like the other scientific racists and misogynists, people like you believe this is merely due to the “inherent genetic inferiority of women and minorities”, as some Galton-type 19th century Social Darwinist would put it (or some modern Charles Murray-type Bell Curve screed would). “It’s not racism at all! It’s just that white males have better genes!”
That phrenology/rigged IQ test bullshit has been repeatedly discredited for decades, yet jackasses keep pulling it out and parading it around. It’s no different than Aryan Brotherhood types keep their spirits up in prison by telling themselves they’re God’s chosen people – a depressingly common phenomenon among human beings of all groups, actually.
No, it’s not just white people who adopt racist attitudes based on in-group/out-group definitions – that’s true enough – but come on, why not just admit that the whole concept is based on simple-minded ignorance, no matter who is perpetrating it?
People who go around thinking that they can trust people who look like them, but not those who look slightly different. . . That’s who con artists look to target. “Sure, friend, I’m one of you! Now vote for me, donate to my church, join my cult, buy this shitty subprime loan. . . ” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Answering the charge of straw men with more straw men is a failing proposition. Oh, but wait, you do not really want a respectful and substantive exchange of ideas, do you? I have repeatedly corrected your false statements in the past with proven fact and yet you have chosen to move on with out acknowledgement. If you are not Mona, you are as close to being her clone as possible. So fuck off.
By “patently false” I assume you mean “because I Karl am full of shit and refuse to look at much less comprehend the myriad evidence supporting the reality of systemic racism and white privilege.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/civil-rights-act-anniversary-racism-charts_n_5521104.html
And that’s just scratching the surface of the studies that have been published, peer reviewed, for decades by academics and the US government demonstrating quite compellingly that “systemic racism” is most assuredly alive and well in America.
That you’re an ideological stooge of the worst kind is irrelevant to the facts.
Same old rrheard.., preemptively projecting onto others that which he has been repeatedly faulted for in the past (example: I am an attorney and therefore the first and last word on any subject). Shall we visit some illustrious examples to prove this point, or adopt a more civil tone whereby a respectful exchange of opinion might affect outcomes favorable to the truth itself? I have reviewed the study to which referred but choose to give it a level of consideration that your ideological arrogance and chronic hostility was intended not to invite.
P.s. Is this one of those instances that make up the 5% of comments that you do not agree with?
I just took the time to consider each of the 15 charts in the Huffington Post article to which you provided a link and I am at a loss as to how you are convinced that this is proof of institutional racism. Let’s consider the first example listed entitled, “Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.” Brown researchers compared black exposure to neighborhood poverty to that of whites and concluded that “Affluent blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.” Yet they provide no compelling evidence that this is the result of systemic racism. Personally, I can think of numerous reasons why Affluent blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes including:
1. People prefer to live among those who share a common cultural identity. A 1986 New York Times article entitled “ATLANTA, MECCA FOR MIDDLE-CLASS BLACKS, ALSO HARBORS POVERTY” spoke to a trend in the 1989s where affluent blacks were flocking to Atlanta which, at the time, was characterized as the “Mecca of black family living.” The reason given for this trend was that affluent blacks wanted to expose themselves and their children to the “black experience.” Thus, Atlanta experienced a surge in demand for home ownership in neighborhoods equivalent to those of Atlanta’s white working class by affluent blacks from around the country .
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/20/us/atlanta-mecca-for-middle-class-blacks-also-harbors-poverty.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=0
2. As growing affluence among blacks is relatively new, there is very often a marked income disparity from one generation to the next. Thus, if a young family of affluent blacks prefers to live a lifestyle comparable to that of whites in the same income bracket, then they are often forced to move away from family and/or friends whose economic fate does not allow for such radical single generation transitions.
3. Blacks often prefer to do business”with their own” for the purpose of improving their common circumstance. However, blacks are more likely to be charged higher interest rates for loans and home mortgages by black owned lending institutions than their white counterparts. Likewise, blacks are more likely to borrow from “high risk” lending institutions:
Said costs result in the purchase of more modest housing.
4. Affluent Blacks only save 5% of their earned income as compared to 20% saved on average by affluent whites. More savings allow for a higher percentage of investment income which, in turn, accounts for growing wealth disparity between the two groups over time. The capacity to delay immediate gratification often plagues those with new found wealth.
5. Blacks are far less likely to inherit wealth than their white counterparts. Because institutional racism was largely responsible for wealth disparity in America’s PAST, whites have a greater level of multi-generational inherited wealth than blacks on the average. The legacy effect of inherited wealth places contemporary blacks at a disadvantage on the average as they are more poorly positioned on the average to rely on inherited wealth when making their housing choices.
6. The fertility rate among blacks is higher then that of whites. Larger families require more space. By choosing a large home in a a working class neighborhood, affluent black families are getting more square footage of living space for their buck.
As you can see, simply listing alleged disparities between whites and blacks within American society does little in the way of proving systemic racism; the devil is always in the details.
Jesus wept, you’re stuck in the early 20th century . . . F. Scott Fitzgeral captured your views back then, as follows, in The Great Gatsby:
Fertility arguments. . . Seriously, who cares? Why do you care? The white race is being overwhelmed? Aryan Nazi paranoia, is it?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/rise-of-the-colored-empires/276844/
Yet another straw man. You are showing your true colors today.
1. To think that the election of Barack Obama means systemic racism is gone is dumb. For one, the election of Donald Trump is clearly reactionary.
2. Personal silliness about Shaun King is irrelevant.
3. That paragraph is incoherent. There’s no argument contained in it, as far as I can tell.
I agree that Trump’s success was largely driven by reactionary, anti-globalist forces. This fact does not translate into evidence of systemic racism however.
The fact that you are unable to understand the remainder of my commentary speaks more to you own intellectual deficiencies than a lack of coherency – a cursory review of your own contributions will bear this out.
I generally hate identity politics, by which I mean local politicians sitting around with the ward map and fresh results from the Census, picking how many issues off the Stock White Column, Stock Black Column, Stock Latino Column to put together into a supposed set of beliefs. Reducing everyone to a race and pandering to each race in proportion is no way to listen to the people.
However, Kaepernick is anything but identity politics. I mean, that’s just a guy hearing an anthem about putting down “the hireling and the slave” and deciding (informed by history) that he wants to side with the slaves. Everybody ought to really, no matter what race, so that’s not identity politics, but politics. The “national anthem” is a law made by a bunch of conniving legislators with nothing more important to do in 1933 – we have better anthems, and we should honor former generations by demanding our right, as they had, to pick ours as we choose.
I agree with you in regard to the national anthem. However, Kaepernick and other professional black athletes are the mean by which the corporatocracy sells the American dream to black America. In an August 28 2016 article by Jon Swartz entitled “Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery”, I wrote:
And again, today I wrote:
How about identifying and shaming those asshole cops who just stood there and watched that young person get his ass kicked?
The problem with a boycott call is that the fan base for football skews heavily white AND heavily against holding police to account.
What might be more productive is a ‘work to rule’ campaign, modified by the position on BLM etc.
No attending ‘voluntary’ practices until the team, including the coaches and management are full public supporters of BLM, including asking the stadium to SIT or TAKE A KNEE during the national anthem ‘in recognition of the ongoing racism in American society, policing, and courts’.
No media interviews with any member of the media who’s organization and representative hasn’t taken a public pro BLM position. If media appearance is mandatory, make all comments about BLM (hire PR people to learn how to ‘pivot’ any questions to that)
Now autographs for any fan who cannot show active and public support for BLM.
Public denunciations of sponsors not supporting BLM in a major way (if not by the actual sponsored/spokesperson individual or team, because of legal clauses, by those who can)
The fan base may not be persuaded to give up their football by appealing to their better nature, but appealing to their social nature in this way might get results, even if it is the negative one of people not watching football – something that the boycott calls are trying to achieve.
“No attending ‘voluntary’ practices until the team, including the coaches and management are full public supporters of BLM …”
You’re kidding right? Do you have any idea who these people are? Have you ever played sports? Coaches, management, and owners are extreme right wing assholes. The day they would agree to that is the day we all win the lottery. This isn’t the NBA.
Look at it this way: Who were the biggest assholes in high school? Answer: the jocks on the football team. These guys are them with more money.
Oh, I know that the owners (especially the OLD owners) are extreme, right wing and disrespectful of everyone ‘beneath’ them, and tend to try and influence the hiring and firing process to protect and promote the straw boss type.
But they are also pragmatists, and if the fans and sponsors start not being cash cows for them, will find a way to make that stop.
The current state of racial & economic affairs in the United States goes back a ways. . .
What the racist xenophobic crowd believes in – it’s scientific racism mainly, the business of the late 19th and 20th century, which in some sense replaced the religious racism of the previous centuries that was used to justify the African slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous people throughout the European colonial sphere. It’s childish and ignorant, but there’s a few academic types who still promote this BS about the genetic superiority of the white male, then you add in the evangelicals and the ignorance, and you get the “White Christian Pride” movement, the Jim Crow era in the South, etc.
In the post-Civil Rights Act (1964) era, things changed a bit – but the main pushback to that was Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and that crew (incidentally, Hillary Clinton got her start in politics with Goldwater). But the Nixon War on Drugs and the explosion of the American prison industry he initiated (and that Bill & Hillary Clinton perpetuated, along with the Bush clan) set the stage for what came next. As Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
The real breeding ground for interracial hatred was the prison complex that Nixon helped expand – with the different racial groups egged on against each other by the prison guards, with the rise of gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood (white), Crips & Bloods (black), Nortenos & Surenos (Latino), etc. – that’s where poor interracial hatred was incubated, and when those people were recycled out into the general population, they formed the nucleus of various gangs. The Aryan Brotherhood gave rise to the white supremacy movement – which found a few backers among the rich and powerful, like Steve Bannon and the Koch Brothers. But, like the skinheads of the 1980s, this is little more than a fringe movement.
What we have today – almost undiscussed in the interview – is economic racism – and that’s why Kaepernick got blacklisted, I think. Consider that the 1% (those with >$8 million in assets, making >$400,000 a year) are 96% white, about 1% for each minority group. The poverty sector – those making <$19,000 a year for a family of three with zero assets, that's 41% white, 28% latino, 22% black, 9% Native American, Asian, other. The owners of the football teams – that's the 0.01%, the mega-wealthy. And here you have someone, Kaepernick, admitted to the first tier of real wealth in the U.S., the 1%, criticizing the power structure in the United States? Undermining the plutocracy? Fire that bastard! Loyalty to your social class – that's rule #1 among the plutocracy.
You have to remember, in a plutocratic system the police are charged with protecting wealth above all else. Wall Street criminals don't get set up on drug busts, even if they're all cocaine addicts, so that they'll rat out their bosses at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan in exchange for immunity from prosecution – it'd be easy to do, that's how other DEA and FBI operations work. Anyone criticizing the police system is thus persona non gratis among the plutocratic class. Targeting poor people is what the police are for – lord forbid the police would target rich people who rob poor people! (And that's the main criticism of Black Lives Matter – a tendency to ignore police persecution and shootings of poor Latinos and whites)
But while Trump is certainly a racist, he's not the Aryan Brotherhood prison class of racist who were on display in North Carolina – he's an economic racist, a plutocrat, who hobnobbed around with the likes of Hillary Clinton, who herself played a big role in perpetuating the system of economic racism – from supporting the prison complex, calling black people 'superpredators' while encouraging the real predators on Wall Street like Goldman Sachs, destroying Glass-Steagall – the end effect is no different from having a Donald Trump in office.
So why in the world would anyone – like Shaun King – ever support a crook like Hillary Clinton, who is a crook just like Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani – all of whom look remarkably similar to their predecessor and spiritual father figure, Richard Nixon? Look – there aren't any 'lesser evils' – there's just evil. It has many faces.
Where to start?
1. Black identity politics in the US is little more than a misappropriation of the past. To think that, after two terms with a popularly elected black president in the US, anyone is still arguing the the prospects of black people are being limited by either systemic racism or white privilege is patently false. One only needs to examine the oft repeated conscious lie that blacks are more likely to be the fatal victims of police shootings than whites to understand the degree to which racially decisive movements like BLM are committed to advancing their own brand of deeply destructive race hate at the expense of truth; BLM, alone, is responsible for setting race race relations back in this country by a whole generation. More pathetic still are their white liberal enablers whose long simmering hatred for all things American, compels them to embrace and nurture such lies at the expense of of social cohesion and the common good. The irony of this retrograde pattern is that it is designed to feed into the neoliberal NWO agenda which mandates that nativist attitudes worldwide must be vilified as a necessary precursor to eroding the traditional social fabric of nation states – especially those of the west.
2. Unlike Obama, who claims that his birth certificate is proof positive of his bona fides, Shaun King claims that his is a lie as it reports that both his parents are white – thus his own seemingly speciously claim of illegitimacy can never truly be resolved. However, this is the least of Mr king’s problems… a long trail of alleged racial, religious, and disaster exploitation has been accompanied by a relentless string of accusations concerning his chronic misappropriation of donated funds. So much so in fact that Daily Beast editor Goldie Taylor wrote a 2015 article entitled, “Where Did All the Money Shaun King Raised for Black Lives Go?”.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/goldie-taylorwhere-did-all-the-money-shaun-king-raised-for-black-lives-go
Of course, Mr King has yet to “open up his {financial} records” as Ms. Taylor suggested. Rather he moved forward from that date to publicly endorse Bernie and then Hillary Clinton’s campaign while simultaneously calling for greater racial diversity of congress itself. Such pleas are standard fare for Mr King who would have us ignore the glaring fact that melanin alone is no guarantee of positive political change – Obama being a poignant and painful example.
3. Like all self-interested, politically motivated chameleons, King’s brand building strategies include aligning himself with purportedly progressive cause celebs like Colin Kaepernick. In the doing, Mr King is predictably averse to labeling Kaepernick’s hand biting stunt as misguided, short-sighted and/or hypocritical. Even while King enthusiastically endorses Jeremy Scahill’s assessment that professional football consciously “encourages a worship of the military and weapons of war as the one true form of patriotism”, he fails to acknowlege his own glaring hypocrisy in calling for its boycott in support of Kaepernick’s reinstatement. Rather, he chooses to adroitly ignore the fact that Kaepernick’s is a multi-million dollar black exemplar of NFL endorsed militarism (and alleged racism) along with another 70 Percent of NFL players who are also black. When one stops to consider the degree to which millions of young Americans are influenced by such corporate media propagandic manipulations, the true nature of King and Kaepernick’s hypocritical brand building manipulations of social justice movements becomes plainly evident.
I agree with this Karl guy. Who pays attention to these idiots other than internet writers and commentators?
You mean besides “this Karl guy”? Lol
You and that Karl guy it seems. Did you think this shit through at all?
Jeremy stop embarrassing yourself, liberals are just as racist as conservatives, if not more so:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
– Crazy Uncle Joe Biden
“Today our country has lost a true American original, my friend and mentor Robert C. Byrd.”
– Crooked Hillary on KKK Grand Wizard, Senator (D) – West Virginia
“The only reason you are endorsing him is because he’s black. Let’s just be clear.”
– Bill Clinton
As you see, Hillary’s code word for Klansman was “American Original” — what hateful coded speech. Actually liberals are more racist than conservatives, if you consider how they treat black Republicans, calling them traitors, Uncle Toms, or worse … .
Kaepernick’s choice wouldn’t have been loaded with the edgy impact he’d hoped for if it didn’t carry risk he knew it would entail. He gambled and lost. He’s also out of work because he walked away from a job after he did that.
Attendance is way down at these events because its audience is tired of being confronted by political statements. Now it even has to worry about reacting the right way. They’re saying Forget this. They have better things to do.
In the “land of the free” it’s our duty to be political. To be engaged in the politics that affect our citizens, our fellow Americans, should be the least we do.
“Forget this? Better things to do”? Enjoying white privilege means “forget this” is probably pretty easy. “Better things to do” speaks to a lack of compassion, empathy and interest in the plights of their fellow human beings.
Kaepernick is being silenced for pointing out injustices. It took courage to do what he did. And bravo to the players kneeling in solidarity with his message. This is a conversation we need to have.
Kneeling doesn’t say good police are bad, or have anything to do with the troops or love of country. It says, please just start treating people of color with the same respect white people enjoy. Stop beating and killing and jailing them at such disproportionate rates. And please hold the bad police officers responsible for these actions accountable.
If attendance is going down of mostly white people going to see mostly people of color run fast and jump high but refuse to even hear or respect their societal grievances and insist on just being entertained…good. Maybe they should find a different, whiter sport to watch? You know, “better things to do.”
And speaking of “better things to do,” most the people who are so upset about Kaepernick taking a knee probably use the time during the anthem to buy beer, go smoke, or take a leak. At least Kaepernick used the time to do something dignified that speaks to being American, like peaceful freedom of expression.
Zzzz. No they go to see sports. When do you want to stop making it all about color and stereotype? Now that that’s available to everyone for like half a century now, you want to look at them as colors again rather than people, is that it? Isn’t that what you want people to want, Carly, or do want your athletes being off topic drama queens too?
People lose their jobs all the time because of their political beliefs, for bringing politics into the workplace. Colin walked a way from his.
An average NFL game (60 minutes) has more than 100 commercials and just 11 minutes of play.
The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads( many of which are the same ads shown over and over again)
Inserted ads during live play equals 45 minutes.
The commercial time equals approx. 60 min, or one-third of the game-time.
The 11 minutes of action was calculated by WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406
There is an “officials”( commercial break) time out every 15 minutes, besides regulation time outs
An average game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes.
An average broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play.
The plurality of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches and refs loitering on the field.
An average play in the NFL lasts four seconds.
i’m with kap….but it’s not like the nfl hadn’t earned a mass boycott WAY BEFORE this sordid saga….this is merely par for the course
This entire article boils down to complete inference….with a heavy dose of racial prejudice, partisanship, and histrionics.
Progress!!
Yes and no to Shaun King’s final thought in this interview, that every DJT damage will take decades to repair. The pendulum swings, and it’s my hope DJT and bigoted followers teach OUR country to face up to its horrific racist past – and better address its currently institutionalized residuals (like a National Anthem glorifying slaves, or the Pledge of Allegiance promising non-existent “justice for all”).
I saw an elaborate statue of Robert E Lee being taken down in Dallas, Texas, this weekend – and I tried to imagine such a thing happening 8 months into a Hillary Clinton establishment presidency. I just can’t get there.
Thank you, Jeremy and Intercepted, for continually bringing us such great guests and interviews.
Gregg Easterbrook says Colin Kaepernick should sign with Google:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/tuesday-morning-quarterback-gregg-easterbrooks-football-for-the-smart-set-comes-to-the-weekly-standard/article/2009369
I love how he complains about Trump’s free press coverage. The DNC contacted the press and asked them to cover Trump as they thought he’d be a better opponent for Hillary. We have hard proof of this.
Even Micheal Vick, the man who tortured dogs to death and returned to the NFL after his prison term, could stand for the national anthem. By refusing to do so, these players are clearly saying they do not wish to be a part of a united country and they’re worse than Vick.
And screw ESPN for injecting politics into every sports story. This only divides us, but hey for leftists this is a feature not a bug.
This will surprise you, but Scahill is bitching about Trump’s free coverage not as a Democrat, but as disturbed citizen who hates how all this crap works. What “united country” are you jabbering about? I sure as fuck aint part of your team, dude, so consider us divided.
+3
“I’m actually trying to honor what we’re supposed to be honoring: the freedom of America, the equality of America, the justice for all, and the liberty. Those are things that I’m trying to remind people that we all fought for.”
“I wish that people would take it for what it is and make a difference and go out there and try to combat against racism, fascism, unnecessary violence.”
Count me in on all the above. You got the right to speak your mind or protest a wrong. NO ONE has the right to make their point by violence, assault is NOT a right either by protesters or police. The Constitution and the law draw a clear line but perfect justice is not possible better justice is only possible though struggle and protest and participation in a governance now too involved with moneyed interest.
> And third, these commentaries act as though the First Amendment has some secret clause that says athletes cannot engage in nonviolent protest as though they’re supposed to surrender their humanity or their principles when they put on their helmet and uniform.
Employees have a First Amendment right to protest on the job? Ridiculous.
Why would anyone believe this guy. He can’t even admit to himself that, as horrible as it is, that he’s white.
PS- you wrote, “Kaepernick was a highly ranked quarterback in the NFL”. Nobody who knows anything about football would believe that. He’s been terrible these past few years. He’d make a solid backup, but that’s about it.
Progressive leftists who lack vocabulary, and their raised fists.