Monday Readings: November 21, 2016
It’s Monday! Here’s what I’m reading.
Jeff Sessions as Attorney General would be a catastrophe for those in solitary confinement, Jean Casella and James Ridgeway write.
Trump has long denounced what he calls “criminals’ rights.” And more broadly, since the widespread use of solitary confinement is driven by mass incarceration, Trump’s general law-and-order stance, which is inhospitable to such moves as sentencing reform, could add to the federal prison population. Sessions, who has a track record on these issues–he virulently opposed recent bipartisan efforts at sentencing reform and wrongly believes that crime is skyrocketing–will certainly have Trump’s back.
Susan Collins of Maine, portrayed as a “moderate” by establishment media, supports Sessions. The Washington Examiner reports that Collins’ support makes a smoother path to confirmation for Sessions.
Collins, the last remaining Northeastern GOP centrist in the upper chamber, said she has known Sessions for nearly 20 years after they both came to Senate in 1997, and believes he has the character and qualifications to serve the country well as its top law enforcer.
“He is an individual who works hard, believes in public service and acts with integrity,” she said. “As a former U.S. attorney and former Alabama attorney general, Senator Sessions is well qualified and would serve our country well as United States Attorney General.”
On an unrelated note to Sessions’ nomination,The New York Times reports that white nationalists had a conference in DC over the weekend to celebrate Trump’s win.
Intellectual leaders of the movement argue that they are merely trying to realize their desire for a white “ethno-state” where they can be left alone. Mr. Trump, with his divisive language about immigrants and Muslims, has given them hope that these dreams can come true.
God forbid they call it racism, though — Tressie McMillan writes about how the media uses euphemisms to avoid addressing reality. Actually naming it is impossible.
I am interested a less contextual discursive question than I am in some measure of the change in media norms. And, I am mostly interested in these data because they should provide insight on how and why mainstream media was woefully unprepared to cover a professionally racist presidential platform like Donald Trump’s and why they continue to be ill-equipped for what promises to be an aggressively, blatant racist political platform.
And over at FAIR, media critic Adam Johnson deconstructs the idea that “identity politics” lost the election for the Democratic Party. The piece, entitled “Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump,” takes on David Brooks, George Will, Mark Lilla, and more, and is worth the read.
Here’s an amusing passage on Brooks and Will:
In typical [David] Brooks fashion, he went on to equate anti-racism with racism:
But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too. To raise money and mobilize people, advocates play up ethnic categories to an extreme degree.
To fight back, people targeted by racists occasionally “raise money and mobilize people” who, like them, are also targeted by racists. The horror! “Why isn’t there a White History Channel?” inanity has its most influential booster, and he’s a bespectacled “moderate” at the New York Times.
George Will, whose piece is too lazy to examine in depth, does what George Will has been doing for 30 years: He lists off some anecdotes of ostensibly goofy political correctness, then tacks on a half-assed concluding paragraph about how it “might have” led to Trump.
See y’all tomorrow.