Tony Hinchcliffe, the opening act of Donald Trump’s ballyhooed Madison Square Garden event, left a trail of controversy in his wake after performing a set full of abjectly racist jabs aimed at various minority groups.
I personally think, quite aside from the unnecessary response from Biden, that Harris is already dragged down by her ties to genocide Joe. And To think I thought we had terrible choices in the last two elections!
Harris has made a series of her own mistakes. This is one that’s not hers but she’s getting the splashback from it.
It’s funny — I’ve seen at least one headline speculate that this episode is hastening Harris’s distancing from the Biden presidency. If she really wanted to put distance and show herself to be her own person, listening to the majority of Americans and announcing that she would pursue a different tack on the Gaza issue would be a fine way to do that.
Of course, we can’t go back in time, but having a candidate that was not attached to the current administration at all would have circumvented a lot of these problems. I go back to Biden putting his thumb on the scale on his way out of presidential contest and I am newly angered. He and his cadre in the Democratic Party have done everything wrong. Harris, in spite of this, was finding success when she was going against conventional wisdom but became mired herself when she adopted Biden’s electoral strategy.
You're right, Nova. Sucha sick, vile "comedian" and Biden had to play right into it. I want it to all go away, the stupidity and the evil. We are doomed by it.
I just performed a thought experiment this morning: what would have been the reaction to such an event as the Madison Square Garden rally had it been held in 2016? There’s no way that Trump would have been the GOP standard bearer — he would have been drummed out and somehow Mike Pence would have been elevated to the top-line position. Republicans wouldn’t have stood for it.
The fact that we’re here and we have more than one Republican making excuses and trying to paper over Trump’s statements that he wants generals like Hiter’s generals shows how slowly this water has been boiling, and how amphibious we’ve turned out to be.
To be honest, I’ve always assumed that the Republican establishment would have preferred some non-entity like Jeb Bush or Rick Perry in 2016. They would have done much of the same domestic policy, but with better optics and less drama. Trump is too much unpredictable for their taste and too much of a dilettante, but they have no way to get rid of him. This is why you see certain establishment politicians endorsing Kamala, because she’s how Republicans used to be twenty years ago. Yet, one could argue that the Republican Party is ostensibly more respectful of the democratic process by grudging accepting the will of primary voters, versus Democrats doing everything possible to shut out Bernie Sanders. Truthfully, I think this has less to do with politics than the fact that no one who is even remotely progressive can be allowed near the presidency.
Biden’s commentary is another unforced error. If he had to say anything, he should have just stuck with calling racist commentary “garbage” and not people. Insulting and shaming voters doesn’t work, yet a lot of people in the Democratic Party seem to think otherwise. The way racism tends to be talked about in political discourse tends to be unhelpful, as it is usually shorthand for being someone who is mean or rude. While that may be true, it reduces racism to a matter of individual intent, rather than a systemic issue that exists, regardless of intent.
Lastly, there have always been Trump-like figures in American politics, but they tended to be consigned to the South. Because the South was considered to basically be a separate country until recently (and precious few whites cared about the plight of Blacks), liberals in other regions were willing to turn a blind eyes to these types, assume that the rot would stay contained there. But that was never the case. The American conservative tradition has always been sympathetic to the Confederate cause/Jeffersonian vision, and it transcends state lines. If you stick the rhetoric of a Storm Thurmond in the mouth of a guy from California (Reagan), Arizona (Goldwater), or Queens (Trump), people will take it more seriously.
This leads to a certain cynicism on my part, as the good liberals of New York, Massachusetts, California, etc. were willing for decades to tolerate the tyrannies of the likes of Eugene Talmadge, Ross Barnett, and George Wallace. But now that such a figure may affect everyone, even the supposed “safe states,” they’re freaking out. Maybe if the enlightened liberals of the past weren’t so intent on going to brunch and ignoring what was in front of them, they wouldn’t be facing “Mississipification.”
Biden's comments were an unforced error insofar as he neutralized the criticism that Trump & Co. were getting for the use of the word in question. They were able to turn around and pin that on Biden himself, thus absolving their own hideous bigotry. That was the mistake. He should have just chosen a different word. The gaffe itself would have blown over and people could still focus on the horrendous use of 'garbage' by the Trump team. That's impossible now.
Biden, incidentally, wasn't talking about "people" -- plural. He was talking about one person, Hinchcliffe, the so-called comedian. I agree with those giving the charitable reading that "supporter's" should be taken as being the singular possessive, because the pronoun used later in the sentence is 'his', clearly indicating a singular male as the reference for the remainder of the remarks. This shouldn't have even been a controversy. However, Fox News and its ilk took those comments and enlarged them beyond the frame. Also, that media silo has perfected the craft of insinuating something, then the next outlet taking that insinuation and reporting it as fact. Thus a rumor goes through a form of wash and it comes out as though something actually nefarious has happened. (This is the exact same cycle of innuendo that affected Rep. Tlaib last month with regards to CNN treating MI AG Dana Nessel's accusations of antisemitism as prima facie true.)
As for the Republicans, they actually did have a way of dispatching Trump. It was in January 2021. They could have convicted him in the Senate and been done with this. Alternatively, Kevin McCarthy could have resisted the temptation to revive Trump's relevance by visiting and embracing Trump two weeks after Trump had left the WH. Adam Kinzinger points to that moment as the resurrection of Trump and blames McCarthy for our current predicament; I too pinpoint that as a inflection point. Without McCarthy, Trump would have slunk into obscurity (especially as he had been kicked off all of the major social media platforms--he would have had a very difficult time getting his message out). At any rate, the GOP had options, and they chose to punt.
As for your consideration of what we as Americans tolerated in the past, I think it's important not to read backwards from where we are today in terms of political vision. I say insofar as people were far more likely to view their politics regionally. We still do this to a large extent. I live in a part of Michigan that is relatively close to the Ohio border, yet I know next to nothing about what's going on politically in that state. Politics tend to be parochial. This had to have been the case even more so before the internet and, of course, before television. Those innovations in technology shrunk borders and dissolved certain forms of sectarianism so that there really did seem like there was a national consciousness (though which one might find national consensus). Newspapers couldn't do that, and even radio couldn't do that because tower transmissions can reach only so far. So these instantaneous communication innovations transformed how we were able to view politics.
Marshall McLuhan, cultural critic, was an amazingly brilliant man, but even he tolerated some base racism in his worldview. I learned of this as I went through some of his lectures and other materials. He was quite concerned that television would spook Black folks in America. I could dig up the quote; maybe I'll write about it -- I know that I was incredibly crestfallen to see him take to such racist premises to form an outlook. But basically he was concerned that television might incite a less sophisticated people, and he was worried how TV would influence what we now know as the civil rights era.
While McLuhan may have been a little backward in his vision in his trepidation, I think he had his finger on something very important, which is the fact that television WAS intrinsic to how transformative that era was. I think we must be experiencing something very similar now, with the advent of social media and the nascent, still rudimentary form of AI. This time, though, the times threaten to bring us to a contractual era, where our world gets more bounded and smaller.
Thank you for your reply. I don’t think it matters whether “garbage” refers to an individual or a group of people. The “I’m being cancelled!! (But not really)” industrial complex that is so rife among the far-right is such that it can be spun into a sense of persecution. As you noted, the actual problem of what Biden responded to has been forgotten, and now we’re stuck in “garbage” discourse, no pun intended.
While it’s true that Americans in the early 20th century would not have necessarily known about the intricacies of local politics in other states, the media was developed enough that people could get a general idea, at least about the more scandalous and/or important issues. For example, the Kennedy family already had national recognition in the 1930s when JFK, RFK, etc were still pretty young. Tammany Hall was quite notorious and talked about beyond New York as a symbol of corruption and graft.
Similarly, the plight of Southern Blacks and the dysfunctional political system they were stuck in was known, even to those outside of the US. For example, “Winnifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth” by Brigitte Hamann includes a portion of a letter a Jewish resident of Bayreuth wrote to Wagner, in which he complained that the city’s Jews were being treated, “like the Negroes in America.” Cases like the Scottsboro Boys, Georgia’s “Two Governors” debacle, and the Moore’s Ford lynchings were reported by the white and Black presses outside of the South, often with withering condemnation. Black papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier did have national reach, at least in Black communities. So people outside the South knew what was going on and who the elected officials were who presided over these matters. However, the only way to change things was to pass federal legislation, which was impossible without the support of the South’s Democratic bloc of senators. This is still a problem today, even if the Southern senators have switched sides.
I do make a distinction between individual, contemporary and historical, who have questionable beliefs vs those who have questionable beliefs and are actively making society worse. For example, a couple of years ago, there was a controversy where a researcher looked through author Flannery O’Conner’s correspondence and found that she was pro-segregationist and made racist remarks. I never understood the controversy, as O’Conner was a sheltered wealthy white woman from middle Georgia who barely got past her own front door. The shock would have been if she was a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. But as far as anyone knows, she never harmed anyone and just wrote and went to Mass. In comparison, Herman Talmadge was not only a segregationist, but he made an already racist political system somehow more racist, harming everyone in the process. Had O’Conner not died young, I think she would have changed for the better, whereas Talmadge is probably complaining that Hell isn’t segregated.
Thanks for replying in such depth, LC. You are voluminous in your ruminations.
I wrote this essay because messaging is so key to politics. Outside of setting policy, politicians have very few responsibilities. Essentially, they must articulate thoughts and send signals or gestures. They are there to communicate. So understanding how the electorate interprets signals is a vital part of the job, and it's excruciating to see Biden screw this up so royally at such a critical juncture. As I understand it, there are headlines now about how the WH altered the transcript of the video call where Biden first made these halting remarks, and all of this could have been avoided if he could have found any other word to describe the Madison Square Garden event. It's this word ('garbage') upon which this whole controversy is turning.
As for the point about regionality, I was responding to this part of your previous post: "Because the South was considered to basically be a separate country until recently (and precious few whites cared about the plight of Blacks), liberals in other regions were willing to turn a blind eyes to these types, assume that the rot would stay contained there." I think that modern, instantaneous forms of communication have shrunk our regional borders such that the South could no longer be considered a carve-out. Even the telephone shrank our conception of barriers (though, of course, the original telephone system was rather limited to where the cable could go and to those who could afford the service).
I think Tammany Hall is a very special case. The level of its grift and corruption has withstood time and space. It's legendary. Certainly newspapers carried information about it, contemporaneously; Thomas Nast made his name in large part by illustrating the graft that emanated from Boss Tweed and associates. So, yes, that era of New York politics certainly wafted across the country on the communication channels we had at the time. But newspapers are a slow-moving form of media.
I appreciate your nuance here. I just recently (within the last five years) learned of Talmadge and his influence (he features in V. O. Key, Jr.'s _Southern Politics in State and Nation_). He was relegated relatively to the dustbin of history, but it seems as though he and others of his kind will need to be featured in some refresher courses.
I don't know what it's like for other cohorts of the American population, but I came up in a very particular time, in the '70s as a child of those who'd gone through the civil rights era, and in the '70s the tenor of the times was that of turning the page. It was a new slate. And because America had embarked on this new covenant, there was a clear break in history, where there was a lot of history that no longer pertained. Now, it seems, we're in an era where some are intent on Making Racists Relevant Again. And I think that many of us are at a disadvantage, because the history of racism in this country does have that cut-off where the civil rights era represented such a change in trajectory; the through-line is not straight but is rather jagged. I think it will be difficult for many to trace.
I personally think, quite aside from the unnecessary response from Biden, that Harris is already dragged down by her ties to genocide Joe. And To think I thought we had terrible choices in the last two elections!
Harris has made a series of her own mistakes. This is one that’s not hers but she’s getting the splashback from it.
It’s funny — I’ve seen at least one headline speculate that this episode is hastening Harris’s distancing from the Biden presidency. If she really wanted to put distance and show herself to be her own person, listening to the majority of Americans and announcing that she would pursue a different tack on the Gaza issue would be a fine way to do that.
Of course, we can’t go back in time, but having a candidate that was not attached to the current administration at all would have circumvented a lot of these problems. I go back to Biden putting his thumb on the scale on his way out of presidential contest and I am newly angered. He and his cadre in the Democratic Party have done everything wrong. Harris, in spite of this, was finding success when she was going against conventional wisdom but became mired herself when she adopted Biden’s electoral strategy.
You're right, Nova. Sucha sick, vile "comedian" and Biden had to play right into it. I want it to all go away, the stupidity and the evil. We are doomed by it.
I just performed a thought experiment this morning: what would have been the reaction to such an event as the Madison Square Garden rally had it been held in 2016? There’s no way that Trump would have been the GOP standard bearer — he would have been drummed out and somehow Mike Pence would have been elevated to the top-line position. Republicans wouldn’t have stood for it.
The fact that we’re here and we have more than one Republican making excuses and trying to paper over Trump’s statements that he wants generals like Hiter’s generals shows how slowly this water has been boiling, and how amphibious we’ve turned out to be.
To be honest, I’ve always assumed that the Republican establishment would have preferred some non-entity like Jeb Bush or Rick Perry in 2016. They would have done much of the same domestic policy, but with better optics and less drama. Trump is too much unpredictable for their taste and too much of a dilettante, but they have no way to get rid of him. This is why you see certain establishment politicians endorsing Kamala, because she’s how Republicans used to be twenty years ago. Yet, one could argue that the Republican Party is ostensibly more respectful of the democratic process by grudging accepting the will of primary voters, versus Democrats doing everything possible to shut out Bernie Sanders. Truthfully, I think this has less to do with politics than the fact that no one who is even remotely progressive can be allowed near the presidency.
Biden’s commentary is another unforced error. If he had to say anything, he should have just stuck with calling racist commentary “garbage” and not people. Insulting and shaming voters doesn’t work, yet a lot of people in the Democratic Party seem to think otherwise. The way racism tends to be talked about in political discourse tends to be unhelpful, as it is usually shorthand for being someone who is mean or rude. While that may be true, it reduces racism to a matter of individual intent, rather than a systemic issue that exists, regardless of intent.
Lastly, there have always been Trump-like figures in American politics, but they tended to be consigned to the South. Because the South was considered to basically be a separate country until recently (and precious few whites cared about the plight of Blacks), liberals in other regions were willing to turn a blind eyes to these types, assume that the rot would stay contained there. But that was never the case. The American conservative tradition has always been sympathetic to the Confederate cause/Jeffersonian vision, and it transcends state lines. If you stick the rhetoric of a Storm Thurmond in the mouth of a guy from California (Reagan), Arizona (Goldwater), or Queens (Trump), people will take it more seriously.
This leads to a certain cynicism on my part, as the good liberals of New York, Massachusetts, California, etc. were willing for decades to tolerate the tyrannies of the likes of Eugene Talmadge, Ross Barnett, and George Wallace. But now that such a figure may affect everyone, even the supposed “safe states,” they’re freaking out. Maybe if the enlightened liberals of the past weren’t so intent on going to brunch and ignoring what was in front of them, they wouldn’t be facing “Mississipification.”
Biden's comments were an unforced error insofar as he neutralized the criticism that Trump & Co. were getting for the use of the word in question. They were able to turn around and pin that on Biden himself, thus absolving their own hideous bigotry. That was the mistake. He should have just chosen a different word. The gaffe itself would have blown over and people could still focus on the horrendous use of 'garbage' by the Trump team. That's impossible now.
Biden, incidentally, wasn't talking about "people" -- plural. He was talking about one person, Hinchcliffe, the so-called comedian. I agree with those giving the charitable reading that "supporter's" should be taken as being the singular possessive, because the pronoun used later in the sentence is 'his', clearly indicating a singular male as the reference for the remainder of the remarks. This shouldn't have even been a controversy. However, Fox News and its ilk took those comments and enlarged them beyond the frame. Also, that media silo has perfected the craft of insinuating something, then the next outlet taking that insinuation and reporting it as fact. Thus a rumor goes through a form of wash and it comes out as though something actually nefarious has happened. (This is the exact same cycle of innuendo that affected Rep. Tlaib last month with regards to CNN treating MI AG Dana Nessel's accusations of antisemitism as prima facie true.)
As for the Republicans, they actually did have a way of dispatching Trump. It was in January 2021. They could have convicted him in the Senate and been done with this. Alternatively, Kevin McCarthy could have resisted the temptation to revive Trump's relevance by visiting and embracing Trump two weeks after Trump had left the WH. Adam Kinzinger points to that moment as the resurrection of Trump and blames McCarthy for our current predicament; I too pinpoint that as a inflection point. Without McCarthy, Trump would have slunk into obscurity (especially as he had been kicked off all of the major social media platforms--he would have had a very difficult time getting his message out). At any rate, the GOP had options, and they chose to punt.
As for your consideration of what we as Americans tolerated in the past, I think it's important not to read backwards from where we are today in terms of political vision. I say insofar as people were far more likely to view their politics regionally. We still do this to a large extent. I live in a part of Michigan that is relatively close to the Ohio border, yet I know next to nothing about what's going on politically in that state. Politics tend to be parochial. This had to have been the case even more so before the internet and, of course, before television. Those innovations in technology shrunk borders and dissolved certain forms of sectarianism so that there really did seem like there was a national consciousness (though which one might find national consensus). Newspapers couldn't do that, and even radio couldn't do that because tower transmissions can reach only so far. So these instantaneous communication innovations transformed how we were able to view politics.
Marshall McLuhan, cultural critic, was an amazingly brilliant man, but even he tolerated some base racism in his worldview. I learned of this as I went through some of his lectures and other materials. He was quite concerned that television would spook Black folks in America. I could dig up the quote; maybe I'll write about it -- I know that I was incredibly crestfallen to see him take to such racist premises to form an outlook. But basically he was concerned that television might incite a less sophisticated people, and he was worried how TV would influence what we now know as the civil rights era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=100wLAP6URc&t=1450s
While McLuhan may have been a little backward in his vision in his trepidation, I think he had his finger on something very important, which is the fact that television WAS intrinsic to how transformative that era was. I think we must be experiencing something very similar now, with the advent of social media and the nascent, still rudimentary form of AI. This time, though, the times threaten to bring us to a contractual era, where our world gets more bounded and smaller.
Thank you for your reply. I don’t think it matters whether “garbage” refers to an individual or a group of people. The “I’m being cancelled!! (But not really)” industrial complex that is so rife among the far-right is such that it can be spun into a sense of persecution. As you noted, the actual problem of what Biden responded to has been forgotten, and now we’re stuck in “garbage” discourse, no pun intended.
While it’s true that Americans in the early 20th century would not have necessarily known about the intricacies of local politics in other states, the media was developed enough that people could get a general idea, at least about the more scandalous and/or important issues. For example, the Kennedy family already had national recognition in the 1930s when JFK, RFK, etc were still pretty young. Tammany Hall was quite notorious and talked about beyond New York as a symbol of corruption and graft.
Similarly, the plight of Southern Blacks and the dysfunctional political system they were stuck in was known, even to those outside of the US. For example, “Winnifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth” by Brigitte Hamann includes a portion of a letter a Jewish resident of Bayreuth wrote to Wagner, in which he complained that the city’s Jews were being treated, “like the Negroes in America.” Cases like the Scottsboro Boys, Georgia’s “Two Governors” debacle, and the Moore’s Ford lynchings were reported by the white and Black presses outside of the South, often with withering condemnation. Black papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier did have national reach, at least in Black communities. So people outside the South knew what was going on and who the elected officials were who presided over these matters. However, the only way to change things was to pass federal legislation, which was impossible without the support of the South’s Democratic bloc of senators. This is still a problem today, even if the Southern senators have switched sides.
I do make a distinction between individual, contemporary and historical, who have questionable beliefs vs those who have questionable beliefs and are actively making society worse. For example, a couple of years ago, there was a controversy where a researcher looked through author Flannery O’Conner’s correspondence and found that she was pro-segregationist and made racist remarks. I never understood the controversy, as O’Conner was a sheltered wealthy white woman from middle Georgia who barely got past her own front door. The shock would have been if she was a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. But as far as anyone knows, she never harmed anyone and just wrote and went to Mass. In comparison, Herman Talmadge was not only a segregationist, but he made an already racist political system somehow more racist, harming everyone in the process. Had O’Conner not died young, I think she would have changed for the better, whereas Talmadge is probably complaining that Hell isn’t segregated.
Thanks for replying in such depth, LC. You are voluminous in your ruminations.
I wrote this essay because messaging is so key to politics. Outside of setting policy, politicians have very few responsibilities. Essentially, they must articulate thoughts and send signals or gestures. They are there to communicate. So understanding how the electorate interprets signals is a vital part of the job, and it's excruciating to see Biden screw this up so royally at such a critical juncture. As I understand it, there are headlines now about how the WH altered the transcript of the video call where Biden first made these halting remarks, and all of this could have been avoided if he could have found any other word to describe the Madison Square Garden event. It's this word ('garbage') upon which this whole controversy is turning.
As for the point about regionality, I was responding to this part of your previous post: "Because the South was considered to basically be a separate country until recently (and precious few whites cared about the plight of Blacks), liberals in other regions were willing to turn a blind eyes to these types, assume that the rot would stay contained there." I think that modern, instantaneous forms of communication have shrunk our regional borders such that the South could no longer be considered a carve-out. Even the telephone shrank our conception of barriers (though, of course, the original telephone system was rather limited to where the cable could go and to those who could afford the service).
I think Tammany Hall is a very special case. The level of its grift and corruption has withstood time and space. It's legendary. Certainly newspapers carried information about it, contemporaneously; Thomas Nast made his name in large part by illustrating the graft that emanated from Boss Tweed and associates. So, yes, that era of New York politics certainly wafted across the country on the communication channels we had at the time. But newspapers are a slow-moving form of media.
I appreciate your nuance here. I just recently (within the last five years) learned of Talmadge and his influence (he features in V. O. Key, Jr.'s _Southern Politics in State and Nation_). He was relegated relatively to the dustbin of history, but it seems as though he and others of his kind will need to be featured in some refresher courses.
I don't know what it's like for other cohorts of the American population, but I came up in a very particular time, in the '70s as a child of those who'd gone through the civil rights era, and in the '70s the tenor of the times was that of turning the page. It was a new slate. And because America had embarked on this new covenant, there was a clear break in history, where there was a lot of history that no longer pertained. Now, it seems, we're in an era where some are intent on Making Racists Relevant Again. And I think that many of us are at a disadvantage, because the history of racism in this country does have that cut-off where the civil rights era represented such a change in trajectory; the through-line is not straight but is rather jagged. I think it will be difficult for many to trace.