Category Archives: Liberal

Published June 22, 2020, 1:19 PM

By Mario B. Casayuran

The leadership of the 74-year-old Liberal Party (LP) paid tribute today to former Senate President Jovito R. Salonga who was born 100 years ago.

Senator Francis N. Pangilinan, LP president, described Salonga as a true patriot and statesman.

Pangilinan said Salonga served as leader of the Liberal Party guided by his wisdom, selflessness, and love for country. Salonga was the 14th chief of the Senate of the Philippines.

Salonga, who served as Senate President from 1987 to 1992, led a group of 12 senators in rejecting the proposed extension of the RP-US Military Base Agreement in September, 1991.

Ka Jovy has endured many battles that maimed his body, but not his spirit. He has confronted the plagues of dictatorship, corruption, and economic crisis, and he carried on, Pangilinan said.

How fascinating it would have been if the gentle sage and fighter that is Ka Jovy were here, amid a pandemic endangering the peoples health and livelihood, and an anti-terrorism bill threatening their rights, he stressed.

Birthdays are for celebration of life, struggles, and triumphs. We are grateful for the encounters and lessons we had with Ka Jovy in his lifetime. We are fired up to carry his work forward, he added.

Pangilinan said that Salonga represents the enduring LP tradition of service and love of country.

Here is the original post:

Liberal Party pays tribute to Jovito Salonga on his 100th birth anniversary - Manila Bulletin

The Supreme Court delivered surprising wins to liberals this week in a pair of blockbuster decisions that forbade businesses from firing workers base on their sexual orientation or gender identity and halted the Trump administration's efforts to end the Obama-era DACA program, which shields the young migrants known as "Dreamers."

But those on the left still see potential danger ahead. In the coming days, the top court is expected to hand down a decision in a high-profile abortion dispute that could provide signals about how the panel, which counts two appointees of President Donald Trump in its conservative majority, will treat reproductive rights in the years to come.

"Kind of feels like we're being softened up for the blow, huh?" Sasha Samberg-Champion, a liberal civil rights lawyer and former Justice Department attorney, wrote in a representative post on Twitter on Thursday, after the DACA decision was released.

"Progressives must keep their guard up,"Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a Supreme Court activist group, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the decisions have unsettled those on the right, who have criticized even the Republican-appointed justices for their votes. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called it the "most disappointing week at #SCOTUS in years."

The fight over abortion has animated clashes over the Supreme Court for decades, and continues to be a battleground in the 2020 presidential race between Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The case, June Medical Services v. Russo, No.18-1323, concerns a Louisiana law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic. A federal district court found that it would limit Louisiana, a state of nearly five million people, to just one doctor providing abortions.

June Medical Services was the subject of outsized political attention even before the top court handed down its opinions in the LGBT worker and DACA cases.

As a result of those decisions, though, the case has gained even more weight as a loose barometer of the court's conservatism during a high-stakes election year in which Trump has sought to make both abortion and his right-leaning court picks major elements of his campaign.

The case is the first abortion case to be argued at the court since Trump's nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, joined the bench.As a candidate, Trump pledged to nominate justices who would "automatically" overturn the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade.

Among the reasons that the case has caused so much alarm among reproductive rights activists is that the law in question is nearly identical to a Texas abortion measure that the Supreme Court struck down just four years ago.

The fact that the court agreed to hear a case involving a law so similar to the one it struck down in 2016 suggests that the court, with its new conservative majority, could be ready to pare back abortion precedents set when the top court was more liberal.

It's quite possible, though, that the court hands another win to liberals.

During oral arguments in March, Chief Justice John Roberts signaled that he was open to striking down the law, though such questions are not always predictive of how a justice will vote. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh provided few clues about their thinking at the time. In an unusual move, Gorsuch asked no questions at all.

A decision in the case will likely be handed down by the end of June, though it could be delayed as a result of precautions taken in response to Covid-19.

The unpredictability of the high court showcases the difficulty of Trump's efforts to make his Supreme Court nominees a campaign talking point. While Trump often boasts of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at speeches and campaign rallies, his tone was far more sour this week.

"These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives," Trump wrote in a post on Twitter shortly after the DACA decision was released on Thursday.

"The recent Supreme Court decisions, not only on DACA, Sanctuary Cities, Census, and others, tell you only one thing, we need NEW JUSTICES of the Supreme Court," he wrote in another. "If the Radical Left Democrats assume power, your Second Amendment, Right to Life, Secure Borders, andReligious Liberty, among many other things, are OVER and GONE!"

To some extent, Trump's attacks on the court are in line with his tangles, dating back years, against Roberts, an establishment Republican who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush.

Carrie Severino, who leads the conservativeJudicial Crisis Network, an influential activist organization, said in an interview that decisions like the DACA decision, written by Roberts, "are part of the reason that we have President Trump."

"The chief justice has created a real pattern of being complicit in efforts to weaponize the court as a tool against the Trump administration," Severino said.

Complicating Trump's maneuvering, however, is the role played by his own justices in the legal defeats.

While both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were in the minority in the DACA dispute, Gorsuch was the author of the court's Monday decision applying Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act to LGBT workers. The vote in that case was 6-3, with Roberts joining Gorsuch and the court's liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

In the sanctuary case the president appeared to cite, the administration failed to garner even four votes to have the court review the administration's challenge to a California law limiting state and local cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Likewise, it only would have taken four votes for the court to agree to hear any of 10 Second Amendment cases that the court rejected onMonday, in a move that disappointed gun-rights activists. Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative judges on the top court, dissented from his colleagues' decision not to hear one of the cases.

While the vote tallies were not published in those disputes, it would not have required Roberts or any of the court's liberals to vote to take them up in the court's next term.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and the co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny, called Trump's messaging around the Supreme Court "a little idiosyncratic and perhaps incoherent."

"There is at once some dissatisfaction that his conservative majority isn't acting in the way he wants, but also a realization that judges helped get him elected," she said.

Of the most recent week at the Supreme Court, Murray pointed out that the legal issues at play in June Medical Services are distinct from those that were argued in the LGBT rights and DACA cases.

But, she said, "one thing you might glean from this week is that the chief justice remains very much an institutional steward of the court and its legacy."

In that sense, it is possible thatRoberts' shepherding of the court's reputation could play some role in all three cases.

"He might be concerned with the perception that the court is in the pocket of the Trump administration," Murray said.

The rest is here:

Abortion case could end or add to streak of liberal wins at Supreme Court - CNBC

In June 2019, two men sat in the Oval Office and talked of war. One was the bloated embodiment of American evil, a smug and fatuous egomaniac whose power and arrogance posed an existential threat to millions of the planet's inhabitants.

The other was Donald Trump.

This conversation was reported by John Bolton, the extremist martinet who briefly served as Trumps National Security Advisor. Jennifer Szalai recounts the story as it occurs in Boltons as yet unreleased book:

You can sense Boltons excitement when he describes going home at about 5:30 for a change of clothes because he expected to be at the White House all night. Its therefore an awful shock when Trump decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning they would kill as many as 150 people. Too many body bags, Trump told him. Not proportionate.

The most striking thing about this anecdote, if Bolton is to be believed, is that Trump is overriding his advisor for a more measured and humane approach. He may have done so for purely political reasons, but the contrast between the two is still striking. Equally striking is the fact that Bolton seems to think this anecdote reflects well on him and poorly on the president. The opposite is true. Anybody who lacks the requisite bloodthirstiness to meet with John Boltons approval has something going for him, whatever other sins he may have committed.

Only an irrational hatred of Donald Trump could persuade anyone to turn to John Bolton.

The Hero That Wasnt

Democrats had hoped that Boltons testimony on Trump and Ukraine would prove decisive in their impeachment inquiries. Early reports suggest that his book doesnt provide the ammunition they had hoped for. Bolton does, however, charge that Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win re-election. There are only two ways to interpret that: One is that Bolton concealed an impeachable deed until it was too late to do anything about it. The other is that hes lying, as hes done so many times before.

Thats your would-be hero?

Boltons bombshells probably wont affect world history much. But failure should not be an unfamiliar experience to Bolton, a blundering war planner who is as incompetent as he is immoral. Bolton is Leslie Nielsen in Airplane! but with nuclear weapons. Hes failed at every military objective hes ever pursued. But hes succeeded in one way: Together with fellow war criminal George W. Bush, Boltons racked up a body count that exceeds one million lives. Trump cant come close to matching that.

And yet, in their eagerness to nail Trump for impeachable offenses and to do so exclusively on national security grounds Congressional Democrats were willing to turn the bloodthirsty Bolton into a star witness, a process that would have meant investing him with credibility.

Boltons comments, as recounted by Hill, were already making him something of a liberal idol. A typical comment, from Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass): When he calls Giuliani a live hand grenade, that says something. He speaks from experience. He's someone who should know.

Boltons liberal apotheosis was at hand. Instead, he chose to decline the honor.

Mendacious Menagerie

Morally dubious figures like James Clapper, Gen. Michael Hayden, and James Comey had already taken star turns as #Resistance heroes. Even George W. Bush, who lied the country into a devastating war and oversaw systematic torture, became a popular figure among liberal Democrats simply by signaling genteel disapproval of Trumps personal style.

These people deserve criticism, not praise. But liberal hatred of Donald Trump can be irrational. Its irrational to make heroes out of Trumps national security critics, most of whom seem more bloodthirsty than he is. Its irrational to invest someone like John Bolton with credibility, when Bolton lied and deceived us into war. And its irrational to support militaristic policies just because Trump opposes them (or says he does).

And yet, liberals in politics and media are still elevating these characters as long as they engage in the pleasing exercise of criticizing Trump. This MSNBC clip is a textbook example of the genre. Chuck Todd cites four former Trump advisors turned apostates: Bolton, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. John Kelly and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. How do they stack up, credibility-wise?

I think we need to look harder at who we elect, Gen. Kelly says in the clip, adding that we need to look at a candidates character and ethics. Well, the country got a glimpse of Kellys own character when he spoke glowingly of the Confederates who fought to defend slavery and claimed that the Civil War was caused by the lack of an ability to compromise. And Kellys ethics were on display when he failed to disclose his relationships with several defense contractors on ethics forms.

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Tillerson, who was CEO of Exxon Mobil, sneeringly observes that Trump doesnt like to read. Since he's such a literacy advocate, Tillerson undoubtedly read his companys internal reports on the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change reports that it concealed from the public for 40 years, while publicly casting doubt on that relationship.

Mattis record lacks the publicly-documented dishonesty of the others. But he didnt publicly reveal what he knew about the war in Afghanistan, even though (per the Washington Post):

senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

Instead, Mattis consistently put his career above the public interest.

These are as big as it gets, Todd says of this mendacious menagerie. The biggest liars, maybe.

Unfit

Despite his record, MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell called Bolton credible. The reasons she offered for this assessment (besides the fact that he is a Yale lawyer; I kid you not) included the assertion that Bolton understands intelligence, as a consumer of intelligence.

Contrast that with the judgement of Robert Hutchings, who was Chair of the National Intelligence Council under George W. Bush. Anyone who is so cavalier not just with intelligence, but with facts, and so ideologically driven, is unfit to be national security adviser, Hutchings said of Bolton.

That quote comes from a ProPublica article headlined, John Bolton Skewed Intelligence, Say People Who Worked With Him. Another article, from the New Yorker, documents Boltons attempts to intimidate and threaten the intelligence analysts and diplomats whose conclusions undermined his call to war.

Bolton is a manipulator of intelligence, not a consumer of it.

That doesnt mean Bolton lies about everything. Many of the anecdotes in his book are likely to be true. Its highly plausible, for example, that Trump thought journalists should be executed. But Boltons hardly an unimpeachable impeachment witness.

It also needs to be said that by many accounts, including Boltons, Trump has taken a more measured approach to war and peace than Bolton or many other members of Washingtons national security establishment. Only someone with an irrational hatred of Donald Trump or a desire to bolster the bipartisan military consensus could turn to the likes of John Bolton.

All You Need is Hate

Thats not to say there arent rational reasons to hate Trump. Hes clearly corrupt in a variety of ways, both personal and professional. That makes it even harder to understand why the Democrats chose to base their impeachment efforts solely on Russia and Ukraine. What happened, for example, to Trumps support for Saudi Arabia and the potential conflicts of interest there (which we reported on for The Intercept)? What about the emoluments clause and the many signs of corrupt profiteering? Or the potential campaign law violations around the Stormy Daniels payoff?

After the books publication, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called Bolton the darling of the liberal left. Thats not true. But it could have been, if Bolton had been willing to testify. Instead, Dems anger at his refusal is based on an escapist fantasy. Had they been able to call him to the Hill, it probably wouldnt have accomplished much. Its likely that Bolton would have tried to pull off the same trick he attempts in the book: being vague enough about his Ukraine accusations to skirt impeachability, while attempting to preserve his right-wing credibility.

Meanwhile, Democrats would have been burnishing the reputation of a bona fide war criminal one whos written books with titles like Surrender is Not an Option and How Barack Obama is Endangering Our National Sovereignty. Bolton would undoubtedly have used his new liberal credibility to do what hes always done: push for needless wars around the globe while giving aid and comfort to right-wing dictators like Bolsonaro and Duterte.

For his part, all Trump would have had to do to cast doubt on Boltons credibility was tell the truth about Boltons Iraq record. That would also have given Trump another chance to position himself to the Democrats left on military policy. It worked for him in 2016, and it could work for him again.

The liberals who looked to Bolton for rescue, the ones who have elevated figures like Kelly and Tillerson, have overlooked a fundamental principle: The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. To believe otherwise is well, irrational.

Read this article:

John Bolton and Liberals Irrational Hatred of Trump - Common Dreams

The University of Iowas largest college will lay off 15 instructional-track faculty as it enters the first phase of a three-tiered plan to make up to $25 million in budget cuts due to revenue loss caused by the novel-coronavirus pandemic.

The first tier identifies $15 million in cuts within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The cuts follow the UIs $70 million financial loss due to COVID-19 and an $8 million cut in state appropriations to state Board of Regents institutions by the Iowa Legislature, and an expected drop in enrollment at the UI in the fall of 2020.

President Bruce Harreld announced in a budget message to the campus community on June 8 that the university was considering permanent or temporary layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, or salary reductions as a result of COVID-19-related financial losses.

While federal funding will help, it is far short of what is needed to make the university whole, Harreld said in the message. As a result, many collegiate and central service unit leaders across the university will be forced to make difficult decisions, some of which will impact employees.

RELATED:UI may permanently lay off some employees as a result of COVID-19

In an email sent to CLAS faculty and staff on Wednesday, Dean Steve Goddard said the college expects a 13-percent enrollment decrease in non-resident students and a 5-percent decline in residential students.

In an email to The Daily Iowan, Goddard said the prediction is slightly more optimistic than the universitys predictions for fall enrollment. However, exact numbers will not be available until after the fall semester begins.

The liberal-arts college will lose 15 of its 205 lecturers. In an email to the DI, Goddard said the layoffs account for $778,000 or 5.2 percent of the $15 million dollar cuts, which will go into effect beginning July 1.

Some instructional-track faculty have already seen their contracts terminated ahead of the official July 1 date. Others have seen the typical length of their contracts reduced, and now remain uncertain of their fate once the second tier rolls around in the 2020-2021 school year, where additional cuts will depend on state appropriation decisions.

The state appropriation cuts will be long lasting, and we may never recover the funding once the deappropriation is made, Goddard said in the email.

Steve Duck, departmental executive officer within the Department of Rhetoric, said five instructional-track faculty members in the department were up for contract renewal, by recommendation of the college. Of those five, three contracts were not renewed.

Duck said the standard contract length at the time of renewal is three years. However, the remaining two faculty members up for contract renewal only had their contracts extended for one year making them vulnerable to the second round of cuts. He said the cuts did not appear to be based on the value and merit of the instructor.

Its very difficult to see colleagues who have performed so well arbitrarily cut just because their contracts are up for their renewal, Duck said.

Duck said that officials within the Department of Rhetoric agreed that they would have taken a pay cut to their own salaries in an effort to protect their colleagues from elimination, had they been given the chance. One lecturer, Ashley Wells, even offered to resign in favor of keeping any one of the faculty members from being let go, but Duck said both efforts did not change the UIs decision.

Shes resigned, shes going to another state, and I asked the college if that would save any of the three people who have been terminated, and they basically said no it wouldnt, Duck said.

Elke Heckner, a lecturer in the German department who was among the 15 lecturers who were laid off, said the termination process was the most cruel and inhumane process she had ever experienced.

After seven years of dedication to the core values of the university, to helping revitalize my department with exciting and urgently needed courses, I am told that my position will not be renewed with two weeks notice, Heckner said.

Heckner taught The Politics of Memory: Holocaust, Genocide, and 9/11, one of the courses the UI offers that satisfies the Diversity and Inclusion general education requirement for students. The course, which was fully enrolled with 22 students, will no longer be offered due to her termination, she said.

We are right now in a huge national crisis issues of racial justice and diversity, Heckner said. Why would we, in this moment when students need ongoing conversations on these very difficult and challenging times, why, at this time of crisis, would we want to cut lines off faculty like me who have conducted these difficult conversations for years and are especially equipped to do this?

The lecturer said she was frustrated by the lack of transparency provided by the university regarding the criteria they followed when making the decision about which facultys contracts to terminate, as well as the decision to delay temporary, mandatory cuts to administrative supplements for leadership, department heads, and directors until the third tier of the budget cut process.

Goddard told theDI temporary salary reductions immediately made to administrative faculty salaries would not be enough.

Temporary salary reductions help with short-term budget reductions to fill a gap in a given fiscal year, but they do not address the long-term budget cuts we are facing, Goddard said in an email to the DI.

While the UI Faculty Senate was not directly consulted about the recent lack of contract renewals, senate President Joseph Yockey said the organization continues to stress to the university that salary reductions, furloughs, layoffs, or hits to academic programming should not be imposed, unless other cost-saving measures are first found, beyond doubt, to be inadequate.

The Faculty Council will hold a special meeting June 25 to discuss steps for addressing budget issues for the summer and into the fall.

I think everyone understands sacrifices will need to be made. No one will escape the budget crisis unscathed, Yockey said in an email to the DI. But at the same time, it is important to recognize that cuts to faculty or academic programs are rarely about trimming fat; those cuts go straight to the universitys muscle and bone.

The independent, student-run newsroom at the DI covers the University of Iowa and local community to keep you informed. Your support helps provide the necessary resources and training to continue our mission.

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15 faculty members laid off within College of Liberal Arts and Sciences amid budget cuts - UI The Daily Iowan

At the turn of the 21st century, when the hegemony of neo-liberal orthodoxy reigned supreme, Latin America was the place where its confident and seemingly invincible march was interrupted. Forcefully defying prophecies of the end of history and the end of ideology, new left governments were elected in Latin America that challenged the neo-liberal consensus of the era. This process not only rekindled hopes for a revival of the left, but also cleared the grounds to build new left alternatives that can learn from the shortcomings of its 20th century counterparts. However, the last five years have witnessed a weakening of the left in the region. Brazil, Chile and Ecuador turned to the right and Venezuela is reeling under a severe economic crisis. Even then, Bolivia still stood out as a beacon of hope for the Latin American left. Though it did not enjoy the same degree of popular support as it did earlier, the government of Evo Morales still remained the most powerful political force in the country, and Bolivia had the highest rate of economic growth in the region continuously for five years, ensured economic and political stability. For all these reasons, there was a lot at stake in the Bolivian presidential elections of 2019 for the Latin American (and global) left, the national oligarchic elites and United States (US) imperialist interests.

However, what eventually happened turned out to be worse than the worst nightmares. Through an analysis of the usurpation of power by the extreme right-wing forces in Bolivia, this article examines the characteristics of the contemporary phase of global neo-liberalism.

New Ways of Staging a Coup

After the electoral tribunal declared Morales as the winner in the 2019 elections, opposition candidate Carlos Mesa refused to accept the results, alleging fraud. Protests broke out in various Bolivian cities. The Bolivian government invited the Organization of American States (OAS) to conduct an audit of the elections. On 8 November, the OAS team recommended that new elections be held as they found irregularities in the vote count. There is still no consensus on the question of whether there were irregularities in the elections held on 20 October. Later, studies by the Center for Economic and Policy Research based in Washington, Centro Estratgico Latinoamericano de Geopoltica (CELAG) and a group of MIT researchers questioned the conclusions of the OAS.

Nevertheless, once the OAS team released its preliminary report, Morales immediately accepted its recommendation and asked the legislative assembly to form a new electoral tribunal and declare fresh elections. However, the opposition demanded the immediate resignation of Morales. With the chiefs of police and the armed forces also asking him to step down, Morales realised that he had no other option. He announced his resignation declaring that a coup has been consummated in Bolivia.

By then, Luis Fernando Camacho, a multimillionaire business tycoon and representative of extreme right-wing politics, had eclipsed Carlos Mesa as the major spokesperson of the opposition to Morales. Hours after the resignation of Morales, Camacho barged into the presidential palace with his ally Marco Pumari. Masked men removed the wiphala, the flag of indigenous self-determination from the top of the presidential palace and burnt it, with a mob cheering Yes, we could! Yes, we could! The wiphala was officially incorporated as a symbol of the fatherland along with the national tricolour flag by the new constitution promulgated by the constituent assembly convoked by Morales during his first term in office.

In the power vacuum that was created, senators from the opposition met in a session without the necessary quorum, and Jeanine ez, the second vice president of the senate proclaimed herself as the interim president. Senators from the Movimiento al Socialismo, the party of Morales, did not attend the session as most of them were underground due to the severe political persecution party members were subjected to after the resignation of Morales. Some of their houses had been burnt and their family members kidnapped and tortured.

The self-proclaimed President made repeated statements that her government was transitional and that its only objective was to conduct elections. Though ez and her party, which only won around 4% of the votes in the country in the 2019 elections, have no mandate to make radical changes in policies, they seem to be in a great hurry to reverse all the important initiatives of the Morales presidency. The following sections of this article discuss how a government with minuscule popular support, with the backing of the armed forces and US imperialism, went on to aggressively pursue neo-liberal policies in an unabashedly dictatorial fashion. It, once again, reveals the tendency of global right-wing forces and US imperialism of making a mockery of democracy whenever it does not suit their interests. The Bolivian experience thus reinforces the need to retheorise the relationship between neo-liberal capitalism and democracy, a task that holds immense relevance in the context of the upsurge of right-wing authoritarianism in various parts of the world.

Neo-liberal Restoration

Like the other new left governments that emerged in Latin America as part of the pink tide, the Morales administration adopted policies that went against the neo-liberal consensus that marked the economic policies of the last decades of the 20th century in the region. The election of Morales in 2005 was the product of a series of mass mobilisations against neo-liberal economic policies.

In 2006, Morales announced the nationalisation of gas. However, it was a partial nationalisation that only involved an increase in the royalties the transnational gas companies pay the state. Nevertheless, it enabled the government gain up to 70% of the revenue generated from hydrocarbons (Farthing and Kohl 2014). Subsequently, similar kinds of nationalisations were implemented in electricity, telecommunications, and mines, enabling a major increase in public investment. Public investment increased by about 250% from an average of $581 million in 19992005 to $2,046 million between 2006 and 2012.

The increased role of the government in the economy helped the redistribution of wealth, both in terms of race and class. Between 2007 and 2015, moderate and extreme poverty decreased by approximately 21% and the Gini coefficient went from 0.56 to 0.47, reflecting a decrease in income inequality (Beverinotti 2018). In 2005, the top 10% of the population had 128 times more income than the bottom 10% by 2012; this difference decreased to 46 times (Pozas 2017).

Direct cash transfers were made to the elderly, public school students and pregnant women. The government also increased the education budget significantly. School attendance increased. A massive literacy programme was implemented and 5,00,000 people graduated from literacy classes. Material benefits for the indigenous population were significant. The econometric study of Hicks et al (2018) points out that the indigenous population of Bolivia achieved a rapid catch-up in income and expenditure relative to the non-indigenous population, which enabled the former to approximately close one-quarter of the interracial gap in income in the pre-Morales era.

Morales also promised to carry out an agrarian revolution in the country. Farthing and Kohl (2014) point out that land surveying, titling, and distribution were done at three times the rate of previous administrations. Ten million acres were expropriated for redistribution from expiring logging concessions and big landowners who held lands over the limit of 25,000 acres set by the new agrarian law. By 2012, for the first time since the Spanish conquest, smallholders, who are predominantly indigenous, control 55% of the land.

The transformations initiated by the Morales government are more reformist than revolutionary when judged by the standards of the 20th-century left. For instance, the redistribution of land to peasants did not translate into equality in the ownership of lands of the best quality. The lands best suited for cultivation continue to be concentrated in the hands of the traditional landed oligarchy, and one-third of the land remains in the hands of large agro-industrial firms. This has led to disagreements on whether the policies of the Morales government represented post-neo-liberalism or reconstituted neo-liberalism (Fuentes 2010; Webber 2010). However, the fact that the policies of Morales marked a break with neo-liberal orthodoxy cannot be denied.

One of the priorities of the ez government has been the restoration of the older neo-liberal policies. The new government has no qualms in declaring that they intended to privatise public sector companies. Knowing that public opinion is against this position, the government tries to create an impression that the public sector companies are unviable and that they are running on huge deficits, which could then justify their privatisation. Some public sector companies were forced to turn bankrupt by the newlyappointed executives by making unjustifiable exorbitant expenses.

For instance, the new chief executive officer (CEO) of the public sector airline Boliviana de Aviacin (BOA) appointed by the ez government declared that the airline was running on severe deficit, with no audit to back up that claim. The workers union called a press conference to inform that flights were arbitrarily reduced by 30% in the peak season. It is no coincidence that the new BOA manager was the chief financial officer of Amazonas, a private airline that is its main rival (Los Tiempos 2020; Eju TV 2019). Not content with bankrupting state companies, the new government reduced public investment by 32.5% (Bedregal 2020).

The issue of lithium occupied a central place in the coup. Bolivia is believed to possess approximately 70% of the worlds lithium, the raw material for batteries in electronic equipment and electric cars. It is seen as one of the most valuable raw materials of the future. Morales planned to begin exploration and industrialisation of lithium through a collaboration between the public and private sectors in which the state-owned YLC would have 51% of the shares, a decision that is not favourable for multinational corporations. The plan to industrialise natural resources and add value to them was a significant shift made by the Morales government in Bolivias economic policies. The ez government, however, gave a clear indication that she would move away from these policies by appointing Juan Carlos Zuleta, a staunch opponent of industrialisation, as the CEO of the public sector company created for the extraction of lithium.

Changes in economic policies were also matched by changes in foreign policy. Besides breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba, the government declared that Bolivia will withdraw from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), the alliance of countries governed by leftist governments in the region against the neo-liberal model. After a decade, Bolivia sent an ambassador to the US and the government declared support for brazenly imperialist policies such as the USs war threat to Venezuela.

Political Repression

The usurpation of power by the extreme right-wing forces led to the eruption of massive protests. The ez government let loose severe repression on the indigenous population that has been at the forefront of these mobilisations. According to official figures published by the National Ombudsman, 32 people have died and 770 have been injured in the repression of protests against the coup. The report of the Argentine delegation of human rights that visited the country reveals the violation of the rights of children, adolescents, senior citizens and people with disabilities (Crnica 2019). Sandra Carreo, part of the Argentine human rights delegation, declared in a television interview that there are about 1,000 forced disappearances in the country, and that the relatives of the victims are being threatened to not report them (Archivo de los medios 2019).

In the neighbourhood of Senkata in the city of El Alto, protestors, who blockaded a gas refinery to cut off fuel supply to the administrative capital La Paz, were brutally massacred by the armed forces on 19 November. The next day, residents of the city accompanied by thousands of protestors who arrived from other parts of the country marched to the centre of La Paz with the coffins. They were tear-gassed, forcing them to flee and leave the coffins abandoned on the streets for a while.

Press freedom has been severely restricted. Two days after coming to power, the minister of communication threatened journalists that they would be tried for sedition for reporting news unfavourable to the government. This immediately silenced the Bolivian mainstream media. Argentine journalists covering the protests were forced to leave the country and an Al Jazeera correspondent was tear-gassed when she was reporting on live television. International television channels Telesur and Russia Today, which began covering anti-government protests, were taken off the air.

The government also forcibly closed 53 community radio stations that were alternative sources of information, especially in the countryside. In many cases, the police and the military destroyed and burned some of them. Extreme right-wing mobs also occupied the office of the Unified Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), the biggest peasant confederation in the country, and its community radio station with firecrackers, dynamites and Molotov after tying the director of the radio to a tree (Chungara 2020).

Racist Backlash

Though the majority of Bolivians are of indigenous descent, the country had to wait for nearly two centuries since its foundation to have an indigenous president. As explained above, the redistributive policies of the government of Morales benefited many indigenous sectors. The government also appointed more people of indigenous origin, especially women wearing the pollera, skirt (which has historically been seen as an index of indigenous backwardness) as ministers, ambassadors and directors of institutions. Radical indigenous intellectuals dismissed these moves as mere tokenism as the number of indigenous people in positions of power was still highly disproportional to their share in the population. However, the presence of indigenous people, especially women wearing the pollera, in such positions had a tremendous symbolic impact on large sections of the indigenous population as it increased their self-esteem and optimism.

This process led to an intense racist backlash from the white-mestizo elites. The mobilisations for the ouster of Morales in 2019 witnessed the explosion of racial hatred that was brewing over the years. Extreme right-wing paramilitary organisations went around the streets, rounding up and physically attacking indigenous people. Racialisation of indigenous people also plays a major role in the ez governments repressive machinery as protestors complain of abuses by the police and the armed forces just for being brown-skinned (Annur TV 2019).

The political genealogy of the extreme right-wing forces in Bolivia is alarming. Camacho, the major organiser of the coup, began his political career as the leader of the paramilitary group Unin Juvenil Cruceista (UJC), which was founded by Carlos Valverde who acted as a paramilitary in the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 1970s. He had a close relationship with Klaus Barbie, the Nazi general who is infamously called the butcher of Lyon for organising massacres and torture of several Jews and other activists of the French resistance to Nazi occupation. Barbie fled Germany after World War II and lived in Bolivia under a different name. Camacho, the major organiser of the coup against Morales, had led the UJC in Moraless first administration, when the paramilitaries of that organisation interrupted the marches of the indigenous organisations with whips and chains, went to indigenous neighbourhoods with sticks and bats to terrorise people, and surrounded the city in jeeps painted with the swastika (Fabricant 2008).

ez, the self-proclaimed President, is not far from Camacho in terms of her ideological leanings as she proudly claims to have Aryan and Nordic features (de Marval and Scelza 2019). Four of the ministers in her first cabinet were members of the UJC. The political discourse of ez is also marked by unconcealed racism. For instance, in one of her speeches, she said that the right-wing parties need to form a united front to prevent the savages from returning to power. Savage is a heavily loaded term in Bolivia as it has been historically deployed in reference to the supposed backwardness of indigenous people. Civilising the savage indigenous people to assimilate them into the dominant culture was an essential part of the Bolivian nation-building project in the 20th century. With such statements, the new right-wing government makes no pretensions of its racist agenda.

Religion and Politics

Religion is a new tool that neo-liberalism uses to re-establish its hegemony in Latin America. It was first used by extreme right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro to win the Brazilian presidential elections in 2018 (Cruz 2019). Bolivian right-wing forces resorted to the same strategy during the coup.

The new constitution promulgated by the Morales government declared the state as secular for the first time in the countrys history. Besides removing Catholicism from the status of the states official religion, the government began to actively promote indigenous ritual practices. The declaration of the state as secular was a move that officially placed indigenous beliefs and Catholicism on an equal footing. Indigenous ritual specialists were present at many official government events.

During the coup, the reaction of the more conservative sectors of the Church to these policies was evident. After Moraless resignation, Camacho entered the presidential palace with the Bible and the priest who accompanied him declared that

the Bible has entered the palace again and the Pachamama (the indigenous deity representing Mother Earth) will never return. Jeanine Aez also entered the Presidential palace with an oversized Bible in hand declaring this Bible is very significant for us, our strength is God, power is God.

In Conclusion

The re-establishment of neo-liberalism has been the priority of the oligarchic elites and their imperialist allies since the turn to the left in the region in the 21st century. The route to the right was different in each country. However, common patterns can be identified, such as the instrumental use of religion in politics, racism and the rush to aggressively implement neo-liberal policies immediately after taking power.

Neo-liberalism as a politicaleconomic doctrine established its hegemony in Europe and the US in the last decades of the 20th century by articulating with religious conservatism and anti-immigrant racism, as evidenced by studies of Reaganism and Thatcherism (Smith 1994; Harvey 2005). Contemporary neo-liberalism does not seem to be very different as illiberal discourses, such as racism and religious fundamentalism, continue to be its dearest bedfellows in Latin America, the US, Europe and India. The Bolivian experience reveals how the desperate quest to re-establish neo-liberal dominance leads national oligarchic elites and their imperialist allies to even abandon a formal commitment to liberal democracy and the rule of law. However, this should not be surprising, given that the first laboratory of neo-liberalism was Chile, where the military dictator Augusto Pinochet invited the Chicago boys to his country after overthrowing the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende in a coup. All of this makes one wonder: Is there anything liberal about neo-liberalism?

References

Annur TV (2019): Bolivia: Las mujeres de El Alto llegaron hasta La Paz, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v= 2442706082618714.

Archivo de los medios (2019): Bolivia: Denuncian que hay 1.000 personas desaparecidas por el gobierno de facto, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Qn0dllaDU&fbclid=IwAR0eavHMEKi6CcipRR2....

Beverinotti, Javier (2018): Development Challenges in Bolivia, Inter-American Development Bank, https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Development-....

Chungara, Danica (2020): La democracia de Aez silencia radios comunitarios y otros medios, La izquierda diaria, 4 January, https://www.laizquierdadiario.com.bo/La-democracia-de-Anez-silencia-radi....

Crnica (2019): Informe argentino en Bolivia denuncia torturas a nios y ancianos, 30 November https://www.cronica.com.ar/info-general/Informe-argentino-en-Bolivia-den...?fbclid=IwAR3QK1N7xxxNF8_TW9-a10Tw-SXkwi3Ggmq9YMduz-CGta2Uq8NcN6dSHA8.

Cruz, Juan (2019): Por qu gan Bolsonaro en Brasil? Revista mexicana de sociologa, Vol 81, No 3, pp 66575.

de Marval, Valentina and Bruno Scelza (2019): Estos son los agresivos tuits contra originarios e indgenas que borr la presidenta interina de Bolivia, Jeanine ez, AFP Factual, 21 November, https://factual.afp.com/estos-son-los-agresivos-tuits-contra-originarios...

Economa y ms (2020): Nuevo golpe a la economa: Reduccin a la inversin pblica, 4 March, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1476418559188828&id=17104149....

Eju TV (2019): Exfuncionarios de aerolnea Amaszonas lograron acomodarse en el gobierno de ez, 20 November, https://eju.tv/2019/12/exfuncionarios-de-aerolinea-amaszonas-lograron-ac....

Fabricant, Nicole (2009): Performative Politics: The Camba Countermovement in Eastern Bolivia,American Ethnologist, Vol 36, No 4, pp 76883.

Fuentes, Federico (2010) Government, Social Movements, and Revolution in Bolivia Today, International Socialist Review, No 73, https://isreview.org/issue/76/government-social-movements-and-revolution...

Farthing, Linda and Benjamin Kohl(2014): Evos Bolivia: Continuity and Change, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Harvey, David (2007): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hicks, Daniel L, Beatriz Maldonado, Brian Piper and Alejandra Goytia Rios (2018): Identity, Patronage, and Redistribution: Economic Inequality in Bolivia under Evo Morales, Journal of Economics, Race and Policy, Vol 1, No 1, pp 2641.

Los Tiempos (2020): Ministro destituye al gerente de BoA tras negarse ste a renunciar, https://www.lostiempos.com/actualidad/economia/20200310/ministro-destitu....

Pozas, Luis Miguel (2017): Una dcada del gobierno del MAS en Bolivia: Un Balance Global, Barataria: revista castellano-manchega de ciencias sociales, No 22, pp 13148.

Smith, Anna Marie (1994):New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 196890, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Webber, Jeffery (2010): From Rebellion to Reform: Image and Reality in the Bolivia of Evo Morales, International Socialist Review, No 73, https://isreview.org/issue/73/rebellion-reform.

Read the original:

Neo-liberal Restoration at the Barrel of a Gun : Dissecting the Racist Coup in Bolivia - Economic and Political Weekly

Amidst the escalated tensions between India and China, following the violent clash between the two sides on June 15 at Galwan Valley in Ladakh, social media warriors from the liberal camp took to Twitter to cast aspersions about the tragic incident. In a bid to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the liberals mocked the martyrdom of 20 soldiers and suggested that it was a ploy to garner votes in the upcoming Bihar elections.

A Twitter user (@BrandySahni) wrote, Strange how there are always martyred soldiers ready for use before every election. And this time Taujee (PM Modi) hit the bullseye Slain soldiers from the Bihar Regiment before elections in Bihar. It could not have been more opportune if he has planned it!!!

Uzair Hasan Rizvi who claims to be a fact checker for AFP on his Twitter bio said that the Bihar regiment of the Indian army have soldiers from different states and concluded that the mention of Bihar in the condolence message of PM Modi was to get leverage in the upcoming Bihar elections.

Another Twitter user (@jameel7866786) suggested a bigger internal conspiracy surrounding the martyrdom of Pulwama soldiers in 2019 and the recent border clash between the Indian and Chinese forces. Linking the tragic Pulwama attack with the General Elections of 2019 and the martyrdom of 20 soldiers from the Bihar regiment to Bihar elections, he asked others to connect the dots between the two mutually exclusive events.

A Twitter user named Professor questioned the coincidence of the timing of the Bihar elections and the decision to deploy the Bihar regiment at the Line of Actual Control.

Replying to an absurd and baseless tweet that PM Modi gave away the Galwan Valley to China, a Congress supporter (@SamanSutiya1) wrote that the martyrdom of 20 Indian soldiers was connected to victory in Bihar elections. 20 mein se 13 Bihar ke thay. Ab benefit le sakta hain, he claimed. The loose translation goes as, 13 out of 20 soldiers were from Bihar. They (BJP) can now be benefitted.

Sasidharan Pazhoor wrote, Bihar elections ahead. Bihar regiment suffers casualties. No, I am not suggesting anything. Interestingly, this is a textbook liberal strategy to sow the seeds of doubt in peoples mind without being explicit about it.

Replying to controversial journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, a user named Desh who claimed to have lost his brother reiterated the conspiracy theory of deploying Bihar regiment at the border for benefitting in Bihar elections.

This is not the first time that the liberal jamaat has ganged up to disprove facts and peddle conspiracy theories. Following the Pulwama attack, manyCongress supportershad floated conspiracy theories that Pulwama was an inside job carried out on the behest of Prime Minister Modi. One Congress leader and conman who questioned Pulwama as an inside job wasgiven a Lok Sabha ticketby the party. AGoa Congress leaderhad even asked for proof of the terror attack and accused PM Modi of planning the Pulwama attack. AKarnataka Congress MPeven said that the Pulwama attack was a match-fixing between PM Modi and Pakistan. Congress party had evenraised questionsasking how did explosives reach the spot indirectly accusing the Modi government of carrying out an inside job. It is not just limited to the Congress party. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee hadstatedthat PM Modi knew about the Pulwama attack earlier and did not do anything to stop it.

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Ladakh standoff: Liberals come together to cast aspersions that Bihar regiment soldiers were martyred because of upcoming state elections - OpIndia

As Yves Giroux, the parliamentary budget officer, put it in his guidance for MPs: It will be difficult for parliamentarians to perform their critical role of properly scrutinizing proposed government spending in the four-hour window. And so it proved. It was a thoroughly unsatisfying experience for anyone who cared to watch.

So much money is flowing through these supplementary estimates that ministers had trouble answering what it was all for

Former NDP MP Pat Martin chaired the government operations committee for years and fought successive governments to improve scrutiny of spending. Its the most fundamental principle of our democracy and the most important job a member of Parliament has, he said. It used to make me crazy that billions of dollars would fly out the door with only a cursory review of an hour or two of review or oversight. That is the bare minimum of accountability the government owes the people.

The opposition parties commanded a majority in the House on Wednesday and could, in theory, have demanded more information. But the NDP had already shown its hand and bargained away its independence.

Singh and his colleagues might have a better chance of changing the world if they just joined the Liberal party.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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John Ivison: Who cares about $87 billion? Not the Liberals or the NDP apparently - National Post

But even in those liberal bastions, the movement is running into resistance.

These are very blue places, yet were still seeing this kind of dynamic with police spending skyrocketing and cuts to community resources and community-led programs, said Kumar Rao, director of justice transformation at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal Brooklyn-based advocacy group. This is a political issue on one level, but its actually very much a bipartisan problem.

In the nations capital, Mayor Muriel Bowser had BLACK LIVES MATTER painted on the street leading to the White House after federal officers forcibly cleared out protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets to make way for a presidential photo op outside a historic church. A day later, Black Lives Matter activists painted DEFUND THE POLICE next to the original message.

Bowser, however, has proposed a 3.3 percent increase, to $578 million, in police spending in the city's fiscal year 2021 budget. She told NPR last week that she was not at all reconsidering her position.

We fund the police at the level that we need it funded, she said.

That stance is at odds, however, with the city council, which has been inundated by the public outcry for police reform. Dozens of public witnesses testified at a six-hour virtual Metropolitan Police Department budget oversight hearing Monday in opposition to increased police spending.

More than 500 had people signed up to testify, and members of the public submitted more than 15,000 written, video and phone submissions, the local news site DCist reported, noting that the list of speakers was cut off due to time constraints. In contrast, only 22 people spoke at last years police budget hearing.

The theme was clear in the testimony, which was a call to evaluate the budget of the Metropolitan Police Department, make appropriate cuts and redirect the funding to meet the needs of residents that have suffered from over-policing and other government disinvestment, said Kenyan McDuffie, a member of the D.C. Council and chair pro tempore.

In a phone interview, McDuffie told POLITICO the council has been responsive to the publics suggestions and is likely to cut the police departments budget to reinvest in the communitys priorities, despite Bowsers opposition. He noted that the council unanimously passed a series of police reforms last week but warned that police reform is only one step in dismantling systemic racism and structural inequities.

The budget process is continuing to play out in D.C., with budget markups set for next week. The full council is scheduled to hold its first vote on the budget on July 7, and the final vote is expected July 28.

The District is just one of dozens of cities from the East Coast to the West Coast grappling with the message behind the defund police motto. To critics, its a literal call to bankrupt and abolish police departments. But to many leaders, its a call to reform policing; rethink when, where and how police should be deployed; cut police budgets; and invest more money in communities, instead of in policing communities.

"You ask people what does defunding the police mean you ask three people, youll get three different opinions," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told California Playbook in a virtual interview Tuesday. But I think what is crystal clear to all of us is that we are underfunding black communities whether its economic development, whether its education, whether its health and other communities of color.

Garcetti said he supported a reevaluation of police funding but did not embrace calls to fully defund or dismantle police departments.

Rashad Robinson, executive director of the racial justice organization Color of Change, noted that activists across the country are seeing a movement of cities beginning to examine their budgets more closely amid calls to defund police.

Budgets are moral documents, right? They say what our values are, he said. Beyond any rhetoric, beyond words, they tell the story of what we actually hope to achieve by what we put money in, and far too often, when we have problems in our society, we seek to solve them with people with guns.

Hundreds of residents and activists have flooded virtual council meetings in city after city with calls to defund and reform police departments. According to a POLITICO analysis of city budgets, crime statistics and census data, theres no direct correlation between police spending and crime.

The grassroots energy overwhelming city councils comes in the wake of George Floyds killing at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25. Floyds death led to global protests against police brutality and racism, and defund the police an idea decades in the making became a rallying cry.

Minneapolis city council has since unanimously passed a resolution to disband its police department and replace it after a year of research and community engagement. But Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo want to reform the department rather than dismantle it.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio earlier this month pledged to cut the police departments funding. De Blasio failed to specify how much he would curb spending, but the city council is eying a cut of nearly 20 percent after calling for a 7 percent reduction weeks earlier. The council has a July 1 deadline to pass a budget.

Atlantas city council has a special meeting to adopt its budget Friday, a week after 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by police outside a Wendys drive-thru. Mondays nearly 12-hour council meeting included the playing of nearly 500 public comments that were submitted.

The council approved two resolutions urging the city and the state Legislature to adopt policies implementing comprehensive police reform and calling for a report of recommendations for the citys approach to public safety, including systematic changes to policies and reinventing the culture of policing, to be submitted by Dec. 1.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a contender to become Bidens running mate who signed an order this week to reform the police departments use of force, has said Atlanta is ahead of the curve because its already in the process of reallocating public safety funds.

But the city council is poised to add about $12 million to the police departments budget when it votes Friday, according to Felicia Moore, the councils president. Moore told POLITICO that city officials had pledged last year to increase police spending for four years following a study by the Atlanta Police Foundation that found Atlanta officers were paid well below the median rates.

I cant speak for what their votes will be, but I would tend to think that reneging on a promise to keep our salaries competitive would be something that they wouldnt want to do, Moore said.

All the moneys not gonna be spent on the day that we adopt a budget, she added. They may go back and revisit the budget and make some adjustments. I just think the issue came up in a time frame that doesnt give the council a full opportunity to make the decision to defund the police department right now.

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'Defund the police faces skepticism even in deeply liberal cities - POLITICO

Megyn Kelly(Mike Segar/Reuters)The lesson seems to be: Liberals will suffer no grave consequences for proving Megyn Kelly was correct about blackface, unless they bring up Megyn Kelly.

The best-known person to suffer serious adverse consequences pertaining to the wearing of blackface makeup is, as far as I can tell, Megyn Kelly. Kelly has not worn blackface recently. No one has claimed that she ever wore blackface at all. Yet she was shown the door at NBC two years ago after casually remarking that when she was a kid 35, maybe even 40, years ago many people thought it was okay to wear blackface. Kelly drew a distinction between wearing blackface in a respectful manner and wearing it to disparage.

That second point blackface can be worn without mockery of black people is perfectly obvious. No one thought Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles was doing a demeaning minstrel act when they wore blackface as Othello. If darkening ones skin is an unspeakable insult, then we should all consider it egregious that the light-skinned Ben Kingsley put on makeup to play the brown-skinned Mohandas Gandhi in Gandhi. No, its not the object per se the makeup that is offensive; it is the items usage as part of a nasty satiric putdown of black people that makes it a racist insult.

As for Kellys first point, that wearing blackface used to be considered acceptable, well. Liberal Hollywood comic Jimmy Kimmel wore blackface in 2003, while lampooning black speech, in a skit in which he played NBA star Karl Malone. Liberal Hollywood actor David Cross wore blackface, in a 2015 sketch on episode three of the show W/ Bob & David. (Netflix pulled the entire episode this week.) Liberal Hollywood actor Ben Stiller wore blackface in Zoolander in 2001. Liberal Hollywood actor Billy Crystal wore blackface at the 2012 Oscars while mimicking the late Sammy Davis Jr.

Liberal Hollywood actor Sarah Silverman wore blackface in a 2007 Comedy Central sketch. Liberal Hollywood comic Jimmy Fallon wore blackface, imitating Chris Rock, in a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit. After liberal Hollywood actor Ted Danson wore blackface while doing a sort of parody of minstrelsy at a 1993 Friars Club roast he had been dating Whoopi Goldberg Howard Stern did a parody of Dansons act in blackface. Most notably, Robert Downey Jr. scored an Academy Award nomination for wearing blackface in Tropic Thunder in 2008. Even Tom Hanks, in 2004, yukked it up in a skit with a guy who wore blackface (and African garb, and an afro) during a school fundraiser. All of these incidents are much more recent than Kellys childhood.

As for political figures, worldwide liberal icon Justin Trudeau wore blackface so many times he cant even remember them all, and the liberal governor Ralph Northam of Virginia may have worn blackface, or perhaps it was a Klan hood, who knows? Journalists never bothered to find out.

Some of these people apologized for being racist, while others insisted anyone who took umbrage was missing the joke. In my defense, Tropic Thunder is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception, Downey recently told Joe Rogan on the latters podcast. Youll note that the list of names doesnt carry a lot of right-leaning personalities, though Stern in 1994 ran for governor of New York as a libertarian and Downey seems to have some conservative tendencies, even if he starred in a campaign video to promote the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Fallon, formerly considered apolitical, shed that label when, after he was deemed insufficiently antagonistic toward Donald Trump on his TV show, he apologized and made a donation in Trumps name to a group that defends illegal immigrants. Wearing blackface seems to be largely a liberal pastime. Still, Downeys defense is correct: The joke is usually not, Black people are ridiculous, as in the old vaudeville acts.

Thats a validation of Kellys point: Blackface can be worn for purposes other than racist ones. Blackface can even be anti-racist; the point of the David Cross sketch that Netflix will no longer let you see is that a white motorist (played by Cross) who antagonizes a cop is treated calmly but a black motorist (played by Cross in makeup) who behaves perfectly normally may cause a cop to panic and reach for his pepper spray. The sketch depends on makeup because its the same guy in both situations. People wont be able to judge for themselves, though, since the sketch has been yanked, and Cross will now have to deal with being forever linked to blackface in news stories that suggest he did something so egregiously wrong that his work had to be removed by its distributor.

Why, though, are so many liberals so fascinated with wearing blackface that theyre willing to take a gamble on it, all these years later? What would Freud say? This brings us to a bizarre Washington Post story about a 54-year-old party guest (Ill omit her name) who wore blackface to political cartoonist Tom Toless Halloween party in 2018. The woman who wore blackface is not a public figure, so what she wore to a Halloween party two years ago does not rise to the level of news, yet the Post this week devoted several thousand words to this incident, making the person in question a public figure, getting her fired, and, perhaps, ruining her life.

The female partygoer is a liberal who often participates in marches for progressive causes. And the intent of her blackface getup was to ridicule . . . Megyn Kelly. She wore a button that read, Hello, Im Megyn Kelly. The joke was obviously that Kelly had been insensitive to the blackface issue, but the woman apologized to the host of the party the next day and said shed made a mistake. Still, years later her employer dropped her when it got wind of the Post expose.

So that makes two people who have lost jobs over blackface: Megyn Kelly, and a random woman who mocked Megyn Kelly. The lesson seems to be: Liberals will generally suffer no grave consequences for proving Megyn Kelly was correct about blackface, unless they bring up Megyn Kelly.

Originally posted here:

What Is It with Liberals and Blackface? - National Review

This transcript may contain errors. Be advised that the audio of this podcast serves as the official record.

Anonymous Speaker: [00:00:00] This episode of Crosscut Talks is supported by Alaska Airlines.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:00:09] Hey. Welcome to Crosscut Talks. I'm Mark Baumgarten, managing editor at Crosscut.

Two times this week, the U.S. Supreme Court defied expectations. First when the high court ruled that gay and transgender workers are protected under article seven of the Civil Rights Act. And then later in the week, when it ruled that the Trump administration would not be able to immediately terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. THe decisions were surprising ... and confusing.

The addition to the high court of Justice Brett Kavanaugh nearly two years ago resulted in a bench that we were told tilted decidedly right. So, how was it that Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, sided with the more liberal-minded justices on both of these cases. And why was Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, offering the majority opinion in the landmark case cementing LGBTQ rights. Did we misread these justices or is there something else going on here?

This week, I'm speaking with Dahlia Lithwick, a great journalist and noted Supreme Court tracker, about the first of those rulings, why it happened and what it portends for the rest of this term, which she calls the most consequential in her career. It's important to note here that we spoke prior to Thursday's DACA decision.

We also talk about the Washington State Supreme Court, which in another surprising turn, recently issued a letter voicing its support for the current anti-racism movement.

Then, later, I'll bring Crosscut reporter Lilly Fowler on to talk about a community-led effort to shore up support for Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best.

And I've got a programming note here. Next week I'll be speaking with Nikkita Oliver, the activist and lawyer who has been one of the most prominent voices in Seattle's Black Lives Matter movement. If you have any questions for her, send them to me at talks@crosscut.com.

Now, I'm going to ask you to help us out. All of the journalism created by the Crosscut newsroom, including this podcast, is free. But it does have very real costs. As a nonprofit news source, we count on support from our readers, viewers, and listeners to continue producing the stories and conversations that keep you informed and engaged with your community. If this work is valuable to you and you would like to support our journalism, go to crosscut.com/donate.

Okay. On with the show

I'm here now with Dahlia Lithwick. Dalia writes about courts and law for Slate. She also is the host of the podcast Amicus. Dalia, welcome to Crosscut Talks.

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:02:49] Thank you so much for having me.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:02:52] Okay. So we're speaking on the afternoon of Monday, June 15th. THis morning, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision that extends the Civil Rights Act's employment protections to gay and transgender people. Title seven, right? This is a big decision for the gay and transgender movement. You called it a landmark decision and it caught many people by surprise. And I'm curious, did it surprise you?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:03:16] It did. Back when this was argued in October, I think at best, maybe you could have hoped that the court was going to do some kind of split-the-baby or narrow decision, right? If they gave any kind of victory to the LGBTQ plaintiffs in this case, the idea that it was going to be just a route, a six to three huge capacious win for the plaintiffs in this case is frankly, I think, astonishing. We saw at oral argument that Neil Gorsuch was kind of surprisingly open to some of these arguments, but the idea that he would author an opinion that I think will be seen as equally consequential to the marriage equality case, maybe more.

So this will be a signal moment, I think, for gay and transgender rights in America. The idea that Neil Gorsuch, joined by John Roberts unequivocally, found that right in title seven, I think it surprised everyone.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:04:25] You know, there's certainly has been a lot of talk about how this sort of goes against the grain of what we expect from Justice Gorsuch. Is there anything that you see from him that this aligns with? You know?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:04:35] Yeah. I think that the knock on Gorsuch from the left was always that he was very wedded to some of these Scalia notions of originalism, textualism -- you look at the language, it means what it says -- uh, and often in a really crabbed cramped fashion. This is very much a textualist reading, uh, very much looking at the plain language of title seven that precludes the government from discrimination because of race, religion, national origin, and sex. And he reads "because of sex" to clearly sweep in gay and transgender workers that brought suit in these cases. Justice Alito, interestingly, writes his scorching descent, and he tries to put himself in the minds of the people who drafted title seven in 1964, right? And it's interesting because Gorsuch is not interested in trying to commune telepathically with the drafters.

He just looks at the plain language and says, "because of sex" clearly contemplates somebody who is fired if they are a man who is married to a man, as opposed to a woman married to a man. That is because of sex. So, in that sense, it's a, just a straight-on plain textual reading that in some sense, we could have seen that been sort of presaged in other things Gorsuch's done.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:06:06] Is this a sign of how cynical that we've become about the idea of partisan courts that we can't read the nuance of, of really how somebody views the law and that this surprise actually has a great amount of meaning behind it? As far as the way that we look at these judges?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:06:26] There's a lot of ways to slice the salami here. I've been thinking about it. And I think there is one reading of what happened here, which is just a purely pragmatic reading. We are staring down the barrel, I know we're going to talk about it later, but of probably the biggest term in my career covering the court two decades. The court was not going to sign off on 10 five-to-four decisions, conservative versus liberal, appointees of Republicans versus appointees of Democrats. There was no way going into an election year that they were going to run the board for Donald Trump. And I think that if you look at the whole board, this is actually, at least in hindsight, a little bit of a gimme that you can have a few defections from the conservatives on the court. I don't know that it disproves that this is a very, very partisan court or that judging has become an extremely, an unseemly partisan business.

I think it does say that, in some sense, gay rights in America is a done deal. And you are going to be in some, in the parlance of many, on the right or the wrong side of history for these cases. There's not great arguments left. So this is a, in some ways, an easy case to flip on. THere is no doubt that the evangelical base that voted for Donald Trump, so he would give them, ironically, a Gorsuch and a Kavanaugh, is going to be incensed. And we've seen that in the early reactions to the cases, but I don't think this is an issue that feels very, very dangerous for the court to move to the center on.

I think some of the other cases that are coming down the barrel are going to be harder for the court to bargain with. And in some sense, this was the easy choice.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:08:21] Hmm. Okay. So it was, there was some political calculation here, you think?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:08:26] I would say that if we know anything at all about Chief Justice John Roberts, we know that he is, first and foremost, an institutionalist. He cares deeply about the esteem and the dignity and the public acceptance of the court as a nonpartisan entity. And if we think about the last couple of years, the only times he's punched back at Donald Trump in a polemical manner is when Donald Trump takes aim at the courts. So he sees it as his job to, in the great tradition of John Marshall, and the great tradition he would say of William Rehnquist, that he clerked for his job is to put the court first.

And so if you reverse engineer the term through the lens of, how does John Roberts in an election year, when trust in other institutions is almost gone, how does he lift up public opinion around the court as an apolitical institution? And there's going to be some decisions where he throws a bone to the left, and it's not hard to look at this case as emblematic of, right ... John Roberts wrote a blistering dissent in the marriage equality case. He is not a fan of advancing a gay rights agenda or writing into law that which Congress has not created. So I think this is just a really savvy, savvy operator doing exactly the thing that he does best. And to suggest that if he was just one of nine justices who could just throw a vote, I think he would have voted against an expansive reading of title seven to protect gay rights. I think he did it for very, very calculated, practical, savvy reasons. It's the same reason, by the way, I think he defected last year on that big census case.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:10:21] Hmm. So, you know, there's a narrative that's going on here, where we had late last week, the Trump administration comes out and ends protections for transgender people in health care. Is Donald Trump out of line with, with where his conservative court is at at this point?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:10:41] I think it's a really good insight that this court is a little bit trying to telegraph how much it plans to carry water for Donald Trump's agenda. The Jeff Sessions justice department, which then became the Bill Barr justice department, was extraordinary in its attempt to use the Supreme Court, almost to weaponize the Supreme Court, to get what it wanted.

And it did that in a whole bunch of ways. Most notably it would leapfrog cases to the Supreme Court rather than letting them percolate through the lower and intermediate courts. It would just turn to the Supreme Court and say, Save us now. And it did that a bunch of times.

We saw the justice department buck a longstanding norm that said, Look, if the Obama administration was for DACA, this justice department is for DACA. If the Obama administration said title seven sweeps in, uh, gay and transgender workers, this justice depart ... but that didn't happen. We saw the justice department go on the attack on a whole bunch of different issues. And then, as I said, skip intermediate courts altogether, run to the Supreme Court and say, give us relief.

And I think that that was a pattern that at least in my world was really shocking because we've not seen the justice department act as though it was just foot soldiers for the president. And what it meant was you got kind of a pileup of cases where everything was on the front steps of the Supreme Court.

There was no issue that wasn't rushed to the court. And part of the reason I think on Monday we saw the court swat away a whole bunch of second amendment gun rights cases, we saw the court swat away sanctuary city claims, we saw the court refused to get involved in qualified immunity. Case after case after case, we're seeing the court, I think in some ways, say, look, we cannot do absolutely everything Bill Barr has on his Christmas list because there's 5,000 things on his Christmas list. Hmm.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:12:42] Yeah. I mean, I wonder is that, is that, is that the way that the court should work? I mean, or should the court not be taking into account those political considerations?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:12:52] That is the $40,000 question. I think that's been the age old question is how susceptible the court is meant to be to political winds and to popular opinion and to polling. And certainly that's the reason that judges were given lifetime tenure and they were protected from all of those political headwinds. But I think it's also true that since time immemorial, the courts have taken those political considerations into account. So I think that the court knows -- and this is a gamut by design, this is what the framers wanted, that article three courts have neither the power of the purse or the sword; the only power they have, the only authority they have and the system of checks and balances is public regard. And they have to be mindful of that. And so whether it's explicitly the case that they should take this stuff into account before the 2020 election, it is probably the case that they very much do take this into account before the 2020 election.

And if I could add one coda, I would say the thing I've been saying all year is that almost every big ticket case that is coming down the pike in the next few weeks was actually capable of being argued a year ago. Last spring, the court held almost every one of these issues over because the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation had such a profound effect, roiling public sentiment and trashing the public ratings for the court and really forcing people to have very strong political feelings about the court.

The court is very good in those moments at taking down the temperature. This, I think what you're seeing is a version of the court being just very savvy about taking down the temperature a few notches.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:14:49] So what's at stake in this term. What are the cases that you're keeping an eye on?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:14:55] This is I think the biggest term of my lifetime, uh, what's coming down the pike in the next weeks. And we don't know exactly when the term is going to end because they stretched it out a little bit after COVID.

But in the next few weeks, we're going to see dACA, which has all those dreamers that you'll remember, President Obama allowed them to stay in the country and to be eligible to work and to go to school. Donald Trump rescinded that by way of a tweet. So whether that rescission was proper is going to be decided, and that will quite literally affect tens and thousands of dreamers who put their faith in the system when DACA was afforded to them as a protection. It will have massive, massive effects on colleges, on businesses who have operated as though those dreamers were here legally and were not subject to deportation.

The other big, big ticket case that everyone's waiting for is June Medical. That is the abortion case out of Louisiana. It's almost a carbon copy of Whole Women's Health, which was a case that was decided only three years ago at the Supreme Court about whether doctors had to have what's called "admitting privileges" in clinics in order to perform abortions within a 30-mile range.

If the court decides -- having decided three years ago that those admitting privileges law in Texas were pretextual, they were just a way to keep clinics close, to keep doctors from being allowed to terminate pregnancies -- if the court decides differently for Louisiana it will only be because Anthony Kennedy left the court, Brett Kavanaugh came on the court.

So it's an incredibly consequential case, not just about the future of Roe V. Wade, but whether the substitution of one justice for another, in a few short years, can fundamentally change the rule of law. So this idea of stare decisis, you know, that precedent means something and it endures, is on the line.

The last and probably the biggest and most political one is those Trump financial records cases. There's two different subpoenas, one coming out of the judiciary committee, one coming out of the New York of Cy Vance's office, both trying to investigate Trump's tax returns among other financial records, right? Both making claims that we thought were pretty open and shut cases after the Paula Jones case, after the Watergate tapes case about being allowed to probe presidential records and presidential actions.

In both cases, Trump, uh, and his justice department have taken the position that he cannot be subject to scrutiny, not by Congress, not by a grand jury in New York. Not ever, not on a plane, not on a train, not on a sox, not in fox. Um, this was the case where famously one of the lawyers argued, even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, he couldn't be subject to this kind of scrutiny. So in some sense, this is going to be the test case again, going right into the election, of whether Donald Trump can in fact be completely immune from congressional scrutiny or from scrutiny by a grand jury.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:18:18] And is there a sense on where that case is going to land, what that decision is going to be?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:18:23] I think I would probably go back to what I said at the beginning, which is I'm trying to look at the whole board and see what gives and what doesn't. Um, if you'd asked me before, uh, the title seven case came down, when I thought maybe, uh, there was going to be a huge blow struck against the workers, the gay and transgender workers of America, I might've felt differently. Now I think this will probably embolden the court, at least in that abortion case and possibly in the DACA case to do something very, very bold in favor of Donald Trump.

And if that's the case, my sense is, looking again at the whole board, that the way to resolve this massive, massive financial records case is to kick it down the road, to say, "Oh, we're going to send it back down to the lower courts, we're going to use some different level of scrutiny, hope the case goes away and resurfaces after the election.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:19:22] I've been keeping a scorecard here and I'll, I'll let you know how you did. So let's talk a little bit more about what about what happened today? Um, you know, the, the court also declined to reconsider, uh, the issue of qualified immunity for police today, an issue that's of major concern to those seeking, um, police reforms right now. Can you tell us briefly what qualified immunity is?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:19:47] Yeah. This is a really longstanding line of Supreme Court doctrine. And essentially what happens is the police officers and other government workers, you know, people who work in, in prisons, government officials, generally, they are not personally liable unless they violate something that is, quote, a clearly established, right.

And the way the cases have worked out clearly established that that standard is so high, that it is almost impossible to find them liable. Pretty much, you can only be held liable, subject to this qualified immunity standard, if a different court in their own jurisdiction has considered the exact same facts and declared that to be illegal, at which point they should have known that they couldn't do it.

But again, as a practical matter, what it means is nobody ever gets tagged. Nobody ever gets tagged for misconduct. There is so much going on right now and asking the court to take on yet another hot button issue, one that is really the volcano right now in this country, and the court just said, no. Hmm.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:21:06] It makes me wonder about this moment that we're in right now suddenly, uh, re-examining uh, criminal justice in a, in a really kind of radical way that, you know, even a month ago it was not being talked about. And, and it, it makes me wonder about what the court's role is in this moment and by courts, I mean, all of the courts and in particular, the Washington State Supreme court. They drafted a letter, an open letter, earlier this month. And, uh, can I, I'm going to read a part from it:

"Recent events have brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness a painful fact that is, for too many of our citizens, common knowledge. The injustices faced by Black Americans are not relics of the past. We continue to see racialized policing and the over-representation of Black Americans in every stage of our criminal and juvenile justice systems. Our institutions remain effected by the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, laws that were never dismantled and racist court decisions that were never disavowed."

So you spoke about this letter in the latest episode of Amicus and I'm, I'm just curious, what is remarkable about this letter to you?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:22:26] Well, for one thing, it was signed, I believe, by every member of the Washington State Supreme court. Breathtaking, breathtaking that that kind of language and that kind of taking responsibility was signed by everyone. I think that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did a version of that last week. And I think maybe some other state supreme courts have followed suit.

But I hold it up for contrast against the U.S. Supreme Court, which up until very recently was making claims like, we can dismantle the Voting Rights Act, right? This is the Shelby County case authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. Because we're over race ... race is, it was super bad. But now we're all good. And why subject those poor southern states to the indignity of pre-clearance, you know, when they put voting rules into effect. And I think that that locution, and, you know, it's the thing that John Roberts will be remembered for.

In a, a school busing case, uh, out of Seattle, he wrote famously, you know, the only way to get past race in America is to get past race. So we have to do away with all of these remedial efforts in affirmative action in schools, uh, in voting rights and that way America will go back to being awesome again.

And I think the, the, the blinkered thinking there that, you know, all of the things, all of those vestiges of Jim Crow, uh, all the vestiges of red lining and zoning and systemic, uh, racial, uh, police violence, and over-incarceration, that none of that has a race valence, that's nuts, it's nuts. And, uh, we're seeing now, it seems to me, the reason people are on the streets is even people who have not been subject to those things, to red lining and systemic police violence and over-incarceration, are looking around and seeing these are all vestiges of a centuries-long problem that we never cured. At best we papered over.

And that while John Roberts wants to say, you know, I, I wiped my hands, thank goodness that ugly chapter is over, america is now colorblind, we know that's false. And so if you look at the last few years of doctrine, at least on this question of race coming out of the Supreme Court, that really crabbed vision that everything is okay. And if we just stop worrying about race, race, wouldn't be a problem. I think in a lot of ways, even good liberals were guilty of some of that thinking, right. We were in post-racial America, and Obama was emblematic of how we're all over the problem. And I think the last couple of years have really put that to the lie and the last couple of weeks have really, I think, seared into most of our consciousness, like it or not, that systemic violent brutalizing racism is still a part of us.

For a state Supreme Court to acknowledge that, not just to tinker around the margins, but to say, Holy cow, you know, we in the judiciary have been a but-for contributor to that systemic violence and degradation and lack of dignity, it's such a huge pivot, even from where the courts were, I think, six months ago. I just don't think I've seen that kind of institutional taking responsibility and pledging to do better, not coming out of the courts.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:26:11] Who is the audience for this letter?

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:26:14] Everyone. I think that they were first and foremost, talking to Black and brown people in the state and reckoning with their own complicity in systemic injustice. I think they were talking to lawyers around the state and saying maybe you should reckon with your own complicity. I think they were trying to model something for law students and college students and activists. This is what it looks like to step up and say we were wrong. And I think they were maybe even trying to model something for other judicial bodies around the country.

I think that it was an attempt to say, This does us almost no harm. It doesn't diminish us. It doesn't belittle or degrade us. What it does is it opens a channel to being really, truly honest and it's time, it's long past time.

So I guess maybe I would say, Who weren't they talking to? I think they were trying very, very hard to show the rest of us what it looks like to say, We as a judiciary have been a part of the problem.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:27:27] And so this in a way is also an attempt to shore up the legitimacy of the court. Uh, these do appear to be very honest feelings. They are, they, they are very, very, um, examined feelings, uh, and truths. And this is a cynical way to look at it, but there is this management of like that, that in order for the courts to have power, they need to have buy-in from the people.

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:27:52] I love that you're saying that. I hadn't connected it, but I think what you've just flagged there is, it's hard to do that in an opinion, right? It's very easy to do it in an, an extra judicial letter, to say, we're not going to within the four corners of a written opinion, do mea culpa for, uh, what's come before. But what we are going to say is it is completely patently obvious that we were wrong.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:28:21] Hmm. Well, and I think, and this is brings, brings me to my last question for you. And it's, you touched on it, uh, in, uh, in the last episode of your podcast. You know, we often think about, um, about the laws being this sort of like emotionless sort of space, especially those of us who are out on the outside of it, is that is this place of, you know, logic and argument, but not really of, um, considerations of the humanity of the people who sort of are the gears.

And, and I just wonder if this feels like a moment where, um, where there is some humanity that's being kind of shown here by the people who are the justice system, are the courts. And if this expression is a sign of a sea change within the field of law in general,

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:29:13] I hadn't thought about it as systematically as I should have. And then in that podcast, I was talking, uh, as you'll remember to Angela Onwuachi-Willig, she's the first African-American woman Dean of Boston University Law School. And she had, by the way, for her part, written this extraordinary letter to her students, talking about George Floyd and their pain and right.

One of the things that she said that was really striking to me was we have this, as you just said, very mechanistic, very formalistic, very dry, icy, almost brittle notion of the law and the rule of law and statutory interpretation as these mechanical justice machines. And the more you inject emotion, passion, personal experience, the more that distorts the outcomes, right? Then you get biased outcomes. And what she said, and I think is really true, is that as soon as an African-American woman dean says to her students of color, I see you, I feel your pain, she's accused of being biased and of being emotional and of being sentimental and lacking in rigor. And yet, for 200 years white male deans of law schools have set the terms of the game.

So we have a default where we say all of those mechanistic, formalistic, rigid rules, those are unbiased and fair. And anything else that inflects on that with personal experience is bias. And the best example of this right is Sonia Sotomayor, who famously gave a speech at Berkeley when she was still, uh, on the appeals court, on the federal appeals court, where she talked about a wise Latina woman might come to a different outcome, uh, from a wise, uh, white man.

And you'll remember, she got pilloried for that at her confirmation hearings for the implication that she was biased, right, that she had a thumb on the scale for minorities. And by the way, she renounced it, she was like, Oh, I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. But the truth is what we now know, is that life experience and where you come from and what you've seen and where you've been and what you know, and what you don't know, because you haven't seen it, all of that affects judging.

And so for judges to pretend that they're just oracles who speak to the framers about some mystical, rigid truth, just carves too many people in too many experiences out of the story. And I think what Sonia Sotomayor was saying, what the dean of BU was saying, what I think by the way, every justice used to say about Thurgood Marshall, is that when you sat in a room with Thurgood Marshall during conference, and he would tell you about Jim Crow, and he would tell you about having to go up the back stairs or the side stairs in a courthouse, or getting punched in the face for being an African-American lawyer, it changes everything for everybody who hears it. And Justice Scalia used to say, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor used to say, Anthony Kennedy would say, we learned so much about what we didn't know from listening to Thurgood Marshall.

And I think. I think what I, what I want to say is not that this makes you biased. It just makes you wiser. It makes you see your blind spots. And the idea that the judicial system, that individual judges are just brains in vats or robots who shouldn't know what they don't know, that's just nuts. And so, I don't even think this is a question of, should they be sympathetic or should they be emotional or should they have extra solicitude for certain communities?

I just think, understand that you've been fed a lie and perpetuated a lie all those times that you've said, this is just a machine. It's not a machine; it's built of human, human experience and human ideas. And for most of history, those were white wealthy male humans, but doesn't make it a machine.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:33:41] Yeah. Dalia. I really appreciate your perspective. Thank you so much for being on Crosscut Talks.

Dahlia Lithwick: [00:33:47] Thank you so much for having me next time. We'll do it face to face in real life.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:33:51] Oh my God. That would be fantastic.

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Mark Baumgarten: [00:34:59] Welcome back to Crosscut Talks. I'm speaking now with Lily Fowler, a staff reporter at Crosscut, and this week Lilly filed a report on a community effort to shore up support for Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, who has been facing some criticism following her department's response to anti-racism protests.

So Lilly, first, can you tell me about this event that happened on Sunday that you, uh, that you wrote about?

Lilly Fowler: [00:35:22] Sure. It was a gathering of clergy community leaders, a lot of folks who have been part of police accountability groups, trying to hold police accountable. There was 25 clergy community leaders at this church in the Central District and they were there to talk about police accountability and the recent movement. But first and foremost, they were there to defend, um, Carmen Best in her job.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:35:50] Why do people believe that Carmen Best's job is at risk?

Lilly Fowler: [00:35:53] It wasn't clear why they thought her job was at risk. One pastor, a bishop there, said that they were, quote, unquote, subliminal messages about calling for resignation. And I think what he was referring to was there was a press conference the other day between Durkan and Best and some people started to speculate that Durkan might be calling for her resignation at that press conference. And then, as it turned out, nothing happened. But what also surfaced was, it was very clear that Durkan and Best were not on the same page as far as police abandoning the East precinct in Capitol Hill. And so, you know, people have wondered, you know, is that going to escalate? And are we going to see Best lose her job in the next few weeks?

Mark Baumgarten: [00:36:44] Hmm. So who were these people that, uh, that are vocally supporting her? And what are they saying about her?

Lilly Fowler: [00:36:51] So the, the gathering that I wrote about it was a last minute, uh, press conference. They said it was pulled together within 24 hours. And a lot of the people there have been leaders in the community for years with regard to police accountability. One of the first speakers was the mother of Omari, which some, um, younger folks might be familiar with because he's been streaming the protests from Capitol Hill on a regular basis and has been at the forefront.

But his mother is head of Mothers for Police Accountability. And she was there and spoke some pretty powerful words. So they were there basically to defend Best and to say, you know, if any, if there's any fall to go around here, we want that fall to land squarely on Mayor Jenny Durkan and not Best. We're going to defend our first African-American police chief in Seattle, as she's made some mistakes. But this is unprecedented times, she's admitted to those mistakes and we stand behind her 100%.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:37:59] Is this a, uh, is this a generational divide? I mean, you said that, you know, you have Omari who I, I don't know exactly what Omari's politics are on this, but then you have his mother being very vocal about, um, about supporting Best. I mean, is there a, is there a sense that there is sort of an old guard of, uh, community, community leaders in the Black community? And then there is this younger generation that may be, there's a, a difference of opinion here.

Lilly Fowler: [00:38:25] Yeah, definitely. I expected there to be some kind of gulf, but I did not expect it to be that wide. They spoke for over an hour at this church. And there was not one word about defunding the police.

Now, I followed up with some of them after the meeting. And so when I talked to some folks one-on-one, then they said, well, you know, one pastor said he was, he could see defunding the police. And he would be supportive of that. Others said that we'd have to look more closely at the budget. Some said they were outright against it. So there's a variety of opinions. But the, the emphasis was definitely different than what you hear from protesters out on the street.

Black clergy have often been at the forefront of civil rights movements. And when I reported on all of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, There was a lot of talk about how Black clergy then had sort of taken a step back and, and, and young leaders were at the forefront and that's happening here today. But the gulf is even wider, I would say, because whereas then the talk was still about police reform, now a lot of the protesters are just calling for outright defunding the police. And I think it's going to take some time before maybe some of the old guard and the, and the younger protestors land on the same page.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:39:56] Hmm. You know, one of the interesting things, I think one of the most striking quotes from your story was actually about, uh, one of these leaders perspective towards the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest or the, uh, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, whichever way you're calling it. What was the view of that protest? Can you, can you tell us, um, what, what they said?

Lilly Fowler: [00:40:18] Yes, it was clear to her. She just thought it was a distraction that, you know, it was these kids playing around, mostly white kids in Capitol Hill, camping out, doing their thing and, and in a way co-oped in the movement, that it was a distraction from the main message about police brutality. And she didn't sound particularly angry about it. She just signed it like this always happens and you know, it was very dismissive of it.

Mark Baumgarten: [00:40:47] Hmm. So, what does this all mean for the anti-racism movement and for Carmen best?

Lilly Fowler: [00:40:55] Well, I think that the clergy got their message out, I think Best is more secure in her position. But I think it also raises some pretty serious questions about where exactly, how this is going to move forward. There are city council members who have said they agree with the call to, to defund police, but is it going to get messy if more and more people jump in and say, well, I don't know. I don't know if we agree with that.

And if that's the case and where do we, how do we compromise on that and how do we move forward? So it'll be interesting to see what happens in the, in the next few months.

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