895 Médecins Sans Frontières engaged in People-Smuggling

Médecins Sans Frontières engaged in People-Smuggling

Newsletter published on 16 December 2016

(1) Médecins Sans Frontières engaged in People-Smuggling
(2) Marine Le Pen making the French Establishment nervous, but experts
say she won't win
(3) White Population dying in Swing States of US
(4) Thanksgiving: ISO Trots campaign to undo White conquest
(5) Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning - United American Indians Of
New England
(6) Trots defeated anti-Immigrant law in 2005. "No Human Being is
Ilegal" banner
(7) Trots plan Student Walkout on Trump Inauguration Day! AGAINST
BIGOTRY & HATE
(8) War on White Privilege? what about Jewish Privilege?

(1) Médecins Sans Frontières engaged in People-Smuggling
From: chris lancenet <chrislancenet@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2016
03:08:24 +0900 Subject: Something Strange Is Taking Place In The
Mediterranean | Zero Hedge

Médecins Sans Frontières engaged in People-Smuggling

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-04/something-strange-taking-place-mediterranean

NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale

For two months, using marinetraffic.com, we have been monitoring the
movements of ships owned by a couple of NGOs, and, using data from
data.unhcr.org. We have kept track of the daily arrivals of African
immigrants in Italy. It turned out we were witness of a big scam and an
illegal human traffic operation.

NGOs, smugglers, the mafia in cahoots with the European Union have
shipped thousands of illegals into Europe under the pretext of rescuing
people, assisted by the Italian coast guard which coordinated their
activities.

Human traffickers  contact the Italian coast guard in advance to receive
support and to pick up their dubious cargo. NGO ships are directed to
the "rescue spot" even as those to be rescued are still in Libya. The 15
ships that we observed are owned or leased by NGOs have regularly been
seen to leave their Italian ports, head south, stop short of reaching
the Libyan coast, pick up their human cargo, and take course back 260
miles to Italy even though the  port of Zarzis in Tunis is just 60 mile
away from the rescue spot.

The organizations in question are: MOAS, Jugend Rettet, Stichting
Bootvluchting, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Proactiva
Open Arms, Sea-Watch.org, Sea-Eye and Life Boat.

The real intention of the people behind the NGOs is not clear. Their
motive can be money, we would not be surprised if it turned out to be
so. They may also be politically driven; the activities of the
Malta-based organisation, MOAS, by trafficking people to Italy is the
best guarantee that migrants will not show up on the Maltese shore. MOAS
is managed by an Maltese Marine officer well known in Malta for his
maltreatment of refugees 1). It is also possible that these
organisations are managed by naive "do-gooders" who do not understand
that offering their services they are acting like a magnet to the people
from Africa and thus they are willy-nilly causing more fatalities, not
to mention that their actions are destabilizing Europe.

How high-minded the intentions of these organisations might be, their
actions are criminal as most of these migrants are not eligible for
being granted asylum and will end up on the streets of Rome or Paris and
undermine Europe stability raising racially motivated social tensions.

Brussels has created particular legislature to protect people
traffickers against prosecution. In a dedicated section of an EU
resolution entitled On Search and Rescue, the text states that "private
ship masters and non-governmental organisations who assist in sea
rescues in the Mediterranean Sea should not risk punishment for
providing such assistance."2)

During the two months of our observation, we have monitored at least
39,000 Africans illegally smuggled into Italy, which was done with the
full consent of the Italian and European authorities.

* * *

Ships permanently used by NGOs off the Libyan coast

  The Phoenix is one of the two MOAS vessels. The ship is regularly
spotted in the territorial waters of Libya. It is registered in Belize,
South America. However, the ship is owned and operated by the Maltese to
bring the immigrants to Italia. Website: MOAS

  The Topaz Responder, a 51-meter custom-made emergency response vessel,
which hosts two high-speed rescue launches. The ship is managed in
combination with MSF. This is one of the three ferries that can
transport hundreds of people at one go. The ship is registered at the
Marshall Islands. Website: MOAS

Iuventa is registered under the flag of the Netherlands and owned by the
German NGO Jugend Rettet. Website: Jugend Rettet.

  The Golfo Azzurro is used by the Dutch ‘Boat Refugee Foundation’.
Golfo Azzurro operates under the Panama flag. The Boat Refugee
Foundation charters the vessel for a symbolic price. Website:
Bootvluchteling.

Dignity 1 is registered under the flag of Panama. We believe the ship
belongs to Médecins Sans Frontières. Website: MSF.

  The Bourbon Argos, a ship of Médecins Sans Frontières. It is one of
the three ships used to ferry people from the smaller vessels to Italy.
The vessel is currently registered under the flag of Luxembourg.  MSF.

  The  Aquarius is one of the many ships managed by Médecins Sans
Frontières. It is registered under the flag of Gibraltar. Website: MSF.

  The Vos Hestia search and rescue ship, chartered by the charity Save
The Children, like many of the NGO vessels it is under the supervision
of the Italian Coast Guard Website: Save the Children.

  Proactiva Open Arms operates the Astral. We spotted the Astral many
times in Libyan territorial waters. The ship disappeared on a regular
basis from the AIS tracking websites. Website: Proactiva Open Arms.

  The MS Sea-Watch I is owned by a Berlin-based organisation. It works
closely with Watch The Med, a transnational network of people that fight
against the European border regime, and demand a free and safe passage
to Europe. Website: Sea-Watch.

  The MS Sea-Watch II is owned by a Berlin-based organisation. It works
closely with Watch The Med a transnational network of people that fight
against the European border regime, and they demand a free and safe
passage to Europe. Website: Sea-Watch.

   The Audur is registered under the Netherlands’ flag. We do not know
to whom this ship belongs.

The MS Sea-Eye is owned by Sea-Eye-eV. Michael Buschheuer from
Regensburg, Germany, and a group of family and friends founded the
non-profit sea rescue organisation Sea-Eye e.V. Website: Sea-Eye. The
Speedy is a speedboat owned by Sea-Eye-eV. The ship is confiscated by
the Libyan government. Website: Sea-Eye.

Minden is owned by the German organisation LifeBoat. The vessel is
currently registered under the flag of Germany. Website: Lifeboat.

(2) Marine Le Pen making the French Establishment nervous, but experts
say she won't win
From: chris lancenet <chrislancenet@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2016
15:18:01 +0900 Subject: Marine Le Pen Profile: Front National Leader
Making France Nervous |  New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/120556/marine-le-pen-profile-front-national-leader-making-france-nervous

Marine Le Pen Is Making the French Establishment Extremely Nervous

The right-wing leader has become one of the country's most popular
politicians

BY CHARLES BREMNER

December 14, 2014

On a rainy November morning, dockers from Calais are firing flares in
protest against port job losses outside the regional council in Lille,
the capital of France’s old industrial north. Inside the plush chamber,
a tall, solidly built blonde woman in jeans and boots crooks a leg over
her knee and flicks through a news magazine. Marine Le Pen, leader of
the Front National, which has 18 council seats, has dropped in from a
day at the European Parliament in nearby Brussels, where the party has
23 MEPs. Le Pen looks bored as the councillors drone on about allocating
€1.1 billion of EU money to help revive the bleak economy of
Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

When her moment comes, she launches into a riff on the evils of the
Union. EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and
impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, she
says. "I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European
money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through
Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe."
With that, the terror of the French political establishment picks up her
papers, closes her beige wool jacket and slips out to a car for the
drive back to Paris, missing the council’s splendid lunch. So it goes
for Le Pen as she tills the fertile electoral soil of the north as the
prelude to a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

France has been frightening itself with visions of a President Le Pen
since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the
far-right Front, landed in the run-off for the presidency. He was
roundly defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied in a "republican
front" to block the leader of a pariah party. Now, with his pugnacious
daughter in charge of the family firm, the prospects of an anti-Front
reflex are dimmer and Marine’s prospects look bright.

The country is in a foul mood. The sense of dispossession at the hands
of a hostile world is feeding contempt for la France d’en haut—the
governing caste. President François Hollande and his Parti Socialiste
(PS) have been disowned by many of their disappointed voters,
discredited by scandal and economic failure. Civil war is tearing apart
the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the center-right opposition
whose leadership is about to be reclaimed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former
president.

Marine Le Pen, 46, the youngest of the 86-year-old patriarch’s three
daughters, is gliding above this desolate landscape, a protective, Joan
of Arc-like warrior in the eyes of her followers. The blunt-spoken Le
Pen fille remains divisive. More than six out of ten people do not trust
her to run the country, according to an October poll. But she ranks as
one of France’s most popular politicians, with a 46 percent approval
rating, after managing to shed much of the racist stigma that made her
father unelectable since she became the party’s leader in 2011. After
four decades as an uncivilized stain on the electoral landscape the
revamped Front is on the brink of the mainstream. As Manuel Valls, the
French prime minister, put it in a wake-up call to his bedraggled PS in
September: "The Front National is at the gates of power."

In the spring, the "de-demonized" Front won the biggest score of any
party in the European elections and took control of a dozen electoral
areas, including the towns of Béziers and Fréjus and the seventh
arrondissement of Marseilles. It also won in Hénin-Beaumont, a run-down
rust-belt town 20 miles south of Lille, which has become the shop window
for Front administration and the base for Le Pen’s battle for the north.

Her plan goes like this. Under an Hollande reform, Nord-Pas-de-Calais,
one of the 22 regions of metropolitan France, is to be merged next year
with Picardy, creating a super-region of six million people under a
planned shrinkage to 13 new administrations. The Front has long been
popular in the north, which is at the top of its arc of strongholds
extending south-east through Alsace-Lorraine to the Mediterranean coast.
Le Pen won 23 percent of the northern presidential vote in 2012 and came
just behind Sarkozy. With its new creed of defending the dispossessed,
the Front may manage to take Nord-Picardy in elections late next year
and that would put Le Pen within credible reach of the Élysée in 2017.

This scenario is not wishful thinking. It was put to me by Le Pen’s
chief local adversary. Daniel Percheron, the Socialist who has presided
over the north for 14 years, thinks that Le Pen can win the super-region
despite her part-time presence. "From that moment, we will be facing a
presidential election of a new kind. She will have a new credibility, a
legitimacy that has never existed for the far right in France,"
Percheron said. A typical provincial baron, the 72-year-old senator
sighed as he acknowledged Le Pen’s skill at winning over his own
clientele. Old taboos against the far right have fallen, he said.
"Left-wing voters are crossing the red line because they think that
salvation from their plight is embodied by Madame Le Pen. They say ‘no’
to a world that seems hard, globalized, implacable. These are
working-class people, pensioners, office workers who say, ‘We don’t want
this capitalism and competition in a world where Europe is losing its
leadership.’ "

Le Pen, whom I have interviewed several times, going back to 2003, is
amused by the left’s indignation over the way that she has broadened her
attraction, softening the anti-immigration rhetoric and adding Socialist
voters to the party’s hard-right faithful. When we last talked at
length, in November 2013 in Le Carré, the party’s seat in Nanterre, a
western suburb of Paris, she mentioned that Charles de Gaulle—whom she
admires—was accused of being both a fascist and a Bolshevik.

In her husky smoker’s voice (she quit tobacco two years ago and now
vapotes with electronic cigarettes) she said: "France is neither on the
right nor the left—it’s just France . . . I don’t have the feeling that
I tell patriots on the left different things from what I say to patriots
of the right."

Physically imposing, caustic, and never letting her guard drop, Le Pen
is an uncanny chip off the old granite block as she expounds her harsh,
France-first creed. The armor was already in place when I first visited
her 11 years ago. Back then, she was the party’s young legal counsel and
was being groomed by her father for leadership.

She became hardened early because, as a Le Pen, she was always an
outsider, she told me. She was the "daughter of the monster," as she put
it, growing up in the comfort of Montretout, the mansion at Saint-Cloud
bequeathed to her Breton-born father by a party supporter in the late
1970s. When she was eight, a bomb had destroyed the family flat and she
had felt no sympathy from anyone. No one was arrested for the crime.

There were years of Jean-Marie’s constant absences, and humiliation as a
teenager when Pierrette, her mother, posed naked for Playboy. That was
an act of revenge in a feud with her husband after she walked out on
him, abandoning her daughters to set up home with a journalist. During
Marine’s twenties, there came the paternal banishment of Marie-Caroline,
the eldest of the three Le Pen daughters, after her husband defected to
Bruno Mégret, a Front lieutenant who mounted an abortive takeover of the
movement.

The wayward Marie-Caroline has never been accepted back into the fold
but Pierrette was given a home on the Montretout estate, in the same
complex as Marine, and until recently she helped take care of Marine’s
three teenage children. Jean-Marie lives nearby with Jeanne-Marie
("Jany"), his second wife.

Le Pen scoffs at talk of a dynasty but she is the heiress to the family
enterprise that sprang from the murky pool of nostalgists for Vichy
France and French Algeria that Jean-Marie, a former trouble-making MP
and paratrooper, hammered together in 1972.

And as Marine Le Pen enters middle age, a younger generation is now
emerging, in the shape of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 24, one of the Front’s
three MPs, who is the daughter of Yann, Marine’s second sister. Perky
and articulate beyond her years, Marion is already a star. She is said
to be closer to the patriarch than Marine because she shares her
grandfather’s uncompromising beliefs, opposing gay marriage, for
example, while Marine tolerates it.

Also helping keep power in the family is Louis Aliot, one of the party’s
five vice-presidents, Marine’s domestic partner—and her paid assistant
in the European Parliament. A rugby-playing lawyer and Front militant
from Toulouse, Aliot got together with Le Pen after she divorced, first
from Franck Chauffroy, a businessman, and then from Éric Lorio, a former
Front official and councillor in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

The Front’s old guard dislike the way that she has "de-demonized" the
party, down to details such as banning leather jackets and requiring
blazers among the personnel. But Le Pen has imposed her authority since
her election as party leader nearly four years ago and scored well in
the 2012 presidential race. She has distanced herself from the father
who still admires the wartime occupation and she disowns him openly when
he reverts to the old sulfur, as he did this summer when he suggested
that disease was a remedy for African immigration to France. "Monsieur
Ebola can solve the problem in three months," he said.

He has also taken issue with Marine’s plans for rebranding the party,
with the aim of dropping the "Front" label, which conjures up brown
shirts and stiff-armed salutes. "Only bankrupt companies change their
names. That would be betraying the militants who built the movement,"
Jean-Marie said this month.

Tension between father and daughter reached a peak in August after one
of his dogs killed Arthemys, her cat, on the Montretout estate. She
moved out with Aliot and her three children and they now live in a
closed community in nearby La Celle Saint-Cloud.

Yet Le Pen père, who continues to stir trouble as the honorary Front
president, is proud of the daughter whom he acknowledges neglecting as a
child. "Marine is more shy, less warm, less sentimental than me,
perhaps. She is my daughter all the same," he told Serge Moati, a
documentary-maker. "People have tried to break the tie between Marine
and me but they don’t manage to." His daughter has an independent mind
but she is refusing to "follow the rule of killing the father," he added.

A Parisian bourgeoise, child of the 1980s, Le Pen defends her father,
though she has jettisoned his retro obsessions with the Second World
War, the colonies, and race that have landed him multiple court
convictions for hate speech. On 20 November, the Paris Appeal Court
fined him €5,000 for a pun it deemed a racist insult against the Roma.
He had said that, "like birds, they steal naturally." The French for
steal (voler) is also the verb for "to fly."

Yet, for all Marine Le Pen’s feminine stamp on dad’s nasty party,
hostility to immigration remains her stock-in-trade. She has merely
shifted the ground, focusing on radical Islam rather than race, lumping
together the Muslim immigrant presence and the assault on the nation
that is supposedly waged from Brussels by free trade. She says that
France is finally waking up to the ruin wreaked by immigration, the
euro, and the removal of internal EU frontiers. The country needs to
reclaim its monetary and territorial sovereignty, she told me.

"Before the total opening of frontiers with the EU, France was a trading
nation and rather more so than today . . . From the moment that they put
in place the convergence criteria for the euro, our exports collapsed
and our imports collapsed. With control of our frontiers, we will just
be like 95 percent of the countries of the world."

This goes down well in milieux where people would never have
acknowledged sympathy for the old man. "Marine talks sense," is a line
you hear in suburban cafés and workplaces whenever the conversation gets
around to la crise, the sense of decline that has hung over French life
for decades. Saying "I’m with Marine" is easier than voicing admiration
for the Front. Blurring lines, the daughter talks less of the Front than
her Rassemblement Bleu Marine—"the navy blue rally," a flag under which
her candidates run in local election campaigns.

Middle-class sympathizers liken the FN movement to the U.S. Republican
Tea Party, Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party and the readership of
the Daily Mail, yet she is not there yet. The old stigma dies hard.
Farage has refused to ally his Ukip MEPs—the other big anti-EU bloc in
Strasbourg—with Le Pen’s because of what he calls the Front’s racist
DNA. The differences do not stop at the past. Le Pen’s lurch to
anti-capitalist populism is the opposite of Farage’s freebooting market
ideas. Les Anglo-Saxons are the adversary in the Le Pen universe, while
Putin’s Russia is her favored model. If only France had a patriotic
leader who stood up for the nation like Vladimir, she says.

Farage’s rejection upsets Le Pen, but she makes no excuses for refusing
to conform to the more civilized manner that, to some, can make him seem
unthreatening. "I’ve had long talks with Nigel Farage," she told me when
she was still courting him. "But his Ukip is a young movement which is
suffering the same strong demonization that is applied to everyone that
opposes the EU. He is not tough enough yet to resist the demonization."

Le Pen’s task is to turn her insurgency into a machine that could
plausibly govern. She says she is ready to become prime minister in
"cohabitation" with Hollande if he dissolves parliament and the Front
wins a majority. She is alone among the party leaders in demanding
dissolution, which she says is needed because the most unpopular
administration in modern French history has lost public trust. She
voices admiration for David Cameron’s promise of an in-out referendum on
EU membership, and says that within six months a Prime Minister Le Pen
would hold a vote to tell Brussels (as she put it in an interview with
Europe 1 radio in October): "Either you reform and you give us back our
sovereignty and independence over the currency, or I will propose that
France leaves the Union."

There is little chance of any such thing, given that Hollande has no
need to call elections that would be suicidal, and that the Front would
have little hope of winning because of the eliminating power of the
two-round electoral system and the party’s thin structure. It would need
to jump from three MPs to the 200 or so required to secure a working
majority. But Le Pen is out to remedy the weakness. Where Jean-Marie
never tried to move beyond a protest movement, she and her entourage in
Nanterre are weaving networks of activists, anointing candidates,
courting business leaders and senior civil servants, and trying to win
respectability with the thinking classes.

The work at ground level is being waged by Front stars such as Steeve
Briois, a 42-year-old who triumphed in March in Hénin-Beaumont, Le Pen’s
northern perch, winning the mayoral seat in the first electoral round.
Few local people have a bad thing to say about Briois, who is greeted
with cheers when he wanders the streets of red-brick terraces and drops
in to the market square to chat like any French mayor.

"He’s a nice guy. La Fête de la Musique was great this year, thanks to
Steeve," said Dorothée, a shopkeeper, referring to the popular Midsummer
Night party associated with the Socialists since the government invented
it in the 1980s.

To clean up the town’s finances, which had been run into the ground by a
sleaze-ridden PS council, Briois brought in as his deputy Jean-Richard
Sulzer, 67, a Paris University economist and veteran Front policymaker.
"It’s excellent being able to put our ideas into practice," Sulzer told
me. "It shows people we can run a clean shop."

A long-time oddity in the academic world because of his Front role,
Sulzer insisted that many colleagues are rallying to the cause. "A
substantial number of teachers are going to vote for the Front. They
won’t admit it. It’s a perfectly hidden vote but our network of
intellectuals is spreading rapidly," he said.

The party’s chief asset on the intellectual side is Florian Philippot, a
33-year-old who hails from the civil service elite and who is, in
effect, Le Pen’s deputy. A disciple of de Gaulle—a figure abhorred by
Jean-Marie and the old guard—Philippot is shaping Le Pen’s new doctrines
of shoring up the welfare state and defending the poor.

The crossover from "brown to red" is vital for her fortunes. She is
doing an excellent job capturing les petits blancs—the dispossessed
white inhabitants of the suburbs and small towns—says Pascal Bruckner, a
star essayist from the post-1968 era. "The genius of the Front is the
way it has taken over the values abandoned by a left that converted to
multiculturalism," he said on television recently. The Front is offering
old-fashioned certainties, a lurch back to the imagined golden age of
the mid-20th century. This was the era of the "Trente Glorieuses," the
30 years of growth that are the stuff of fashionable nostalgia,
reflected in retro pop songs, comedies set in the 1960s, and above all
by Le Suicide français, a new, bestselling rant against the evils of
modern France by Éric Zemmour, a right-wing essayist.

Le Pen is subliminally promising a return to this imagined golden age
that ran up to the mid-1970s. She is forecasting a surge to three to
four percent economic growth simply from stopping immigration, slapping
tariffs on imports, and leaving the euro. Her contempt for Sarkozy,
Hollande, and what she calls the discredited political classes goes down
well. "They have failed. They are bankrupt," she told a radio phone-in
in mid-November. "They didn’t react for decades when our sovereignty
passed into the hands of the European Union and we became a vast
playground for the multinationals."

It is perhaps easy to be carried away by the specter of President
Marine. As implausible as it seemed until lately, the big parties are
taking the prospect seriously. L’Express news magazine recently
published a cover report explaining "Why the worst is possible." It
quoted Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, saying that her victory
could no longer be excluded. It is expected that Le Pen will reach the
run-off for the presidency in 2017. A recent Ifop poll showed her
topping the vote or coming second to the UMP in a notional first-round
presidential vote. In all hypotheses, she would relegate Hollande or any
other Socialist to third place. Her most redoubtable adversary at the
moment would be Alain Juppé, the UMP elder statesman, a former prime
minister who is nearly 70. He is eclipsing Sarkozy’s attempted comeback,
according to Ifop.

Yet it is unlikely that Le Pen will be able to pull it off. Some calm
analysis comes from Jean-Yves Camus, an academic authority on the Front.
"If her opponent in the second round is Sarkozy, he wins the match
easily, and if it is Juppé or anyone else from the UMP, they will still
beat Marine Le Pen," Camus told me. We are back to the matter of the
so-called anti-Le Pen Republican Front. "The question is, if a left-wing
candidate reaches the second round, will UMP voters back the Socialist
to block Le Pen?"

He thinks that, for all the sympathy on the right for Le Pen, they will
flinch from putting her in the palace. "They may back the Front locally,
but in a presidential election the question is whether it has the
capacity to run the country. The Front does not have the elite necessary
to take the controls of the state. It’s as simple as that."

Le Pen has done a solid job harnessing the nation’s discontent, Camus
agrees. "But it’s not very difficult, given the toxic atmosphere that
reigns in French politics and the colossal errors being made by her
opponents. Marine Le Pen has only to stay in her armchair and watch the
news."

This piece was originally written for the New Statesman.

(3) White Population dying in Swing States of US
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-02/hillary-supporters-get-welcome-news-study-confirms-white-population-dying-fast-key-s

Hillary Supporters Get Welcome News As Study Confirms White Population
Dying Off Fast In Key Swing States

by Tyler Durden

Dec 2, 2016 8:00 PM

Disaffected Hillary snowflakes at colleges and universities all around
the country, many of whom surely cried themselves to sleep last night,
woke up this morning to some of the best news they've received in weeks.
  According to a new study by the University of New Hampshire Carsey
School of Public Policy, white people are dying off faster than ever in
the U.S.  Moreover, the biggest declines are coming in key swing states
like FL and PA.  Even better, the study expects the "natural decrease"
of whites to accelerate in the future.

     In 2014, deaths among non-Hispanic whites exceeded births in more
states than at any time in U.S. history. Seventeen states, home to 121
million residents or roughly 38 percent of the U.S. population, had more
deaths than births among non-Hispanic whites (hereafter referred to as
whites) in 2014, compared to just four in 2004. When births fail to keep
pace with deaths, a region is said to have a "natural decrease" in
population, which can only be offset by migration gains. In twelve of
the seventeen states with white natural decreases, the white population
diminished overall between 2013 and 2014.

     This research is the first to examine the growing incidence of
white natural decrease among U.S. states and to consider its policy
implications. Our analysis of the demographic factors that cause white
natural decrease suggests that the pace is likely to pick up in the future.

Here are some of the the "Key Findings" from the study:

NH

At the national level, the White birth-to-death ratio has been shrinking
aggressively since the "great recession" started in 2008. By the time
2014 rolled around the rate had declined to near parity. Researchers
attribute the trends to "declining fertility due to the Great Recession"
and an aging baby boomer population.

     Over the last several decades, demographers have noted the growing
incidence of natural decrease in the United States. More widespread
natural decrease results from declining fertility due to the Great
Recession, and the aging of the large baby boom cohorts born between
1946 and 1964. This senior population is projected to expand from nearly
15 percent of the total population in 2015 to nearly 24 percent in 2060.
  Much of this aging baby boom population is white, and so white
mortality is growing. Together, growing white mortality and the
diminishing number of white births increase the likelihood of more white
natural decrease.

NH

Meanwhile, white populations in the key swing states of FL and PA have
been shrinking for years while NV and AZ also joined the club in 2010
and 2012, respectively.

NH

And while white populations are declining the Southwest and Northeast,
the Midwest populations are still growing...but no real problem there as
those are Republican strongholds anyway.

     White natural decrease states are widely dispersed, with clusters
in the South, West, and Northeast regions. States with minimal white
natural increase are also widely distributed, though they are often in
close proximity to the natural-decrease states. States with high natural
increase are concentrated in the Mountain West and the West North
Central regions but also include Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, and Virginia.

NH

So it's not all bad news for democrats...if Hillary can hold out for a
couple more election cycles, and suppress her "pneumonia" flare ups, she
may just be unbeatable.

(4) Thanksgiving: ISO Trots campaign to undo White conquest

https://socialistworker.org/2016/11/24/was-america-ever-great

Was America ever great?

The myths about Thanksgiving are alive and well--but as Brian Ward and
Alan Maass write, so is the history of resistance to violence and
oppression.

Brian Ward and Alan Maass

November 24, 2016

The aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890The aftermath of
the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890

IT'S THAT time of year, when many people will flock to family homes for
the Thanksgiving holiday. And this year more than others, there will be
some uncomfortable dinner conversations about the new president-elect.

Donald Trump ran for president promising to "Make America great
again"--which begs the question that Thanksgiving has always raised
about the real history of the U.S.: Was America great before?

The grade school story about Thanksgiving is that it marks a joint
celebration of the Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621. According to
the legend, the Native tribe that welcomed a band of Europeans fleeing
religious persecution and taught them how to survive in their new
surroundings gathered for a feast to give thanks that the newcomers made
it through their first winter.

But of course, waves of European settlers later returned the thanks by
simply slaughtering the Indigenous people who got in their way. When the
settlers rebelled against control by England, they established a new
nation that eventually spread across the North American continent,
expelling the Native peoples at every turn.

Thus, many Native Americans come to Plymouth, Massachusetts, every year
to mark the holiday with a Day of Mourning to remember those who were
lost due to European settlement.

Now, with the era of Trump about to begin, the frightening question many
people will ask today is: Who will suffer to make America great this
time? Thanksgiving reminds us that the U.S. has a bloody history, but we
also know that the suffering and violence continues to this day.  - - -

BUT THERE is another side to America's history: resistance.

A smaller number of people--with much larger numbers across the country
supporting them--will spend Thanksgiving and the days afterward
celebrating that part of history when they travel to Standing Rock in
North Dakota to participate in the struggle to defend Indigenous rights
and to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

These delegations are arriving at a crucial moment. The builders of the
pipeline, led by the corporation Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), are
attempting to crush the protests that have stood in their way all year
so they meet construction deadlines before winter sets in.

In the latest escalation of violence on November 20, police and company
security moved in against a peaceful group of protesters trying to clear
a public bridge, firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, and
drenching the protesters with water from fire hoses, despite the frigid
temperatures. More than 100 people were insured in the police attack,
some of them very seriously.

Meanwhile, pressure is building on Barack Obama to take action before
Trump can take over, and stop the project from being finished. The
administration could shut down construction by deny permits necessary to
extend the pipeline over the Missouri River.

The struggle at Standing Rock is a reminder that that colonial
encroachment and the breaking of treaties with Indigenous Nations are
still very much with us. The DAPL project has sparked a historic level
of Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock Indian Reservation to protest
a project that could poison water for Native peoples and many others
downstream, and destroy sacred lands.

Thousands of people, Native and non-Native, have traveled to Standing
Rock to stand against DAPL, and there has been a rising wave of
solidarity protests and actions around the country.

The response of authorities in North Dakota and nationally has been very
much in keeping with history--Morton County police have arrested more
than 400 people for protesting the pipeline, and federal judges have
mostly denied the legal protests against DAPL.  - - -

THERE'S SOMETHING else to remember about Thanksgiving that stands in
stark contrast to the world according to Donald Trump.

The Pilgrims, after all, were refugees fleeing England in search for a
better life where they didn't suffer persecution because of their
religious beliefs. These early refugees were taken in and protected by
the Indigenous population of New England.

But to Trump, refugees are a threat. From the start of his presidential
campaign, he used xenophobic and racist stereotypes against people
fleeing Syria and other war-torn countries. In particular, Trump
promised to bar Muslims from coming to the U.S., claiming that this
would protect the U.S. from terrorism.

Republican governors jumped on the same bandwagon last year and declared
that they would refuse to allow refugees into their states, though they
have no legal authority to do this. Though Barack Obama and the
Democrats paid lip service to accepting refugees, the U.S. has taken in
the pathetically low number of 10,000 Syrian refugees.

The contradictions of America's founding myths were reinforced during
Trump's campaign. Out of one side of his mouth, he claimed that America
was a great country, dedicated to freedom and opportunity. Out of the
other, he spewed hateful rhetoric about refugees being terrorists and
Mexican immigrants being "rapists." The candidate who claimed he would
help out ordinary people took in $100,000 in donations from a top
executive of ETP, the company building the DAPL on Lakota land.

This Thanksgiving, we should reflect on this history and recognize that
America has never been great in the way that Trump means.

The history of the U.S. has a lot in common with the reactionary agenda
that Trump has pushed. It is bloody and violent, and filled with the
vilification and scapegoating of immigrants and refugees, whether they
were Italian, Irish, Mexican, Syrian or Chinese. We are told that this
is the "land of the free"--but the country was built on stolen
Indigenous land and the labor of millions of slaves.

But resistance to these crimes has always been a part of U.S. history,
as well. Refugees and immigrants demanded to be treated with humanity.
Slaves struggled against bondage and inspired and abolitionist movement
that finally won their freedom. Indigenous people have always fought
oppression.

As Trump continues to fill his administration with one right-wing bigot
after another, it's clearer than ever who he wants to "Make America
great again" for, and how--unless we have something to say about it.
Today, we should mourn those who fought and lost to European settlers,
but we also should be thankful for the brave water protectors at
Standing Rock and those out in the streets organizing against Trump's
presidency.

(5) Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning - United American Indians Of
New England
http://uaine.org/

United American Indians Of New England

We Are Not Vanishing.

We Are Not Conquered.

We Are As Strong As Ever.

National Day of Mourning

Since 1970, Native Americans and our supporters have gathered at noon on
Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the
US thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the
arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is
a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of
Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants
in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of
Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and
spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression
which Native Americans continue to experience.

47th National Day of Mourning: November 24, 2016 [...]

Thanksgiving: A National Day of Mourning for Indians, 1998

by Moonanum James and Mahtowin Munro

Every year since 1970, United American Indians of New England have
organized the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth at noon on
Thanksgiving Day. Every year, hundreds of Native people and our
supporters from all four directions join us. Every year, including this
year, Native people from throughout the Americas will speak the truth
about our history and about current issues and struggles we are involved in.

Why do hundreds of people stand out in the cold rather than sit home
eating turkey and watching football? Do we have something against a
harvest festival?

Of course not. But Thanksgiving in this country -- and in particular in
Plymouth --is much more than a harvest home festival. It is a
celebration of the pilgrim mythology.

According to this mythology, the pilgrims arrived, the Native people fed
them and welcomed them, the Indians promptly faded into the background,
and everyone lived happily ever after.

The truth is a sharp contrast to that mythology.

The pilgrims are glorified and mythologized because the circumstances of
the first English-speaking colony in Jamestown were frankly too ugly
(for example, they turned to cannibalism to survive) to hold up as an
effective national myth. The pilgrims did not find an empty land any
more than Columbus "discovered" anything. Every inch of this land is
Indian land. The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims)
did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in
Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced
sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class
system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they
arrived on Cape Cod -- before they even made it to Plymouth -- was to
rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians'
winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry. They
were no better than any other group of Europeans when it came to their
treatment of the Indigenous peoples here. And no, they did not even land
at that sacred shrine called Plymouth Rock, a monument to racism and
oppression which we are proud to say we buried in 1995.

The first official "Day of Thanksgiving" was proclaimed in 1637 by
Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from
the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Connecticut to
participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men.

About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful
European strangers would not have survived their first several years in
"New England" were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people. What Native
people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our lands, and
never-ending repression. We are treated either as quaint relics from the
past, or are, to most people, virtually invisible.

When we dare to stand up for our rights, we are considered unreasonable.
When we speak the truth about the history of the European invasion, we
are often told to "go back where we came from." Our roots are right
here. They do not extend across any ocean.

National Day of Mourning began in 1970 when a Wampanoag man, Wamsutta
Frank James, was asked to speak at a state dinner celebrating the 350th
anniversary of the pilgrim landing. He refused to speak false words in
praise of the white man for bringing civilization to us poor heathens.
Native people from throughout the Americas came to Plymouth, where they
mourned their forebears who had been sold into slavery, burned alive,
massacred, cheated, and mistreated since the arrival of the Pilgrims in
1620.

But the commemoration of National Day of Mourning goes far beyond the
circumstances of 1970.

Can we give thanks as we remember Native political prisoner Leonard
Peltier, who was framed up by the FBI and has been falsely imprisoned
since 1976? Despite mountains of evidence exonerating Peltier and the
proven misconduct of federal prosecutors and the FBI, Peltier has been
denied a new trial. Bill Clinton apparently does not feel that
particular pain and has refused to grant clemency to this innocent man.

To Native people, the case of Peltier is one more ordeal in a litany of
wrongdoings committed by the U.S. government against us. While the media
in New England present images of the "Pequot miracle" in Connecticut,
the vast majority of Native people continue to live in the most abysmal
poverty.

Can we give thanks for the fact that, on many reservations, unemployment
rates surpass fifty percent? Our life expectancies are much lower, our
infant mortality and teen suicide rates much higher, than those of white
Americans. Racist stereotypes of Native people, such as those
perpetuated by the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, and countless
local and national sports teams, persist. Every single one of the more
than 350 treaties that Native nations signed has been broken by the U.S.
government. The bipartisan budget cuts have severely reduced educational
opportunities for Native youth and the development of new housing on
reservations, and have caused cause deadly cutbacks in health-care and
other necessary services.

Are we to give thanks for being treated as unwelcome in our own country?

Or perhaps we are expected to give thanks for the war that is being
waged by the Mexican government against Indigenous peoples there, with
the military aid of the U.S. in the form of helicopters and other
equipment? When the descendants of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca flee to the
U.S., the descendants of the wash-ashore pilgrims term them 'illegal
aliens" and hunt them down.

We object to the "Pilgrim Progress" parade and to what goes on in
Plymouth because they are making millions of tourist dollars every year
from the false pilgrim mythology. That money is being made off the backs
of our slaughtered indigenous ancestors.

Increasing numbers of people are seeking alternatives to such holidays
as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. They are coming to the conclusion
that, if we are ever to achieve some sense of community, we must first
face the truth about the history of this country and the toll that
history has taken on the lives of millions of Indigenous, Black, Latino,
Asian, and poor and working class white people.

The myth of Thanksgiving, served up with dollops of European superiority
and manifest destiny, just does not work for many people in this
country. As Malcolm X once said about the African-American experience in
America, "We did not land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us."
Exactly.

info@uaine.org

(6) Trots defeated anti-Immigrant law in 2005. "No Human Being is
Ilegal" banner

http://www.socialistalternative.org/2016/11/17/trump-targets-immigrants/

Trump Targets Immigrants – Lessons of 2006 Movement

Published On November 17, 2016

By Erin Brightwell

Attacking immigrant workers with vile racist language and the promise to
build a wall along the border were mainstays of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Now Trump is threatening to ramp up mass deportations in his first 100
days in office. His "Contract With the American Voter" states:

         Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.         Begin
removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the
country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.
         Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting
cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will
be considered "extreme vetting."

In addition, Trump has threatened to cancel the DACA program which Obama
brought in to remove the threat of deportation from 750,000 who came to
the U.S. as small children.

This is not the first time the right has gone on all-out assault on
immigrants. In 2005, during George W. Bush’s administration, "The Border
Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005"
(H.R. 4437) was passed by the Republican-dominated House of
Representatives. This infamous legislation contained a host of vicious,
reactionary measures aimed at immigrants, including militarizing the
border, criminalizing undocumented immigrants and anyone who helped
them, and building a border wall. A true mass movement arose in
opposition and succeeded in making it politically impossible for H.R.
4437 to become law. A look back at how this struggle developed is
relevant to the movement that will need to be built in the coming months
to fight Trump.

In the spring of 2006, a powerful mood of anger at H.R. 4437 galvanized
millions into mass demonstrations in cities all over the country. Some
of the biggest marches in April were counted in the hundreds of
thousands, and two million marched on an April 10 nationwide day of
action. Large immigrant organizations, the Catholic Church, and Spanish
radio DJs were involved in organizing and leading the actions, but these
organizations were surprised by the size of the response from
working-class Latino communities.

As the movement developed, it became more radical and went beyond
calling for repeal of H.R. 4437 to rejecting the second-class status
being proposed by corporate politicians backing "immigration reform" and
demanding immediate legal status for all workers. At this point, the
movement had moved well beyond what was acceptable to the Democratic
Party, the alleged defender of immigrants’ rights.

When a call was made for a one-day nationwide strike and boycott, dubbed
the "Day Without Immigrants," the more conservative elements of the
leadership of the movement, as well as Democratic politicians tried to
put on the brakes.

Despite the campaign that was waged against the idea of a strike, May 1,
2006 was a historic day and an awe-inspiring success for the movement of
immigrant workers. Millions joined marches in large cities and small
towns across the country, including an estimated 400,000 in both Los
Angeles and Chicago. Hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and
paralysed important sections of the economy in many areas and the port
of Los Angeles was shut down. In building and carrying out the first
national political strike in many decades, the immigrant rights’
movement revived May Day in the U.S. as the international day for workers.

The mass movement of 2006 not only stopped H.R. 4437 but also helped to
push back anti-immigrant attitudes in society. It did not, however,
succeed in winning "equal rights for all workers" which was one of its
key demands. Crucially, the wider native-born working class did not take
action in support of the movement despite the sympathy of many. This
allowed the ruling class to isolate, wear down, and ultimately savagely
repress the movement – particularly through targeted Gestapo-like mass
deportations of Latino workers who were unionizing, as in the
meatpacking industry.

Today, after eight years of Obama promising reform but simultaneously
raising deportations to previously unseen levels, immigrant communities
are facing the possibility of a severe increase in repression with
Trump’s election. The president-elect’s plan on immigration echoes much
of H.R. 4437. Like the House Republicans of 2005, Trump seeks to attack
immigrant workers to divert anger from the failure of capitalism to
provide decent jobs for million of working-class people.

This time, Trump must be met by mass resistance in which the labor
movement plays a decisive role alongside all of the other people
targeted by his vile agenda. People of color, women, LGBT people,
immigrants, and all working people and youth face extraordinary dangers
from a Republican-controlled congress and a Trump presidency. Only the
maximum unity and the willingness to use a range of tactics including
mass civil disobedience and strike action will be able to stop Trump.
There can be absolutely no reliance on the Democratic Party or any
section of the corporate establishment. The Democrats, as in 2005, will
be opposed to the only strategy that will work: mass mobilizations of
working people. But, if our movements succeed in dealing a decisive
defeat to Trump on this key part of his agenda, we can force him on the
defensive and cripple the right-wing onslaught.

(7) Trots plan Student Walkout on Trump Inauguration Day! AGAINST
BIGOTRY & HATE

http://www.socialistalternative.org/2016/11/17/student-walkout-trump-inauguration-day/

Student Walkout on Trump Inauguration Day!

Published On November 17, 2016

NATIONAL STUDENT WALKOUT AGAINST BIGOTRY & HATE

SocialistStudents.net

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are preparing to unleash a storm
of attacks on women, immigrants, the Muslim community, LGBTQ people,
workers, and the environment. We must stand together in solidarity
against Trump’s attempts to divide us!

A huge national student strike will send a clear message to Trump, the
billionaire class, and the Republican Party that we reject their agenda
of bigotry, hate, and division; that we reject their corporate policies
to gut our social services and education.

Already we have seen the beginning of a mass fightback against Trump,
with hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets after the election.
But we can’t stop there, more will be needed to stand up and fight back
against the onslaught of right-wing hate and corporate greed.

It’s clear we cannot rely on the political establishment or corporate
politicians to fight Trump – it’s on us. That’s why high school and
college students across the country are walking out of class on January
20, Trump’s inauguration day, to demand with one united voice:

No deportations of undocumented immigrants!

Black Lives Matter! End police brutality and mass incarceration!

Unite against Islamophobia!

Fight Trump’s sexism! Defend and extend reproductive rights!

Tax the rich! Make college free &amp; cancel student debt!

Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline — Green jobs now! — #NoDAPL

Fight discrimination and violence against the LGBTQ community!

(8) War on White Privilege? what about Jewish Privilege?

http://www.unz.com/plee/is-america-ready-for-a-war-on-white-privilege/

Is America Ready for a War on White Privilege?

Peter Lee

December 2, 2016

In my opinion, all political campaigns are identity based. Shaking the
money tree to the tune of $1 billion + it now takes to run a national
campaign demands access to big money, deference to capital, and a
willingness to promote political loyalties on the basis of identity, not
class. George Soros is not going to underwrite an anti-plutocrat
jacquerie marching on Washington.

Post-election there has been a lot of defensive bleating by mainstream
Dems that they did not run an identity politics campaign i.e. one that
trafficked primarily in ethnic/gender allegiances to attract voters.

There is considerable spittle devoting to rebutting the idea that
Clintonism was Vote Your Vag + African American tactical voting.
"Issues, ability, and values brought the voters to Clinton" is the refrain.

The campaign spin was that Clinton, a tired pol with more baggage than
an Indian passenger train– and who had interrupted her self-declared
mission as champion of the oppressed for a resume-polishing stint as
warmonger at the State Department–was Jesus in a pantsuit and the
primary task of her campaign would be restraining the American public
from skipping the election and making her president by acclamation.

Judging by the immortal exchange at Harvard between Kellyanne Conway and
Jennifer Palmieri ("’I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,’
Palmieri said, her voice shaking" per NPR. Well, Wish. Granted.) it
looks like the Clinton campaign had partaken intemperately of its own
Kool-Aid.

Trouble is, Clinton was an establishment pol promoting a rather murky
elitist and globalist agenda that pushed zero nationalist and populist
buttons. She was the candidate of the 1% and she needed help of some of
the 99% to push her across the electoral finish line. She and her
handlers chose identity, not soak-the-rich faux populism as her path to
the White House.

Clinton’s strategists eventually chose identity-lite for the general
election campaign, targeting voters whose idea of heaven is attending
continuous performances of Hamilton for the rest of eternity, instead of
unambiguously throwing out red meat to the blocs she was targeting to
elect her.

Coulda worked. Shoulda worked. Except Clinton was a clumsy campaigner
with a less than galvanizing message. Trump, a talented carny barker,
ran his much narrower identity politics campaign as an outsider,
igniting the bonfire of white anxiety and stoking it to white heat. And,
pending the outcome of the recounts, he did good enough to win.

Unsurprisingly, the Democratic Hamiltonians hang their hats on the
coulda/should/mighta/might still.

This comes up a lot, complete with torrents of spicy rhetorical lava,
when Sandernistas play the class card and claim their guy wudda won with
a class-based appeal that would have lured a decisive number of white
males into the Democratic camp.

Prudence might dictate looking at Sanders’ socialism-lite as a way to
advantageously slice and dice the white electoral gristle.

Inside the Democratic Party at this moment, however, vitriol carries the
day as champions of the "woke" coalition—energized by African-Americans
who, with the endorsement of John Lewis, placed all their eggs in the
Clinton basket—point the finger of blame at everybody and anyone but
themselves for failing to deliver the "Expect Us" rainbow triumph, and
furiously resist Sandernista white "class" outreach.

Problematically, repudiation of the Sandernista claim involves tarring
both Sanders and the voters he was targeting as irredeemable, despicable
racists who would have been deaf to any principled class-based appeal.

This kind of flamethrowing works OK if you won the election; but if
you’ve lost, and find it necessary to dismiss almost half of the
electorate as either Nazis or deluded fellow travelers—and sustain
eye-bulging outrage for the duration of Trump’s administration– it
creates a certain awkwardness.

It’s also identity politics. You can call it "identity politics by
default: they started it!" but it’s basically "Admirables" vs.
"Deplorables". Unity is derided as appeasement and the political
dynamics are being driven toward increased polarization by a combination
of money, self-interest, hurt pride, conviction, and calculation.
Judging by my Twitter timeline, not an infallible indicator I’ll admit,
defining and running against the Trump Republican Party as bigoted scum
is seen by some activists as a winning strategy as well as a moral
imperative.

Sooner or later, the Democratic Party is going to have to decide whether
an overt anti-white-male-racist posture is going to deliver the winning
combination of advantageous demographics, fired-up base, and big-money
support. 2018 (mid-terms) or 2020 (presidential)? Or maybe sometime later?

In other words…

When will the War on White Privilege be fought?

Well, it was already roadtested during the primaries. Hillary Clinton’s
surrogates used it to eviscerate Bernie Sanders in the southern states,
and POC activists still use it to deny Sandernistas a spot at the DNC
strategy table/feeding trough.

White privilege issues took a dirt nap during the general, when avoiding
the alienation of white voters nationwide took precedence over nailing
down black Democratic support during the crucial southern primaries.

But I saw inklings of it back in June, when John Lewis organized a
sit-in of Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives to
protest Republican inaction on gun control following the Pulse nightclub
massacre.

Lewis was attempting to amplify the call President Barack Obama made for
gun control legislation in his eulogy for Reverend Clement Pinckney, one
of eight people, all African-Americans, massacred in a church in
Charleston. Obama framed the Charleston killings as a tragedy but also a
catharsis, one that would bridge racial divides and unite Americans in a
shared abhorrence of gun violence.

     None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations
overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says we have
to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race. There’s no
shortcut. And we don’t need more talk. (Applause.) None of us should
believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every
tragedy. It will not.

     But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood
for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable
silence again.

The political conditions were deemed to be ripe, since demographic and
electoral shifts had forced the NRA in a deep, virtually monogamous
relationship with the Republican Party and allowed the Democrats to
seize the moral and political high ground as both national unifiers and
gun control advocates.

The opportunity to amplify African American social and political
aspirations through the broader issue of gun control was, I expect, seen
as attractive both by African American and Democratic political strategists.

At Slate, Jamelle Bouie laid out the thinking:

     [N]either [Pelosi] nor her caucus has to cater to vulnerable
Democrats in the rural South or West. The kinds of voters Democrats once
tried to attract by shying away from gun politics are Republicans now.
And Democrats don’t believe they need to reach out to them. The
politics, they argue, have turned… this past week is the clearest
possible evidence that we’re watching a new kind of Democratic Party,
one in which a young black representative from Brooklyn named Hakeem
Jeffries, speaking shortly before midnight, invokes Martin Luther King
and Bull Connor in a call-and-response with his colleagues. One that’s
changing.

The GOP, at least in the eyes of liberal critics, had in contrast
committed itself irrevocably to serving as the party of the white as the
Democrats scooped up the rest of the rainbow.

This understanding—that the Democrats were already on the winning side
in the identity politics contest—perhaps provided the pretext for
officially dismissing the overt influence of identity politics
considerations and focus on ladling out Clinton pap in the general
election instead.

Beyond the predictable exploitation of the Republicans’ slavish devotion
to the agenda of the NRA, there was an interesting kulturkampf subtext:
that the dead hand of white conservative America was holding back the
real America by its domination of institutions like the US Congress,
which is pretty much lily-white.

In fact, a rather compelling case was made that, thanks to the vital
alliance between the NRA and conservative Republicans, collateral damage
of the effort to maintain GOP dominance was the unnecessary deaths of
thousands of Americans due to gun violence.

Or as Bill Moyers put it:

     Once again the Republican leaders of Congress have been revealed
for what they are: useful stooges of the gun merchants who would sell to
anyone — from the mentally ill to a terrorist-in-waiting to a lurking
mass murderer. And the Republican Party once again has shown itself an
enabler of death, the enemy of life, a threat to the republic itself.

Human decency as well as American progress, therefore, would dictate
that these old white guys and their reactionary and self-serving agenda
get booted from office and letting a new team dedicated to pushing
America forward instead of holding it back take over.

It was a seductive narrative of what I like to call "White
Twilight/Black Dawn!" It exploited the rhetoric of
intersectionality—shared experience of oppression as a defining
political identity—to permit the African American community, as the
prime wronged American ethnic bloc, to claim a position of moral and
political leadership.

Of course, white privilege is sustained not only by racist domination of
powerful institutions, but also by white votes, and direct
confrontations with white political power, particularly on behalf of
African Americans who compose only 14% of the US electorate, tend not to
go well, particularly in national elections.

African American activists’ ambitions to punch above their weight are
increasingly hampered by their limited demographic clout and also by
perceptions that their political strength has plateaued and the growing
Hispanic demographic component will displace African Americans in the
party league tables and hearts of political planners. Hence the
obsession with the "intersectional" force-multiplier narrative.

Add to that disturbing expressions of black militancy surrounding the
shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, and I think a
conscious decision was made by Clinton strategists in the summer of 2016
to soft-pedal racially-inflected attacks on white privilege (like Occupy
stunts in Congress led by black male politicians!) and go with the
positive but apparently fatally mushy "rainbow coalition" alignment
(hugging black moms + Hamilton!).

The electoral results were not pretty. Now the question is, rethink or
double-down on race-inflected Democratic identity politics?

Is there a political future in an open, polarizing political campaign
against conservative whites founded on the idea that they must surrender
control of the public institutions they currently dominate?

Let it be said I am a believer in the fact of white privilege, as well
as its beneficiary.

There is a special circle in Unzworld Comment Section Hell devoted to
flambéing folks who don’t understand that, far from reveling in unearned
privilege, Caucasians are not enjoying anywhere near the advantages
merited by their genetic and cultural endowments. Well, fire up the barbie.

But…just for the sake of argument…let’s assume that the idea that
pruning the white deadwood becomes a top priority for political
activists. How would that work?

Pretty well, I think.

The big story over the next thirty five years is the inexorable decline
of the white vote from majority to plurality. That kind of demographic
trend is bloody chum in the political shark tank.

Some day some opportunistic and charismatic pol is going to stand up and
sell the message that it’s time for the old whites to step aside and
give the young people of color their shot.

Political happenstance will dictate, I think, how much racial justice
and social progress we get, and how much co-option and corruption. And I
have a feeling that Hispanic as well as white factors will continue to
marginalize black political clout.

But it’s not too early to think about what the war on white privilege
might entail, and what choices might be made. (Reprinted from China
Matters by permission of author or representative)