Search Results for: Republican

The Racist and Sexist T-Shirts of an Inauguration

The StrangerLongreads has teamed up with The Stranger’s Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover, along with photographer Nate Gowdy, to cover the presidential inauguration and protests. Below, the latest dispatch from Brownstone in D.C.

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Donald Trump has just been sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I’m sitting at a Bolt Burger in Washington, D.C., watching the inauguration ceremony post-mortem play on several flatscreen TVs. A friend is sitting across from me. Her eyes are wide and wet. We have no words.

Last night I watched Trump signs burn at a protest outside the National Press Club, where leaders of the alt-right, a loose conglomeration of people who seek to make racism, xenophobia, and misogyny cool and current, were attending something called the Deploraball. Several hundred protesters were outside the event waving antifascist signs. One protester, a young white man in a black bandana, elbowed his way past me and said, “It was better when there were less media people here.” He didn’t speak for every protester, but I couldn’t help but think that the people attending the Deploraball might agree with him.

Earlier in the evening, Heidi Groover and I wandered down the National Mall, where Trump supporters were listening to Toby Keith. The walk between the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with enormous screens echoing Fox News’ Trumpian propaganda. I stopped to bum a cigarette from a guy who was having an argument about feminism with a protester who was broadcasting the interaction on Facebook Live. This man told me that 70 percent of domestic violence attacks are perpetrated by women against men. I asked him for his source. He showed me something called “Newscastmedia.com,” and I told him that wasn’t credible. When the man asked for my sources on rape and domestic violence, I e-mailed him three reports from the CDC, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the DOJ’s Violence Against Women Survey. He told me he would read them later, then told me that more women are at risk of being raped because they are not strong enough to fight off men.

Later that night I threw on a dress and a blazer and attended a Young Republicans MAGA ball at Ultrabar. Wealthy young people in ball gowns sipped cocktails and rubbed their bodies against one another. The DJ played Beyoncé. An ambitious 21-year-old told me I was cute. I told him I was a reporter. Trump wasn’t his first choice, he said, but he thought America should give him a chance. I went outside to go bum another cigarette. I got one from a young man with a fashy haircut and an interesting pin showing a “Y” inside an inverted triangle. When I Googled this image later, I found out that it was called the “Dragon’s Eye,” an ancient Germanic symbol depicting the battle between good and evil.

Outside the Bolt Burger, I can hear a group of roughly 50 protesters being arrested, one by one, after being kettled into a street corner by dozens upon dozens of officers of the Metropolitan Police Department. Tear gas has been used, and the protest is growing. When I last saw them, they were holding up a sign that read, “Make Racists Afraid Again.”

But the racists are not afraid in DC this week. At Trump’s Tody Keith concert, one man wore a t-shirt reading “Blacks Make Racial Slurs & Commit Hate Crimes Too!!” The misogynists are not afraid, either. They are buying leftover RNC kitsch that reads “Trump That Bitch!” and plowing through crowds of young queer kids protesting outside security checkpoints. These people are the ones in power now.

‘We Need to Have A Voice In This America, Too’

The StrangerLongreads has teamed up with The Stranger’s Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover, along with photographer Nate Gowdy, to cover the presidential inauguration and protests. Below, the latest dispatch from Brownstone in D.C.

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When Kimball Allen and Scott Wells married in October, Seattle band Prom Queen serenaded the couple with a David Bowie cover song as they walked down the aisle. Later, during the reception held at Portland’s Jupiter Hotel, Washington state senator Marko Liias recited the text of Obergefell vs. Hodges, the 2015 US Supreme Court decision that legalized Allen and Wells’ right to marry in the first place. “It was magical,” Allen remembers. The couple thought about their future, about adopting or fostering children. The election was still a month away, and Allen and Wells were hopeful Hillary Clinton would win.

But just a month after the wedding, Allen and Wells’ sense of hope plummeted. The election went to Trump and his notoriously homophobic vice president-elect, Mike Pence. The newly married couple realized that a Trump appointee to the Supreme Court could reverse their hard-won rights. Allen started having trouble sleeping at night. The couple fought.

These had not been problems before. Read more…

‘We Have to Resist’: A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit

Photo by Adrian Mendoza

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | December 2016 | 10 minutes (2,632 words)

 

It is difficult to define Rebecca Solnit. Is she an historian, a cultural theorist, a journalist, an activist? She cites reserved intellectuals like John Berger and Lawrence Weschler as influences, and she is also on the front lines of protest: she was an outspoken proponent of Occupy Wall Street; she was in Standing Rock, at the Dakota Access Pipeline, where protestors recently gained an unexpected victory; and she co-founded the Stop Trump project, which ideologically resists the U.S. President-Elect while uncovering the potential malfeasance that led to his election in the first place.

Born in Connecticut and educated at San Francisco State University and U.C. Berkeley, the 55-year-old has been an independent writer living in northern California since 1988. She’s authored seventeen books, ranging in topic from art to politics to geography to community to feminism. She won the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she’s currently a contributing editor at Harper’s, where she writes the bimonthly Easy Chair column.

Her essay “Hope in the Dark,” which she gave away as a free ebook after Trump was elected, was written twelve years ago as an instructive piece on what went wrong with the Iraq War protests. Its relevance resurged after Trump was elected.

I spoke with Solnit about reclaiming the notion that political protest works, understanding the role of hope, the lessons of Hilary Clinton’s defeat, not ceding resistance, and whether Trump was even elected president at all.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Political Analysis

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in political analysis.

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Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.

The Trouble With the Liberal Arguments Against Third-Party Voters—and What to Do About It (Josie Duffy Rice, The Daily Kos)

I got tired of reading about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016, especially when most pieces could be lumped in the For or Against piles. But Josie Duffy consistently managed to make me think and feel not just what I hadn’t thought or felt, but what I tried to avoid thinking and feeling. Her piece, “The Trouble With Liberal Argument Against 3rd Party Candidates …” is amazing in its scope. Josie is easily one of the most amazing young long-form essayists in the country. In between evocatively presenting autobiography and political analysis, she dropped three sentences that made music out of American Presidential noise. “Listen,” she wrote, “I am a firm believer that in a country like America you should vote for your opponent. Who do you want to fight against for the next eight years? Who do you want to push left?” The piece, like most of Josie’s writing, welcomes us in, cares for us and asks everything of us when we leave. I can’t share this piece enough. Read more…

J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America

Longreads Pick

“No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.”

Published: Nov 17, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,297 words)

What Comes Next: Confronting a Post-Election America

Like you, perhaps, I am in mourning for something that could have been. As a queer, non-binary person, I have received numerous inquiries about my well-being from friends and colleagues; I am simultaneously reckoning with the privilege my whiteness affords me. I am functioning—I go to work, I eat meals, I take most of my medications, I even go to bed on time—but I feel dead inside. Family members, former classmates and millions of people I’ve never met have written off my existence, as well as the rights of women, disabled people and people of color, and the safety of Muslims, Jews and immigrants. This week’s reading list is dedicated to those marginalized voices. Some of these stories were written in the wake of this year’s election; others came before. I hope you read these and feel if not heartened, then more determined than ever to protest evil, protect marginalized communities/yourselves and share your lived experiences. Read more…

On Wisconsin

Longreads Pick

In the wake of the Presidential election, it’s fitting to highlight this evergreen personal essay from the literary magazine Witness. In it, one man meditates on his home state, a cold place where a distrustful, resistant tribalism intersects with a history of early progressivism, harkening back to a time “when the Republican Party was on the side of the righteous” and to an unjust shooting.

Source: Witness
Published: Jan 1, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,098 words)

An Uncomfortable Truth

Photo from Kheel Center, Cornell University (CC BY 2.0).

Instead of seeking aggressive racial-equality initiatives, Democrats too often have opted for a sort of trickle-down liberalism. If we work to strengthen unions, that will trickle down to you. If we work to strengthen health care, that will trickle down to you. If we work to make all schools better, that will trickle down to you. After decades of Democratic loyalty, too many black Americans are still awaiting that trickle…

Since first securing the right to vote, black Americans have had to be single-issue voters — and that single issue is basic citizenship rights. Maintaining these rights will always and forever transcend any other issue. And so black Americans can never jump ship to a party they understand as trying to erode the hard-fought rights black citizens have died to secure.

But it is also true that black Americans have not always been single-party voters, and they don’t have to remain so. If Democrats want to keep black voters, they need to work for those votes, because one day Republicans might wise up.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nikole Hannah-Jones explores the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s appeals to black voters — noting that he’s “speaking more directly about the particular struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the government should help them more than any presidential candidate in years” — and calls on the Democratic Party to stop taking black support for granted.

Read the story

King-Killers in America (and the American Who Avenged the King)

Cromwell before the Coffin of Charles I, Paul Delaroche, 1849. Via Wikiart.

Michael Walsh & Don Jordan | The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History | Pegasus Books | August 2016 | 26 minutes (6,559 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The King’s Revenge, by Michael Walsh and Don Jordan. The story takes place in the wake of the English Civil War, fought between the Parliamentarians (“Roundheads”), who favored limitations on the king’s power and had the support of radical Protestant religious minorities (such as Puritans), and the Royalists (“Cavaliers”), who were loyal to the throne and were mostly members of the Church of England.  In 1649, the victorious Roundheads tried and executed the king, Charles I. After the coronation of his son Charles II in 1661, known as the Great Restoration, Charles launched a global manhunt for the 59 judges who signed his father’s death warrant, as well as the court officials who tried the case, collectively known as the “regicides.”

Many of the regicides fled to other countries, and below we found out what happened to those who fled to America, as well as to those were pursued by an American in Europe. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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If what he had done against the King were to be done again, he would do it again.

The spring of 1661 was significant not only for the crowning of the king. Hitherto Charles had paid little attention to the capture of regicides abroad, but that was about to change. As carpenters sweated over the erection of those magnificent coronation arches with their dual themes of royal triumph and revenge, Charles unleashed his bloodhounds in America and Europe. Two royalists set out from Boston to lead a hunt across New England for Whalley and Goffe, and the most ruthless operator in the king’s service was drafted in to spearhead a search across Europe for Ludlow and the other nineteen regicides who had escaped in 1660.

The American manhunt was launched on May 6 by John Endecott, governor of Massachusetts. Endecott had received an arrest order from the king which, dispensing with flowery courtesies, had been brutally curt:

Trusty and well-beloved,

We greet you well. We being given to understand that Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe, who stand here convicted for the execrable murder of our Royal Father, of glorious memory, are lately arrived at New England, where they hope to shroud themselves securely from the justice of our laws; our will and pleasure is, and we do hereby expressly require and command you forthwith upon the receipt of these our letters, to cause both the said persons to be apprehended, and with the first opportunity sent over hither under a strict care, to receive according to their demerits. We are confident of your readiness and diligence to perform your duty; and so bid you farewell.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo via Flickr/ amylovesyah

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…