Tuesday Reads: Angry Women Unite!
Posted: July 16, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: angry women, Donald Trump, misogyny, Racism, rape culture rape kits 51 Comments
Jean Léon Gérôme, Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896
Good Morning!!
For months now, I’ve been feeling depressed and discouraged by the damage Trump is doing to our politics and our country. This morning I woke up and realized what I really am is angry, enraged, and pissed off! This has to end. Angry women must rise up and take back our country from the racist white supremacist in the White House, his GOP enablers, and his Russian troll army, and the white male-controlled media that is too fearful to call out his lies and racism.
Two angry women fighting back with intellect and direct action:
https://twitter.com/kimlockhartga/status/1150902159124389889
https://twitter.com/veejaysai/status/1150834313832722437
An angry woman in Montana stood up to on-line racist trolls and won. Buzzfeed News: A Judge Ruled A Neo-Nazi Blogger Should Pay $14 Million To A Woman Targeted In A Racist “Troll Storm.”
A federal judge ruled more than $14 million should be awarded to a woman who was barraged with anti-Semitic and threatening messages online after a neo-Nazi blogger instructed his followers to target her and her family with a “troll storm.”
The ruling was handed down Monday against Andrew Anglin, a white supremacist and publisher of the website The Daily Stormer.
In his decision, judge Jeremiah Lynch found that Anglin “acted with actual malice” when he told followers: “Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO – it’s time, fam.”
Elisabetta Sirani, Timoclea Killing Her Rapist, 1659
What followed were a series of racist and sometimes threatening messages to Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh, her co-workers, and her family, including her 12-year-old son.
The recommended ruling against Anglin included more than $200,000 for lost earnings and medical expenses incurred by Gersh, $821,000 for future lost earnings, and $3 million for past and future pain and suffering.
The bulk of the judgment, however, was the state maximum of $10 million in punitive damages against the white supremacist for what the judge called “particularly egregious and reprehensible” behavior and to “punish Anglin and deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future.”
I’m so angry today, because we have been battered by days of racist tweets and racist language spewed by the monster who is occupying the people’s White House. He is not my president and I will never call him that. I so agree with what Rep. Ayanna Pressley said about him:
“I never use the word you used — president — to describe him,” she said. “I refer to him as ‘the occupant.’ He simply occupies the space. He embodies zero of the qualities and the principles, the responsibility, the grace, the integrity, the compassion, of someone who would truly embody that office. It’s just another day in the world under this administration.”
At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer addresses Trump’s racism: Trump Tells America What Kind of Nationalist He Is.
On Sunday morning, the president told four members of Congress to “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” The remark, a racist taunt with a historic pedigree, inspired a flurry of fact-checking from mainstream journalists who were quick to note that Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar are American citizens, and that only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia. It was a rather remarkable exercise in missing the point.
Angry Bee Girl, Karin Bolstad
When Trump told these women to “go back,” he was not making a factual claim about where they were born. He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American. This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.
After telling minority members of Congress to go back to where they “came from,” Trump today accused the women of “foul language & racist hatred.” White nationalists in the United States have always asserted that they are, in fact, the true victims of racial hatred, even as they’ve demanded the exclusion of nonwhites from the polity. When the Confederacy was shattered, its partisans launched a propaganda campaign rewriting the origin of their rebellion as the defense of individual freedom rather than property in man. The Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction with terrorism and violence portrayed themselves as the victims of Negro tyranny, and as the historian Jonathan Sokol has written, when de jure segregation unraveled in the South in the 1960s, white southerners “began to picture the American government as the fascist, and the white southerner as the victim.”
Read the rest at The Atlantic.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1620)
As a reminder, here is The New York Times’ recently updated compilation of Trump’s long racist history: Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List, Updated, by David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick.
More reads on Trump’s racism:
George Conway at The Washington Post: Trump is a racist president.
David Remnick at The New Yorker: A Racist in the White House.
Michael Luo at The New Yorker: Trump’s Racist Tweets, and the Question of Who Belongs in America.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times: Racism Comes Out of the Closet. The dog whistle days are apparently over.
Trump’s racism enrages me, but you know what makes me just as angry? Rape culture. And Trump in the White House is a visible symbol of America’s misogynist history.
Barbara Bradley Haggerty at The Atlantic: An Epidemic of Disbelief. What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them.
Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.
It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.
As Spada wandered through the warehouse, he made another discovery, one that would help uncover a decades-long scandal, not just in Detroit but across the country. He noticed rows of steel shelving lined with white cardboard boxes, 10 inches tall and a foot wide, stacked six feet high. What are those? he asked a Detroit police officer who was accompanying him. Rape kits, the officer said.
Collage by Yasmin Diaz
“I’m assuming they’ve been tested?” Spada said.
“Oh, they’ve all been tested.”
Spada pulled out a box and peered inside. The containers were still sealed, indicating that the evidence had never been sent to a lab. He opened four more boxes: the same.
“I tried to do a quick calculation,” he later told me. “I came up with approximately 10,000.”
Spada’s estimate was conservative. Eventually 11,341 untested rape kits were found, some dating back more than 30 years—each one a hermetically sealed testament to the most terrifying minutes of a woman’s life, each one holding evidence that had been swabbed or plucked from the most private parts of her body. And in all likelihood, some microscopic part of her assailant—his DNA, his identity—sat in that kit as well.
Or kits.
That’s thousands of rapists whose DNA was on file, yet police never even tried to catch them. Many, went on to rape more women. Why? Because police still don’t believe women. Please go read this important article.
An angry woman academic and author speaks up at The Lily (h/t Delphyne): A female historian wrote a book. Two male historians went on NPR to talk about it. They never mentioned her name. It’s Sarah Milov.
Sarah Milov was sitting at her kitchen table, nursing her baby, when she saw the tweet.
“It took substantial government support to create Americans’ dependency on tobacco,” wroteNathan Daniel Beau Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “@edward_l_ayres and I talk with @jeremyhobson about the regulation of tobacco on this week’s @hereandnow.” Connolly ended the tweet with a “shout out” to Milov, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia whose forthcoming book, “The Cigarette: A Political History,” provided virtually all the material for the segment, which aired on Thursday.
Unfortunately, “Here & Now” — a radio show co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston, which is syndicated to approximately 5 million listeners — did not grant Milov the same courtesy. The three men on the segment, two historians and an NPR host, never mentioned Milov’s name or the name of her book.
“Every single word they said was from my book,” said Milov in an interview with The Lily. While the historians did not quote directly from “The Cigarette,” she said, every cited fact was taken from its pages. “Then I got to the end of a nearly 10-minute segment and did not hear myself credited at all.”
Read the rest at the link.
I’m so angry today. I know this post doesn’t make much sense, but it reflects my current state of mind. What’s going on with you today, Sky Dancers?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Why we need a serious, intelligent woman as our presidential candidate, not another old white man.
The Washington Post: Joe Biden: I’ll challenge Trump to do push-ups onstage if he makes fun of my age or mental state.
How about challenging him to speak in complete, coherent sentences and explain how the U.S. government works?
Two bald men fighting over a comb.
🤣🤣🤣
He also seems to think that mental state is determined by the ability to do pushups. (snort!)
From the rape-kit article above. Example of one repeat rapist who was allowed to go on for years.
They’ve known testing those backlogged kits would uncover repeat offenders for years now. And they’re still sitting there going to ruin in moldy warehouses.
I do not trust local law enforcement to protect me anymore than if I were a person of color.
I know. It’s horrifying, but I think it’s important to keep talking about it. One of Kamala Harris’ policies to to make sure all the rape kit backlogs are cleared.
This backlog of collected biologic samples is outrageous. Would evidence for any other crime be warehoused and not processed? I’m also pissed off that they’re called “rape kits.” They are evidence.
I totally agree. I saw Harris’ announcement yesterday to process ALL OF THEM immediately. Her prosecutorial background is a great asset although apparently it is offsetting to some in the AA community.
I’d like to see her replace Barr as AG. I think we’re gonna end up with Biden/Warren on the ticket….{sigh}.
Good Goddess. You better not be right! I’ll be taking the first alien spaceship out of the galaxy.
Biden won’t last that long. And Warren would never sign on with him after their violent disagreements about the bankruptcy bill.
BB – I hope you are right. I had forgotten about Warren’s disagreements with him. I wonder what Harris would do if it were him and he asked. He said he wants a woman on the ticket.
Gosh I so hope you are right and he flubs it again.
Wonderful post, BB – I join you in your fury about this system that promotes and protects racists and rapists. We Skydancing Furies may be the modern descendants of these ladies:
Thanks. I love that! It sounds a bit like Medusa.
I remember feminists wearing Medusa buttons to say, basically, ‘miss me with your patriarchal bullshit.’
The common thread is that they’re ombudswomen for the powerless against the powerful. We could really benefit from their return!
https://twitter.com/KYT_ThatsME/status/1150817099779960832
How far should Muslim women cover up/not cover up? As far as the men do. Not to reduce women to men but so the amount of clothing is considered unremarkable.
It is plainly disheartening to what is happening to America today.
Open racism. Sexual misconduct. Self dealing. Lack of experience of cabinet appointees. “Acceptable” lies. Mishandling of foreign affairs. “Packed” courts. Law breakers. Social indifference. Blatant corruption. Sheer ignorance. Allies as “enemies”. Enemies as “friends”. Chaos. Environmental rape. Absolute incoherence. Shameless conduct. Rampant evil. Distrust.
Under Trump we are becoming less of a democracy with each and every day. And unless the righteous voter manages to get out there in 2020 it will only get worse since those who can have refused to impede the progress this monster has created in turning this nation into a “monarchy”.
It is difficult to get beyond the sense of frustration our supposed leaders are failing to do. All we can do is weep at what we have become.
Well said.
Weep and fight back.
I was quite proud of the “Squad” yesterday.
They were cool, sober, serious, determined, adults.
They could not be easily ignored and demonizing them will be hard.
I really wish that Speaker Pelosi would begin an inquiry into impeachment simply on basis of the ever widening contempt of congressional oversight and the obstruction it entails.
He commits a fresh impeachable offense daily. Every time he tells someone that they can flout the rule of law on his say so.
His hubristic sycophants publicly confess their racism and sexism. Lindsay Graham proudly proclaiming how he’d be fine with people in detention being there for 400 days. Screaming that the Presidents enemies are communists.
Remember what Lt. Kaffee said about Col.Jessup, “I think he wants to say it. I think he’s pissed off that he’s gotta hide from this.” They are so excited that Pompous Magnate is dropping the dog whistle for a bull horn that they all want to do it too!
Fine. Lets let them vent in a forum where there are consequences.
Isn’t it funny how it is never “If you don’t like a woman’s right to choose GTFO! Or, “If you don’t like the social safety net GTFO!” You only really hear that kind of rhetoric attached to white nationalist propaganda and bluster. “If you don’t like racism, rape culture, unequal pay, lack of police accountability, homophobia and ogliarchy….GTFO!”
Let’s force them to defend that nonsense on the record in hearings.
If reminds me of the Epstein case, or Bill Cosby. They got away with it until they didn’t.
Let Trump big mouth “oops” moment be in a forum he can’t rig and can’t bully his way through.
They WANT to say, “We the Real (white male) Americans can do whatever we want and you blacks and browns and women and perverts and foreigners can stop us!”
Our damn problem is we have ethics. It would be so convenient if we could somehow make a country for the white nationalists and throw them back in there, with a nice wall around it to keep them in. Or if we could just lock them up in cages and toss a few space blankets in there.
Meanwhile Trump’s Dept of Justice [sic] isn’t filing charges against the cop who murdered Eric Garner.
Trump’s grandfather’s town definitely doesn’t want Trump back.
Send them to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
I wonder if MSM will give this the air time it so richly deserves.
We have light years to go. Adam Serwer, who is brilliant and whom I read every chance I get and whose heart is very much in the right place, can still, now, in 2019, write this:
“rewriting the origin of their rebellion as the defense of individual freedom rather than property in man.”
All he had to say was “rather than human property.” It even scans better. But no. To really stress the awfulness of slavery, the patriarchy we soak in says “man” is the stronger word.
Consciousness of the depth of the sex caste system is now at about the same level as the understanding of the race caste system was around 1850 in the US. Masses of people think it’s “natural.” Even bigger crowds think it’s too convenient to give up. And the small minority of abolitionists / suffragists is considered a kind of ridiculous bunch of dorks.
I’ll happily join the dorks.
Angry dorks!
Trump’s racist comments can be used against him in court as judges cite them to block policies
I forgot about that!
From another era — when “moderate Republican” truly meant moderate.
https://twitter.com/jonmladd/status/1151165275011780608
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_YM9cCtwz4&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0b0M8d_mae0BpOSf0NkJYMNup_w4I8-cYRaOzfzAhsIk28W30UBP71uv0
RFLMAO – You go Buzz! I love how his wife (I think it must be his wife) just calmly walks away.
Really these idiots could not be more disrespectful of the 100s of thousands of people who made those missions happen – the astronauts who died or almost died – astronauts who each and every one risked their lives for science and exploration.
And what has that Bible-thumping schmuck ever contributed I wonder.
She looks more like his daughter.
“U. K. Unable To Find Replacement Ambassador Who Does Not Think Trump Is An Idiot”
… imbecile … dolt … nitwit.
Andy Borowitz, “The New Yorker Magazine”, July 10, 2019
Ha! Satire, I know, but all too true.
The House on Wednesday voted to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt
Looks like Pelosi’s plan is to let the committees investigate and (I hope) so show the detailed reasons for impeachment.
Pelosi does not want an exonerated (Senate votes down impeachment House action), nor a martyred Trump.
I’m as impatient and disgusted by the slow pace as anyone, but I do respect Pelosi’s position.
It was one of the discussions here, I think, where the analogy came up: the Dump is like someone throwing a dead cat on the table and after that all anyone can talk about is the dead cat.
The Pelosi wing of Democrats responds to that by running investigations that are not televised and passing good bills that McConnell kills in the Senate and that nobody talks about.
This is not working.
The Dems need to have attention-grabbers bigger than the Dump’s but based on truth.
And they’re in luck. He provides reams of material to slam him with. Not just plain old torture in the service of some national illusion, which would be bad enough. Torture as a tactic in despicable race-based persecution. His history of rape. Money laundering. Mafia ties going back to his roots in Queens. Using Middle Eastern geopolitics for self-enrichment. Kowtowing to Putin. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
And instead of making sure that’s out there, every day, on television, on social media, making his dead cat look like minor garbage, what are the Dems doing?
Quietly doing their jobs without fanfare and hoping someone gets bored enough with the dead cats to notice. It’s kind of the way I live my life, so believe me, I’m an expert in how well it works.
It. Does. Not.
Dak, this comment of mine last night was put in moderation, for reasons i don’t understand. I’ll try again.
Pelosi does not want Trump to feel exonerated when a House resolution to impeach him passes and dies in the Senate. Nor does she want a martyred Trump who plays the victim for the next 16 months.
Agree that Pelosi is looking beyond the immediate feel-good moment of a House vote for impeachment to see the effect it would have after the Senate votes it down.
The investigations and hearings have barely gotten started. The House has started issuing subpoenas. I do think the House should step up their pace. Sure, already there’s an abundance of material out there which shows he’s a traitorous racist rapist mob boss money-laundering fraud. There are congresspeople and senators talking about the evidence. But the media has placed little focus on that information (though more than they used to).
About damn time.