Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won Saturday’s presidential primary in South Carolina, marking another win—and another notch against Bernie Sanders. CNN called the race for Clinton almost the moment that polls closed.
The former Secretary of State is projected to win a large share of the Palmetto State’s 53 delegates. The win comes after a similar one last week in Nevada.
According to ABC News, more black voters turned out to vote in South Carolina than in 2008, giving Clinton a major boost. Exit polls showed that 61 percent of voters in Saturday’s primary identified as black, with only about 35 percent saying they were white.
According to CNN, the Bernie Sanders issued a campaign congratulating Clinton, and adding that “we are not going to stop now,” referencing the upcoming primaries on Super Tuesday.
Early poll numbers show that Clinton crushed Sanders, especially when it came to black voters.
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While they might not conform to the classic look of our favorite chef’s knives, this Cuisinart Advantage knife set is anything but dull (get it?). You can own the whole collection today for just $15, an all-time low price
ExOfficio’s Give-N-Go boxer briefs were a finalist in our recent best men’s underwear Co-Op, and $15 is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen on them. That’s still pricey for a single pair of underwear, but reviewers say it’s worth it. Note: I’m currently seeing $15-$16 prices on white and black, but click around as prices and availability change frequently. [ExOfficio Men’s Give-N-Go Boxer Brief, $15-$16]
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What politician doesn’t jump at any chance he gets to call out the fallacy of white supremacists and the KKK? The same man who’s bolstered by their support, it seems.
Donald Trump, in his own words, does “not know enough” about the Ku Klux Klan and its former Grand Wizard, David Duke. Duke recently told his followers, “voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage.” When asked three separate times by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning to renounce the endorsement he’s received from Duke and other KKK supporters, Trump, in all earnestness, pretended he did not know about the KKK:
“I know nothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacists...I don’t know David Duke, I believe I never met him, and I just don’t know anything about him.”
But Donald Trump has spoken publicly about Duke and the KKK before. In an article published in The New York Times in 2000, acknowledged that Duke was a “Klansman” adding that he did not want to keep that type of company:
Mr. Trump painted a fairly dark picture of the Reform Party in his statement, noting the role of Mr. Buchanan, along with the roles of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Lenora Fulani, the former standard-bearer of the New Alliance Party and an advocate of Marxist-Leninist politics.
“The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani,” he said in his statement. “This is not company I wish to keep.”
It’s worth mentioning that Trump’s Twitter is continually filled with the musings of white supremacists, whom he broadcasts to his audience of 6 million. Just yesterday, he did it again.
Earlier this week, Trump also addressed Duke’s endorsement while being endorsed my another hated man. “I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke he endorsed me, OK? I disavow. OK?” Trump told a crowd, with as much sincerity as he could muster.
Is Donald Trump a fascist? Experts, historians, and pundits have debated the question for months. One thing has been certain for a while now: He tweets like one. That’s why, last year, Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg created a Twitter bot that would post quotes from the writings and speeches of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but with all of them attributed to businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. This morning, he retweeted that account.
Twitter is Trump’s preferred social media platform for direct communication with his followers, haters, and—most importantly—the journalists who obsessively cover his carnival-like presidential campaign. It’s where Trump goes to personally insult his enemies and opponents, but it’s also where he seeks evidence of his greatness, and regularly retweets (in his idiosyncratic style, quoting entire tweets rather than using the network’s built-in retweet tool) praise for himself.
Gawker internal chat log, November 30, 2015.
Last year, we set a trap for Trump. We came up with the idea for that Mussolini bot under the assumption that Trump would retweet just about anything, no matter how dubious or vile the source, as long as it sounded like praise for himself. (It helps that that a number of Mussolini’s quotes sound plausibly like lines from Trump’s myriad books.) The account, @ilduce2016, was created by Gawker senior writer Ashley Feinberg and Gawker Media Editorial Labs director Adam Pash. It has tweeted solely at Donald Trump, multiple times a day, since December 2015.
Our Fascist bot was anything but subtle. It was, after all, directly named after Mussolini. The New York Times today swiftly recognized that it was a parody account. At the time of the account’s creation, Gawker Media Executive Editor John Cook expressed some concern that the joke behind the account was far too obvious, and wouldn’t trick anyone but a complete idiot.
Today, Donald Trump proved him—and all of us—right.
Chris Christie’s desperate glomming-on to a presidential candidate he once called a “13-year-old” has not come without its consequences.
Namely, some of Chris Christie’s most ardent supporters have begun to turn on him, not unlike the way a pack of wolves will drive one member out out of the pack when food is scarce, creating the phenomenon of a “lone wolf.” That wolf is Christie, and he found his alpha in Donald Trump.
Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard and National Finance Co-Chair for Christie’s suspended presidential campaign, announced on Sunday that she opposed Christie’s endorsement of Trump, calling it “an astonishing display of political opportunism.” Whitman said in a statement:
“Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism. Donald Trump is unfit to be President. He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The Governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie’s donors and supporters to reject the Governor and Donald Trump outright. I believe they will. For some of us, principle and country still matter.”
Whitman and Christie have been close for a long time, and Christie even campaigned for Whitman during her failed bid to be California’s governor in 2010.
Many have speculated that Christie is throwing his support behind Trump in hopes of getting the vice presidential spot next to him. But if we asked Christie’s former self, a young man in 2010, the answer would be unequivocal:
U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her position as Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, announcing that she quit so that she can support Sen. Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee.
“As vice chairman of the DNC I am required to stay neutral in Democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are too high.”
Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, defended Sanders on foreign policy issues, saying he “will not waste precious lives and money on interventionist wars of regime change.” She was one of five vice chairs on the committee, has been a part of skirmishes among the other chairs regarding the scheduling of debates lately.
Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz accepted Gabbard’s resignation on Sunday.
“Luckily, I drank blood. If not, I’d be crazy, calling to prayer from the trees,” says Inong, a thin, old man in a knitted skull cap. “If you drink blood, you can do anything! Salty and sweet. Human blood.”
The seventy-two-year-old is the former leader of a village death squad in The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated documentary, a companion piece to his 2012 The Act of Killing about the 1965-66 political massacre in Indonesia. A number of the killers interviewed in The Look of Silence mention the same superstition—that drinking their victims’ blood kept them from going mad—an assertion suggestive not of cognitive dissonance so much as a cognitive concerto for sledgehammers.
As many as a million alleged Communists, perhaps more, were murdered by Inong and gangsters like him, at the secret direction of the military dictatorship led by Suharto. In the fifty years since, no one has ever been punished, and despite promises of human rights reform from the current regime there’s been, as yet, no widespread effort at a national reconciliation.
“Everything is safe now,” Inong says. “The past is past.”
He is talking to Adi Rukun, a soft-spoken North Sumatran optometrist, a youthful forty-five, clean-shaven and polite, who has been testing and fitting him for eyeglasses. In 1965 Rukun’s older brother Ramli, then the twenty-five-year-old leader of a farmers’ cooperative, was tortured, then kidnapped after his escape, tortured again, and finally killed by Inong and several others. In the end they cut off his penis, and threw him in the river.
The optometrist asks about the killings carefully, slowly, revealing his own identity a bit at a time as he works. Rukun will go on in the film to confront several of the men who participated in his brother’s murder, a number of whom have remained in power as local officials ever since.
“Something disturbs me,” Rukun says to Inong. It’s a lie, he says softly, that Communists have sex with each other’s wives; a lie that the people he killed had no religion. “It’s only propaganda to give religious people like you an excuse to kill.”
The old man seems to panic a bit, and then tries to brazen it out. “You’re talking politics again! It’s bad. Joshua! Stop filming!”
But Joshua doesn’t stop filming.
“The Act of Killing has been downloaded and shared tens of millions of times,” Oppenheimer, a compact, pale forty-one-year-old, told me during a recent Oscar press day at the production company’s plush Beverly Hills offices. “I don’t have the latest numbers, but it’s been... explosive. And The Look of Silence ought to go that way, too.” In Indonesia, both films are available to download for free, and it is not too much to say that they are having a palpable effect on the nation’s political conscience.
The director arrived in Indonesia in 2001 at the invitation of a union group, planning to make a film about workers at an oil-palm plantation who were dying, in their forties, of liver failure caused by continuous exposure to poisonous pesticides and herbicides. In response to the workers’ requests for protective clothing, the plantation’s Belgian owners paid a paramilitary organization—Pancasila Youth, the same group that had terrorized them and their families in 1965—to force them to drop their demands. And they did drop their demands, preferring to die rather than endanger their families. Oppenheimer met Adi Rukun and other human rights activists at this time and it was then that he committed himself to expose the hidden history of the massacre.
Despite its careful fidelity to Indonesian history, society, and culture, The Look of Silence may strike the Western viewer as “heroic” in its exposure of distant wrongs: Here’s a sophisticated Western artist, come to shine a light on injustice in a faraway land. But Oppenheimer rejects this view outright, explaining that the impetus for making both films came not from himself, but from Adi Rukun, his family, and the other Indonesian human rights activists with whom he ended up working for more than a decade. These films, he says, were made for Indonesians, and largely by Indonesians:
Adi’s family sent me to film these perpetrators. I was afraid to do it. I... I think they pushed me. They said, ‘Look, you’re here. You speak the language. You have to try.’ I went. I approached them.
And I found they were boastful. Adi’s family and the little community of survivors Adi had gathered to try and tell me their stories... they were waiting to see the material. I warned them it was going to be really tough... Many watched it, and [they said], ‘You must continue to film the perpetrators, because anyone who sees the way they’re talking will be forced to acknowledge that this genocide hasn’t ended, because we’re still living ... the perpetrators are still in power... Millions of people’s lives are still being diminished by fear.’
Gradually I gathered this crew of Indonesian human rights activists, filmmakers who wanted to be directly political, who felt it necessary—the lies are so bald-faced. They’re so grotesque.
Watching the initial footage convinced Adi Rukun that he had to confront the perpetrators himself. He thought that if they understood what they’d done, they would regret, and they would apologize. Finally, then, his community would begin to heal. At first Oppenheimer refused: it was far too dangerous, he said. But in time he came to agree, and then to help.
At the time of filming The Look of Silence, local authorities—including Ramli’s killers—already knew Oppenheimer as the director of The Act of Killing. Government officials who were superior to them in rank and power had approved the earlier project. This provided the cast and crew making the second film with a certain amount of protection, at least until the release of the first. Even so, Oppenheimer and his production team arranged in advance for the Rukun family to be able to leave the area at a moment’s notice—a getaway car was packed, and visas and permissions were ready to go in case anyone was threatened with harm. Part of the production budget went to the Rukuns’ relocation to a safe place far from North Sumatra in advance of the premiere of The Look of Silence in Venice in 2014.
The two films have sparked a worldwide reexamination of the massacre. The Act of Killing focused on Anwar Congo, a gangster who admitted to killing, with his own hands, more than a thousand men, women and children in 1965-66. Still-extant Indonesian institutions have held these murders to be necessary and heroic acts, but even so, Oppenheimer was shocked to find Congo and many other perpetrators of the atrocities positively eager to discuss their crimes. The Act of Killing invited them to reenact and dramatize their version of events, thereby drawing viewers into a dizzying morass of self-deceptions, fears, and fantasies; The Look of Silence takes the next step into a direct confrontation between victor and victim.
Oppenheimer sees himself as providing audiences not a revelation but a mirror.
“My films’ impact does not derive from the fact that they have opened the world’s eyes to impunity in Indonesia,” he says. “[Instead] there’s this uncomfortable moment of recognition, of resonance. A feeling of, ‘Oh, no.’ Because this is also us. In The Act of Killing, we’re brought so close to a man like Anwar Congo... you almost can physically feel him, that he’s human, and you feel ... ‘How am I like a perpetrator? How are we all like perpetrators?’ If only in the simple sense that we all do things all the time that we know are wrong—we’re forced to be complicit with things that we know are wrong.”
In other words, the most ordinary and everyday human denials, obfuscations, and dodges are recognizably like Anwar Congo’s, and it’s a shock to see them pressed into the service of sublimating the memories of a man who’d go see a gangster movie, and then cross the street from the movie theatre and walk upstairs to a nondescript cement rooftop, where he’d be “happy” to strangle a dozen people with wires (initially the victims were beaten to death, but that left too much blood and bad smells, so he and his associates developed a method of garrotting instead, an innovation he describes with evident pride). We watch as Congo, five decades later, is still drowning his terror and confusion in liquor, music, braggadocio, playing with his little grandsons—anything but having to face his own literal, and, as becomes evident in The Act Of Killing, inescapable, bad dreams.
Oppenheimer’s empathy can find rays of humanity to show us, even in a murderer, and conversely, it’s strange to realize that this young American man was able to persuade so many Indonesian killers to confide in him. But in the end it seems the depth of sympathy, understanding, and trust between Adi Rukun and Joshua Oppenheimer is what really made the films possible.
“So many human rights-related documentaries present a far-off problem as they explain the context,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s clearly a stranger’s-eye view. And part of that distance is often about saying, ‘Look at how terrible things are over there.’”
“Far away,” I say.
“Yeah, and the unspoken compact with the audience, which is escapist... I mean: Don’t you feel good about yourself for reading about this, or for watching this film? For taking out ninety minutes to watch this film, and see how terrible things are there. Convincing yourself that you care by watching this film,” Oppenheimer said.
“Absolving yourself.”
“And reminding yourself that you’re good. Exactly.”
A key scene in The Look of Silence takes place in a classroom of Indonesian twelve-year-olds, as they are indoctrinated in the official line regarding the killings. There are perhaps twenty uniformed sixth-graders—the boys in white short-sleeved shirts, the girls in gray hijabs, taught by an intensely focused man of about thirty. “Communists are cruel,” he says; “Communists don’t believe in God.” As the teacher warms to his theme, he begins to mime some of the Communists’ lurid crimes, poking a marker just a couple of inches from a boy’s eye. “Imagine how painful it would be if your eyes were gouged out! Their eyes were ripped out!” Several of the children are clearly distressed by the violent talk, including one whom we will discover to be Adi Rukun’s son. But the boy next to him is laughing, in what looks like a cross between mirth, incredulity, and fear—a species of laughter echoed by some of the killers, throughout the movie; they laugh just this way when they are describing things like the way they cracked a man’s skull open. The way he tried to hold his broken head together.
“So let’s thank the heroes,” the teacher concludes, “who struggled to make our country a democracy!”
“How did you arrange to film this?” I asked Oppenheimer.
“I just asked the teacher if I could film their annual history lesson on the extermination of the Communists.”
The Look of Silence also raises questions for the American viewer of a particularly American complicity. Many reviewers have noted the fact that the U.S. supported the Suharto government, and therefore those carrying out the massacre, with information, weapons, and money. The film touches briefly on this point, and Oppenheimer wrote an op-ed inThe Times addressing it more directly. The extent of U.S. involvement, as well as that of Britain, is still not fully known. But beyond this, the parallels in Oppenheimer’s work between our own comfortable, self-imposed political denialism and ignorance and their Indonesian counterparts are hard to miss. “Throughout the year we’ve been reminded again and again of the brutal and completely unresolved history of racial oppression, the ongoing criminalization of whole classes of our community,” Oppenheimer said.
The era following Suharto’s 1998 resignation has seen major political reforms in Indonesia—free elections and a free press, increased regional autonomy and tolerance for dissent—but there’s also been a significant pushback against those reforms from the right. The former general Prabowo Subianto, Suharto’s son-in-law, is a hardliner implicated in the mass killings in East Timor; he has a history of threatening journalists, and drew widespread condemnation for a ghastly campaign video making use of Nazi costumes and imagery set to the tune of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Even so, he came close to winning the 2014 election that installed the current president Joko Widodo. The country’s polarization, too, echoes our own.
The political situation in Indonesia vis-à-vis The Look of Silence is more complex than might be suggested by reports of cancelled screenings like the one at the recent Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. There have been crackdowns and even threats of violence against those wishing to screen the film, but they’ve been rare. Widodo has promised to address human rights violations, Oppenheimer told me. “He’s appointed some good people where he can. And the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council, which are two government bodies, are the official distributors of The Look of Silence in Indonesia. At the same time, the thousands of screenings and putting the film out for free online, and now the Oscar nomination, have provoked, in a way, a backlash.”
“How likely is it that the paramilitaries could gather back up into a single political force again?” I asked.
“I think the films make it much harder for them. I mean, they make their threats in the films, but in fact, the films ultimately sort of undermine their power, because they shine a light. And make people angry about it... and they’re angry in the media. They’re angry inTempo magazine. They’re angry inKompas now. They’re angry in... they’re angry across the Indonesian media.”
Nowadays Oppenheimer lives in Denmark, and must find himself both distant from and profoundly connected to events in Indonesia. He still receives regular death threats, including one from a would-be assassin offering to use his head as a football should he dare to return; he hasn’t been back in years. If activists like him and Adi Rukun succeed in forcing Indonesia to look in the mirror, what is the future of Indonesian politics?
“I think there have been—there are really perilous moments,” he says carefully. “In general, I don’t think the movement for truth, justice and reconciliation around 1965, including my films, would be what causes a resurgence of violence, but I think other things could. This is exactly why we made these films.”
Image via Drafthouse Films. Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles based journalist and critic.
“She’s a brilliant, intelligent but challenging and unpredictable personality,” an unnamed MSNBC executive told The Washington Post, referring to the network’s decision to cut ties with host Melissa Harris-Perry, who sent an email to the staff of her show in the midst of her battle with the network. Harris Perry, according to The Post, is not coming back to MSNBC.
Donald Trump, a man who denied knowledge of America’s most famous hate group and a leader he has publicly, voluntarily denounced in the past, definitely knows about the Ku Klux Klan. At least, he knows about the white supremacist group when he has to deny allegations that his father was involved in it.
After the Republican presidential frontrunner professed his willful ignorance of the KKK and former leader and current Trump supporter David Duke on Sunday, an interview was unearthed that shows that Trump has passionately spoke about the KKK in the past. Jason Horowitz, a reporter at The New York Times, asked Trump about a 1927 article in that same newspaper which said that his father, Fred C. Trump, was arrested along with a group reportedly at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens. It wasn’t clear what sort of role the senior Trump played in the rally, but according to the younger Trump, it never happened at all. From The New York Times report:
Q. Have you seen this story about police arresting a Fred Trump who lived at that Devonshire address in 1927 after a Ku Klux Klan rally turned violent?
A. Totally false. We lived on Wareham. The Devonshire — I know there is a road Devonshire but I don’t think my father ever lived on Devonshire.
Q. The Census shows that he lived there with your mother there. But regardless, you never heard about that story?
A. It never happened. And by the way, I saw that it was one little website that said it. It never happened. And they said there were no charges, no nothing. It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges. They said there were charges against other people, but there were absolutely no charges, totally false.
In an introduction to the interview, Horowitz noted Trump’s “sudden denial of a fact he had moments before confirmed.”
There are a lot of conclusions one could take from this exchange, including the theory that Trump’s father may have been a KKK sympathizer. But that’s not the issue at hand today—rather, this serves to point out that, of course, Trump knows about the KKK, just like any other moderately conscious citizen in the U.S.
David Green, founder and CEO of the arts-and-crafts chain store Hobby Lobby, has turned his brilliant political mind to the presidential campaign, and leveled his mammoth influence onto the head of a Republican who, now, will surely win. That blessed head belongs to none other than Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
“Marco Rubio has impressed us with his preparation and the way he carries himself. But most importantly, Marco regularly exhibits humility and gives the glory to God...I don’t see humility in Mr. Trump, and that scares me to death.
“Our family business that we began with $600 has quite possibly been more successful than Mr. Trump’s, but that doesn’t make either of us qualified to be president. And unlike Mr. Trump, we give all the credit to God.”
Rubio responded with thanks at a rally in Virginia:
Green is most famous for stripping his female employees of their rights to contraceptives paid for by their insurance and mandated by the Affordable Care Act. He and his family are also known for funneling piles of money into the homeschooling empire of Bill Gothard, who resigned after being accused of molesting dozens of women.
Rubio, who supports emergency birth control methods like the morning-after pill, is a surprising choice for Green, whose family has been a loud voice in anti-abortion circles. At this point, though, choosing one of these three stooges is like choosing the least-rotten egg in the expired carton.
Actually, that is precisely what the comprehensive, two-part reported analysis—subhed: “The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven.”—is about.
On Sunday, Senator Jefferson (“Jeff”) Sessions endorsed Donald Trump during a campaign event in his home state of Alabama. Sessions is the upper chamber’s most strident opponent of immigration reform, and the first senator to endorse the billionaire real estate developer.
“The events of history have aligned to give the people this fleeting chance to bust up the oligarchy,” Trump said, introducing Sessions, “to take back control from the ‘Masters of the Universe’ [and] return it to the good and decent and patriotic citizens of the United States.”
Taking the microphone, Sessions said that Trump would “fix illegal immigration,” and referred to the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement as “Obamatrade.” Trump’s immigration proposals were crafted with input from Sessions, the Washington Post reported in August.
Last week, Sessions told Fox Business News that he thinks Trump could defeat Hillary Clinton in a general election: “It looks like working people who may have been voting Democrat voted for Trump in huge numbers. They say, it’s correct, you cannot win an election with the simple Republican base. You have to have a nominee who can reach beyond that base. Trump is reaching out to working Americans in a way others so far have not been able to do. That’s the way you get over 50 percent.”
“I’ve been talking about that for seven years,” he said. “Our consultant ‘geniuses’ said you’ve got to be more moderate, you have to have more amnesty, and that’s the way to win elections. I think Trump is proving that’s not so.”
In a statement on Sunday, Trump said, “I am deeply honored to have the endorsement of Senator Jeff Sessions, leader of congressional conservatives.
“He has been called the Senate’s indispensable man and the gold standard. He led the fight against the Gang of Eight [immigration reform], against Obama’s trade deal, against Obama’s judges, and for American sovereignty. He has stood up to special interests as few have.”
Sessions has also been supportive of his colleague—and Trump rival—Ted Cruz, stumping for the Texas senator as recently as December and defending his opposition to 2013's “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill. “I believe that without the vigorous opposition of Ted Cruz, this bill likely would have passed,” Sessions said, according to the Texas Tribune. “Ted Cruz stood with me, Steve King and Mike Lee and others that opposed this bill. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
But on Sunday, Sessions pulled on a Trump-branded campaign hat. “At this time in American history, we need to make America great again,” he said. “I am pleased to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States.”
MSNBC has confirmed with The New York Times that the network and Melissa Harris-Perry have officially parted ways—and one of the main reasons for the break was over Beyoncé’s #BlackLivesMatter-themed music video for “Formation”—the same video made by a non-white person that white people just don’t seem to understand.
As NYT reported, the break between the two over the direction of Harris-Perry’s titular show came roughly four weeks ago after “Formation,” which features allusions to both protests organized by the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
“When she said wanted to discuss Beyoncé’s new video, ‘Formation,’ and how it addresses race, she said she was encouraged to focus on the election instead. She wound up discussing the video anyway but as she did, footage of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie rallies in New Hampshire appeared in a box, an indication that the network’s priorities were shifting.”
Harris-Perry’s kerfuffle with NBC execs came to light after an email she wrote to her staff was leaked, with her permission, by former colleague Jamil Smith on Friday.
In the email, Harris-Perry cited moves made within recent weeks by the network to usurp the program’s autonomy, preempting it for two weeks with coverage of the election. The network’s choice subsequently took away focus from topics like race and identity politics, which it has been known for since first airing in 2012.
“Our show was taken—without comment or discussion or notice—in the midst of an election season,” she Harris-Perry wrote. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”
Harris-Perry was quick to assert her autonomy as a black female personality within the national sphere—and that, essentially, she is nothing to fuck with.
“I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by [NBC executives] or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”
“I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person,” she said.
Regardless, Harris-Perry failed to appear on her show this past weekend, which led to ensuing speculation that the Wake Forest professor was finally done with the network.
While Harris-Perry has not issued a full statement regarding the split at this time, she did tweet her farewells on Sunday morning,
Right now, there is no word on whether the show will be cancelled or whether someone else will assume Harris-Perry’s role as anchor.
Harris-Perry hasn’t been the only person of color on the MSNBC roster who has suddenly been ousted and/or preempted due to the elections. As The Washington Post pointed out, Jose Diaz-Balart, who hosts a two hour bloc in the mornings on the network, has als0 disappeared from the lineup, which inspired the hashtag #MasJose, demanding that Diaz-Balart is put back on the air.
Two years ago, Kristin Cavallari served as a fashion critic on E!’s red carpet pre-show at the Academy Awards. How’d she do?
The most comprehensive assessment of her performance can be found in the following Huffington Post article from that night titled, “Kristin Cavallari’s Oscars Red Carpet Gig Came Out Of Nowhere, Apparently.” It begins with the question, “Is that... Kristin Cavallari?”, and it ends with tweets like these:
Kristin noted in an Instagram post after the show that she “felt like a princess” in her dress, which is all that matters. She is not attending the ceremony tonight, so far as I know.
As long as you don’t mind “Cranberry,” Bose’s acclaimed Sound True in-ear headphones are down to an all-time low $50 right now. I suspect these will sell out early. [Bose - SoundTrue In-Ear Headphones - Cranberry, $50]
If cold winter air is chapping your lips and drying out your hands, this powerful Honeywell humidifier can make things a little more comfortable for up to 24 hours on a single tank of water. This model frequently sells for $80-$120, but today’s price is part of a Gold Box deal, meaning it’s only available today. [Honeywell Cool Moisture Console Humidifier, $65]
If you fly Southwest with any regularity, this deal is basically free money. Pro tip: Use the money you saved to buy Earlybird check in. [$100 Southwest Airlines Gift Card, $90]
Folding clothes isn’t far below scrubbing toilets on my list of least favorite chores, but a laundry board can speed up the process considerably. All it takes is three steps and three seconds once you lay a garment on top, and your clothes will come out perfectly folded every time. [Huji Clothes Folding Board, $10 with code 5VO69ZO4]
While they might not conform to the classic look of our favorite chef’s knives, this Cuisinart Advantage knife set is anything but dull (get it?). You can own the whole collection today for just $15, an all-time low price
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Three people were stabbed—one critically—and 12 arrested during a clash between members of the Ku Klux Klan and counter-demonstrators in Anaheim, California, about 3 miles from Disneyland, on Saturday.
According to the Associated Press, dozens of protestors confronted six Klansmen, dressed in black shirts emblazoned with the Klan cross and Confederate flags, who bore signs stating “White Lives Matter.”
Anaheim police had alerted the community that the demonstration would be taking place, reminding citizens of the KKK’s First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, the confrontation quickly turned violent: One Klansman stabbed a counter-demonstrator with a flagpole bearing an American flag.
Five members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, the AP reports, and seven of the counter-demonstrators were arrested on suspicion of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury.
According to census data, Anaheim is 52 percent Latino and 27 percent white. Mayor Tom Tait described it as “rich ethnically mixed community where people live with natural respect and tolerance.” The KKK was not likely to find much support there, he told the Los Angeles Times: “Their despicable message is not one shared by the people of Anaheim.”
We arrive at Hollywood’s annual prom night for the 88th year in a row with some caveats and some questions: mainly #OscarsSoWhite is a cause for boycott for many, wherein it’s unclear if the ancient pasty mummy-men controlling the movie industry even saw half the movies on the ballot. But also, does this night even really matter anymore, culturally speaking (apart from host Chris Rock’s much-anticipated opening speech)? Crack some vino and join your investigative team of bloggers at Jezebel—plus some special guests from Gawker, Deadspin, and Gizmodo—and let’s see if we can parse any of this glamorous mess.
According to the Associated Press, Trump claimed that the reason Gonzalo Curiel, a judge in the Southern District of California, hadn’t thrown out the case yet was, “because it was me and because there’s a hostility toward me by the judge—tremendous hostility—beyond belief.” Not that he’s worried about it: “It’s a small deal, very small.”
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump clarified what he meant: “I think it has to do perhaps with the fact that I’m very, very strong on the border, very, very strong at the border, and he has been extremely hostile to me.” From Yahoo Politics:
Curiel, who was born in East Chicago, Ind., and graduated from Indiana University and Indiana University Law School, was nominated to the federal bench by President Obama in 2011 — and approved by the Senate the next year by voice vote without opposition. His confirmation followed a lengthy legal career that included 13 years as a federal prosecutor in San Diego, starting under President George H.W. Bush, and ultimately rising to become chief of the office’s Narcotics Enforcement Division in charge of prosecuting narcotics cases involving Mexican drug smugglers. (At one point, Curiel’s efforts to extradite a top smuggler from Mexico led to a cartel threat to assassinate him.)
Assigned two fraud lawsuits filed by former students of Trump University accusing the school of deceptive trade practices, Curiel has rebuffed multiple motions by Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the case.
On “Meet the Press,” Trump said, “I think the judge has been extremely unfair. This is a case that many, many, many people said should have been thrown out on summary judgment. We have 98 percent approval. We have an A from the Better Business Bureau.” In fact, neither Trump University nor the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative—which is what Trump University changed its name to—is accredited by the Better Business Bureau.
Trump has also accused New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, whose office filed a separate, $40 million civil complaint against Trump University in 2013, of being politically motivated. In a statement, the attorney general said, “I will not engage in a debate about ongoing litigation.”
“But there is no place in this process for racial demagoguery directed at respected members of the judiciary,” the statement continued.
Trump described the cases as the work of “a sleazebag law firm,” the AP reports. “I could’ve settled this suit numerous times. Could settle it now. But I don’t like settling suits,” he claimed. That may or may not be so, but he certainly has settled a lot of suits.
Chris Rock opened the 88th Annual Academy Awards Sunday night with a monologue that likely lived up to expectations.
Amidst the controversy around #OscarSoWhite, Rock was expected to address Hollywood’s diversity issues in his opening. He hit the ground running with a zinger about the Oscars being the “White People’s Choice Awards,” and how if the host was chosen through nominations, Neil Patrick Harris would be hosting.
It will be interesting to see how this monologue is received from a little distance. The mostly-white audience’s reaction was difficult to read with many of the attendees seemingly unsure how to respond. Rock absolutely had some high points skewering Hollywood’s racism but he also suggested that #OscarsSoWhite grew out of black people not having more important things to protest about. “Everything’s not sexism. Everything’s not racism,” he said.
Here’s his full monologue:
Woo! Man, I counted at least 15 black people on that montage.
Hey! Well, I’m here at the Academy Awards. Otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards. You realize if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job. Y’all be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.
But this is — this is the wildest, craziest Oscars to ever host, because you have all this controversy, the no — no black nominees, you know?
And people are like, Chris, you should boycott, Chris, you should quit, you should quit.
You know, how come it’s only unemployed people that tell you to quit something, you know? No one with a job ever tells you to quit.
So, I thought about quitting. I thought about it real hard.
But I realized, they’re going to have the Oscars anyway. They’re not going to cancel the Oscars because I quit. You know? And the last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart. Okay? I don’t need that. Kev — Kev right there. Kev make movies fast. Every month. Porno stars don’t make movies that fast.
Now, the thing is, why are we protesting — the big question, why this Oscars? Why this Oscars, you know?
It’s the 88th Academy Awards. It’s the 88th Academy Awards, which means — this whole no black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. Okay? You got to figure that it happened in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s. You know, in the ‘60s, one of those years, Sidney didn’t put out a movie. I’m sure — I’m sure there were no black nominees, some of those years.
Say 62 or 63 and black people did not protest. Why? Because we have real things to protest at the time. You know? We have real things to protest. You know? Too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won Best Cinematographer. You know, when you — when your Grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about Best Documentary Foreign Short.
But what happened this year? What happened? People went mad, you know? Spike got mad and Jada went mad and Will and everybody went mad, you know like — Jada got mad, Jada says she’s not coming, protesting, I’m like — doesn’t she have a TV show? Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited. Oh, that’s — it’s not an invitation I would turn down. But I understand, I — I’m not hating. I understand you’re mad. Jada is mad. Her man was not nominated. I get it. I get it. You get mad. Said it’s not fair that Will was this good and doesn’t get nominated. You’re right. It is also not fair that Will was paid $20 million for Wild Wild West okay? Okay?
You know, this year, the Oscars, things are going to be a little different. Things are going to be a little different at the Oscars. This year, in the In Memorium package, it’s just going to be black people that were shot on their way to the movies. Yes. Yes. I said it. All right?
Hey, if you want black nominees every year, you need to just have black categories. That’s what you need. You need to have black categories. You already do it with men and women. Think about it. There’s no real reason for there to be a man and a woman category in acting. It’s — come on! There’s no reason! It’s not track and field. You don’t have to separate them. You know, Robert de Niro’s never said, “I better slow this acting down so Meryl Streep can catch up.” No. Not at all, man. If you want black people every year at the Oscars, just have black categories, like Best Black Friend.
That’s right. “And the winner for the 18th year in a row is Wanda Sykes. This is Wanda’s 18th Black Oscar.”
But here’s the real question. The real question everybody wants to know, everybody wants to know, in the world, is Hollywood racist? Is Hollywood racist? You know, that’s — that’s a — you know, you got to go at that at the right way. Is it burning cross racist? No. Is it fetch me some lemonade racist? No, no. It’s a different type of racist.
Now, I remember one night I was at a fundraiser for President Obama, a lot of you were there, and, you know, it’s me and all of Hollywood. And all the, you know, it’s all of us there and there’s about four black people there, me, let’s see, Quincy Jones, Russell Simmons, Questlove, you know, the usual suspects, right? And every black actor that wasn’t working. Needless to say, Kevin Hart was not there, okay? So, at some point, you get to take a picture with the President.
And as they’re setting up the picture, you get a little moment with the president, I’m like, “Mr. President, you see all these writers and producers and actors? They don’t hire black people. And they’re the nicest white people on earth. They’re liberals.” CHEESE.
That’s right. Is Hollywood racist? You’re damn right Hollywood’s racist. But it isn’t the racist you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood is sorority racist. It’s like — “We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.” That’s how Hollywood is.
But things are changing. Things are changing. Yeah, we got a black Rocky this Year. Some people call it Creed, I call it Black Rocky. And that’s a big — that’s an unbelievable statement, I mean, because Rocky takes place in a world where white athletes are as good as black athletes. Rocky’s a science fiction movie. There are things that happened in Star Wars that are more believable than things that happened in Rocky.
We’re here to honor actors. We’re here to honor film. And there’s a lot of snubs. A lot of snubs. One of the biggest snubs no one’s talking about, my favorite actor in the world is Paul Giamatti. I believe he’s the greatest actor in the world. Think about what he’s done. Last year, he’s in 12 Years a Slave, hates black people. This year, he’s in Straight Outta Compton, loves black people. Last year, he’s whooping Lupita, this year, he’s crying at Eazy-E’s funeral. That’s range. Ben Affleck can’t do that.
But what I’m trying to say is, you know, it’s not about boycotting anything, it’s just, we want opportunity. We want the black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors. That’s it. That’s it. You know? Just — you know, not just once, you know? Leo gets a great part every year. And, you know, and — everybody — all you guys get great parts all the time.
But what about the black actors? Look at Jamie Foxx. Jamie Foxx, one of the best actors in the world, man. Jamie foxx — he is. Jamie Foxx was so good in Ray, that they went to the hospital and unplugged the real Ray Charles, like, we don’t need two of these. No, man.
But the big — you know, everything is not about race, man. Another big thing tonight is, you’re not allowed — somebody told me this, you’re not allowed to ask women what they’re wearing anymore. It’s a whole thing. You know, Ask Her More. You have to ask her more. Now — you know, like, you ask the men more. Hey, everything’s not sexism, everything’s not racism.
They ask the men more, because the men are all wearing the same outfits, okay Every guy is wearing the exact same thing. You know, if George Clooney showed up with a lime green tux on and a swan coming out his ass, somebody would go, “What you wearing, George?”
