President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address offered predictable platitudes, backslapping by chummy Democrats, and idiotic responses by maniacal Republicans. It also offered more of the same outright lies for which Joe Biden has long been renowned.
It is especially revealing when journalists critique comedians who speak the truth they prefer to ignore.
Biden’s speech ignored reality
Biden claimed this week, for instance, that he “ran for President to fundamentally change things,” despite running in 2020 on the promise that “nothing would fundamentally change.”
More broadly, his depiction of progress belies the stark reality in America today: children stand at risk of being randomly murdered by irate or mentally ill classmates, while Black and Latino Americans face the same threats from police paid public dollars to supposedly guard public safety. Meanwhile, violent right-wing vigilantes enjoy fame and impunity for documented murder.
Medical debt is sweeping the country at the same time that life expectancy has declined, inflation is eroding lifelong savings as wealth & income stratification grow more severe, and economic precarity has grown so punishing that Americans have widely delayed or foregone childbearing. Biden’s speech conveniently ignored his recent decision to throw railway workers under the train by forcing them back to work despite ignored demands for sick days—which would have supported public health in the midst of a pandemic.
That is to say nothing of saber rattling in both Eurasia and the Pacific, a mounting global climate calamity, and a Congress that continues to subsidize fossil fuel companies and allow the CIA to operate in secret without any public visibility into its repeatedly criminal operations or even its budget.
Presidents manage to gaslight the public only due to the complicity of the press, which has proudly embraced Biden’s smug self-congratulation in defense of his administration.
Ignorance reveals itself in many corners
The police murder of Tyre Nichols has yet again sparked a national dialog that we seem to embrace like clockwork—only to forget as soon as the press finds distractions from reporting on the state violence that continues to plague low-income communities of color across the United States. That dialog, in turn, has revealed the ignorance of the press establishment building a cult of personality around Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
It is especially revealing when journalists critique comedians who speak the truth they prefer to ignore.
Last Saturday, comedian D.L. Hughley guest-hosted the Daily Show, whose former hosts include Trevor Noah and Jon Stewart. Hughley aired a clip critical of Vice President Kamala Harris, along with a monologue sharply critical of her record as a traditional (i.e. predatory) prosecutor in San Francisco before moving on to become California’s Attorney General, then a U.S. Senator, and now, the Vice President of the United States.
Ignorance reveals itself in many forms, including the self-righteous indignation of voices fairly described as “the white moderate” decried by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who chafe at the observations of justice seekers less beholden to the establishment that they serve.
Today, many of those figures aren’t even white.
Democrats have proven entirely useless on the issue of police reform, and Kamala Harris, in particular, went to the White House in 2020 in the midst of the largest grassroots uprising in American history, after building her career on the backs of communities and families composed of people who look like her.
Few figures demonstrate the prescience of Dr. King’s analysis—and the charity of his formulation including a racial descriptor—than Vice President Harris. And few stories better demonstrate the role of mass media in enabling predatory state violence than a story in SF Gate by journalist Alec Regimbal expressing faux outrage at The Daily Show for calling attention to Harris’ record as a career predatory prosecutor.
One hopes journalists might spare some outrage for the complicit public officials they instead absurdly choose to lionize.
MLK saw all this coming
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter from a jail in Alabama that quickly became one of the most crucial political texts in American political history. In it, he responded to white clergy critical of his organizing and agitation for civil rights, explaining that their preference for “order” over “justice,” and their willingness to urge patience in the face of long denied demands for basic rights, represented a failing of not only solidarity with oppressed people, but also reason, and the principles that they claimed animated their faith.
Correcting the feel-good history taught in American schools is critical….Obama’s presidency set back civil rights by more than a generation.
King would have been disappointed in the figures enabled by his legacy, including the two Black politicians who have reached the White House: President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Each of them embodied “the…moderate” decried by Dr. King, despite racial backgrounds that would have landed them outside his original formulation.
Obama’s record has been exposed in the years since he left the White House, but was in plain sight to those of us who paid more attention than the press when he was in office.
Beyond siding with Wall Street over working Americans, escalating U.S. human rights abuses abroad (after thankfully curtailing some of them only to then give the criminals carte blanche), entrenching the Bush-Cheney assault on constitutional civil liberties (which in turn created the attack surface for today’s GOP majority in the House), and further entrenching the longstanding racket of private corporate health insurance, President Obama also did more or less nothing to address the racism pervading policing, going so far as to invite a white police officer who racially profiled a Black Harvard professor (who he knew and reportedly considered a friend) to the White House for a beer.
Despite professional obligations to rigor, transparency, and accountability, journalists spent the entire eight years of Obama’s administration building a cult of personality that persists to this day.
Journalism, it seems, has learned nothing from its institutional failures.
Beyond the temporary recognition of voting rights and de-segregation principles that were also eventually turned on their heads, the civil rights movement was mostly unsuccessful in achieving its policy goals.
Correcting the feel-good history taught in American schools is critical. Most Americans learn a version of history that ignores how contemporary institutions carry forward the legacy of institutional racism that defines the United States (and the distribution of capital within it) to this day. That’s largely why we confront the specter of “white pride” in the U.S. today, as largely rural populations respond to scarcity by striking out at scapegoats.
But more specifically, judges and Justices of the Supreme Court have also falsely internalized a narrative of progress belied by the facts. In Shelby County v Holder, Justices observing the election of a Black president decided that communities of color no longer needed presumptions favoring their right to participate in elections, even in jurisdictions with a long history of discrimination. By striking down the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the Court effectively repealed its enforcement mechanism and rolled back the clock on civil rights.
In other words, Obama’s presidency arguably set back civil rights by more than a generation, even as its symbolism seemed to herald a paradigm shift.
What America got—instead of reforms to dismantle the intersecting evils of capitalism, racism, and militarism decried by MLK—were racially diverse individuals in positions of influence who do the dirty work of white capital while wearing dark skin. They range from the Mayor of San Francisco to the former President of the United States, and from our city’s former prosecutor who now serves as a Vice President to, sadly, many voices in Congress.
For now, let’s leave aside the distribution of wealth and capital. I hope to examine that in a future article addressing issues including reparations for slavery, and the need for intergenerational entitlements commensurate with the four century period of forced labor. Paid subscribers can access below a draft introduction for that forthcoming post.
What Mr. Hughes & the Daily Show observed-via-insinuation may be horribly unfortunate, but it is also painfully true: Democrats have proven entirely useless on the issue of police reform, and Kamala Harris, in particular, went to the White House in 2020 in the midst of the largest grassroots uprising in American history, after building her career on the backs of communities and families composed of people who look like her.
Long before Biden went to the White House, he crafted the bill that, in the 1990s, inflated our nation’s prison population and swelled the ranks of legal slaves. As Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he also played a role in the CIA running crack cocaine into U.S. cities and flooding the prisons even further. Biden also infamously put Clarence Thomas on the bench, enabling a continuing parade of horrors as the rule of law crumbles in the face of politicized so-called “justice.”
The complicity of Democrats in predatory policing and mass industrial slavery extends well beyond Biden and Harris. As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi once instructed Democrats in Congress to ignore the pleas of activists seeking human rights in the face of relentless predatory state violence. That dovetails neatly with her historical role enabling CIA torture and potential liability under international law for human rights abuses, or her inability to respond to immigrant rights activists incensed by her critical role enabling human rights abuses at (and well beyond) our nation’s borders.
While Dr. King included a specific racial descriptor when identifying the crucial impediment to justice, “the…moderate” remains in an only more entrenched position today than when he was alive.
A record typical for predatory prosecutors
In the years since Kamala Harris served as San Francisco’s District Attorney, a movement has crossed the country challenging the racially biased patterns & practices of prosecutors and police departments. Ironically, San Francisco briefly emerged as one of the country’s most crucial locales embodying that movement, before the city’s establishment struck back, restored the longstanding deference to police that characterizes every city across the United States, and then placed a police propagandist on our elected Board of Supervisors.
San Francisco enjoys a bizarrely progressive reputation, based largely on a counterculture that emerged in our city (with its epicenter at the intersection where I now live) 60 years ago.
Its longer history, however, reflects a sadly different pattern. San Francisco’s racist history has no shortage of lowlights, including:
the forced expulsion of Asians (long before the most recent expulsion of Black residents and preceding theft of Black wealth);
ongoing environmental racism;
racist journalism protecting corrupt oligarchs; and
absurdly severe racial disparities in wealth, income, and incarceration, as well as housing assessments and employment opportunities.
As a traditional, predatory prosecutor, Harris stood with our city’s racist history, rather than calls for long overdue (and ultimately still inadequate) police reform. The evidence is sadly voluminous.
Strap in
The 2024 presidential primary is already underway, with several candidates campaigning for the Republican nomination. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are questioning whether Biden should run again given his advancing age, which could make Harris the likely nominee despite her record in California and equally disappointing job performance in Washington.
I emphatically hope that Biden steps aside, and am eager to see a voice emerge from the Left to challenge him and/or Harris not only in the Democratic primary—but if necessary, as an Independent in the 2024 general election. Too much hangs in the balance to defer to a Democratic Party establishment whose corruption has repeatedly revealed itself.
Paid subscribers can access an introduction to an upcoming post exploring the issue of reparations, which has been in the news lately but predictably lacked any meaningful context.
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