Mike Pence is about the Race Bannon resemblance, but he’s really in the wrong Sarah Huckabee Sanders multiverse if he thinks he’s going to be 46* because Mighty Mango will probably not be impeached. They’ll cut ribbons at many a supermarket until 2020 unless Congress goes Blue in 2018.

For the Democrats to run for the purpose of impeaching Trump would rile up conservatives who have (to borrow President Donald Trump’s famous promise) gotten tired of all the winning.

Republicans, though, face their own risks in trying to push Democrats to call for impeachment. For one, a Democratic response could talk about the importance of letting the investigative process run its course while listing the burgeoning list of issues which require inquiry…

www.nbcnews.com/…

There’s removing managers and baristas because of imagined micro-aggression or false consciousness, and then there’s boycotting things because their coffee might suck or be overpriced. Unfortunately like the supermarket checkout or the eatery, we can be bombarded with racism. Or like Pence’s Indiana wedding cakes, bigotry of all kinds can occur in the agora of ideas.

Greensboro NC Four

Two Chinese-American women eating at a Manhattan diner early Sunday morning said a man called them bitches and whores and told them to “go back to Tokyo” after one of the women asked him to lower his voice while he complained about Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s cold reception at a weekend performance of Hamilton: An American Musical. The 56-year-old man was later arrested for pepper-spraying another diner patron in the eyes—according to one witness, because that patron had spoken up in defense of the women. (2016) gothamist.com/…

Enter the Supermarket, exit the check-out line. The reign of error that is the Trump regime will be narrated by The National Enquirer.

So when one looks at the bios of Steve Bannon, the white victimization hypothesis remains essential to some folk theories of American history. Bannonism’s nativist shibboleth, similar to Steve King’s American apartheid, is all about the “let them call you racist” victim’s discourse.

It was baffling how so many RWNJs came to convert as adults to Catholicism: Laura Ingraham, Newt Gingrich, Mike Pence, but I was reminded of a colleague who shared with me that many Moonies had left the Catholic faith because “it just wasn’t conservative enough”. Slippery slope from St Ignatius to the One True Family, maybe, but without worrying about Pius XII or the Latin Mass, there are paths to Traditionalism.

Because it’s about the race, Bannon, not the Race Bannon.

In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard J. Jensen printed “No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization.” His abstract begins:

“Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming ‘Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply!’ No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent.”

The Irish were persecuted in the American job market—and precisely in the overt, literally written-down way that was always believed.

Enter Kerby Miller, a newly retired history professor from the University of Missouri. He’s written everything from Guggenheim-funded books about the 18th-century Irish to the PBS documentary Out of Ireland with Paul Wagner. In 1986, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for history.

“It was out of the blue on May 1st, May Day—which is sort of fortuitous, now that I think about it,” says Miller. May Day is International Workers’ Day, which celebrates laborers worldwide.

[…]

“This was a period dominated in Irish writing by those who collectively came to be known as ‘revisionists.’ What they did was, in some cases, take every traditional Irish Catholic belief concerning British Colonialists—some of which were heroic, even—and turn them upside down,” says Miller. “The British and Britain’s supporters were not to be seen as oppressors. They were now to be considered those taking down Irish Catholic oppression.”

Miller says it applies to all of Irish history, but recent history as well—even events and acts of persecution that the Irish lived through themselves.

[…]

“Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.”

[…]

She then makes a salient point: Even if it were 15 recorded instances per year or 1,500—the signs existed, the persecution was real, and discrimination of the Irish was not an imagined feeling, but a reality difficult to both express and quantify.

“NINA sign would be just as offensive and memorable to Irish-American and other viewers whether it was for a job, an apartment, a social club, a ‘freedom pole,’ or anything else,” she wrote.

www.thedailybeast.com/…

YouTube Video

What, hegemony?

the “white victimization” fantasy will, once again, be a key part of the right wing’s attempt to appeal to the clueless American people.

Where is this white-Christian-male suppression coming from? Who is instigating this mass persecution? Why am I not able to perceive it? Am I really that dense? Some of the folks who know me might agree with that last assessment (I can almost hear the wisecracks now) but I think I’m a fairly perceptive guy. If I have ever once, during my fifty-six-and-a-half years on this sad planet been discriminated against because I am a male and a Christian, I’m not aware of it. In fact, the only person in my life who ever put down due to the fact that I’m Irish Catholic is me! You know how we Irish are with our self-deprecating wit!

The most widely available “No Dogs No Chinese” sign, is from the 1972 Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury, where it was used as a plot device to introduce the star’s rage against insults, slights and injustices suffered at the hands of the foreign interloper.

In the many shots of this sign gained from an internet search, all show the exact same wording, the same mottled concrete and the same ironwork fence. And all are still photos taken from Bruce Lee’s film.

A coffee shop has been the target of hateful harassment after issuing a ‘punch-card’ with the faces of notable Republican politicians, including President Trump.

The Black Forge coffee shop in Pittsburgh gives out their paper cards for frequent customers with their logo on the front, but on the back are the faces of Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, Mike Pence, Martin Shkreli, Pat Robertson, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz.

Though some argue the cafe is simply exercising their freedom of expression, co-owners say that they’ve been incessantly called by blocked and out-of-state numbers since news broke of their controversial coupons.

And, for the Democrats to run for the purpose of impeaching Trump, as The New York Times reported last weekend, would rile up conservatives who have (to borrow President Donald Trump’s famous promise) gotten tired of all the winning. Warnings that a midterm Democratic victory will ensure impeachment “have become a surefire way for candidates to raise small contributions from grass-roots conservatives who are devoted to Mr. Trump, veteran Republican fund-raisers say,” Jonathan Martin reported. “But party strategists also believe that floating the possibility of impeachment can also act as a sort of scared-straight motivational tool for turnout.” www.nbcnews.com/…