AmeriKKKa

[Sean Hayden]

The sheriff's deputy featured in the last post is still awaiting trial as of late November. Free on bond, or perhaps his own recognisance.

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I considered ironically posting this item in the 'Alt-Right' thread. That strain of ugly authoritarian bigotry is becoming more dominant on the right in the US--not so much 'alt' these days. This thread is more appropriate anyway. Spew hatred, rake in the dough. Hey, the president feels the same way.

'Cinnabon Fired an Employee for a Racist Tirade Caught on Video. The Story Gets Uglier From There.'

On Friday, in a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Somali American couple was out shopping at an indoor mall when they decided to stop by Cinnabon. It’s not completely clear how the interaction with the Cinnabon employee first became heated, but the TikTok user who uploaded the video said her cousin, the female customer in the video, had asked for more caramel on her cinnamon roll. The worker, a white woman, responded by insulting the woman’s hijab, according to the TikTok user, saying the customer could see her “squeezing [the caramel] through that witchcraft bandana.”

The exchange that followed, as captured on video, turned uglier once the employee, Crystal Wilsey, noticed she was being filmed: “I am racist, and you are a n—r,” Wilsey says, while leaning across the counter. “I am racist, and I’ll say that to the whole entire world. Don’t be disrespectful.” Wilsey then extended her middle fingers to the customers, told them to “suck it,” and called the female customer ugly. “You know damn well you’re fucking evil fucks,” she said. Video of the incident went viral, and Cinnabon has since fired Wilsey.

In a normal world (or even in the world of a couple years ago), that would be the end of the story, or at least pretty close to it. Wilsey’s story is not particularly remarkable: We know there are proudly racist individuals living in the U.S. She’s also not a powerful figure—she certainly can’t set public policy—meaning her firing from a Wisconsin Cinnabon would hardly be newsworthy. A different video of the incident, later published by TMZ, showed Wilsey making irrational claims, accusing the customer of having come up to her earlier in a white-face disguise.

There also wouldn’t be much to debate: There was recently a near-universal consensus that racial slurs were to be met with condemnation. People could still deploy all sorts of dog-whistles to hint at their views, but slurs—and certainly the self-proclaimed racism—were relegated to the fringes of the discourse.

But these are not normal times, and that near-consensus is thoroughly broken: On GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform typically used for more conservative causes, “Stand with Crystal” has raised more than $113,000 in donations. A fundraiser for the Somali American couple’s legal fees, in contrast, has raised less than $5,000.

And on social media, large accounts have rallied behind Wilsey, portraying her either as a hero standing up for white Americans or as a victim of Black aggression. “Crystal, a hardworking White mom, was doing her job at @Cinnabon when a Somali couple decided to make her shift horrible with intimidation,” read one typical X post with more than 2 million views.

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[Description of another bigot (Hendrix) yelling the same slur at a child on video. Hendrix has got $800,000 out of it so far.]

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Both the Hendrix and the Wilsey incidents targeted Somali Americans. The latter occurred just a few days after President Trump made some of the most baldly racist comments recorded by a U.S. president, directed at Somali immigrants.

On Dec. 2, during a Cabinet meeting, Trump referenced a fraud investigation involving some Somali Americans to disparage the entire immigrant population. “They contribute nothing,” he said. “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” He also accused Somali Americans of being lazy. “These are people that do nothing but complain,” he said. “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country.” He also said Somalia “stinks.”

“Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars,” he said. “And they contribute nothing.”

I think Trump talks like they talk. We get to hear what the GOP sounds like when the mics are off. Are enough Americans outraged by it though?

[Tero]

[L'Emmerdeur]

The US Supreme Court's reactionary right majority under Roberts has championed arguments previously used to disenfranchise black people in the South. It turns amendments to the US Constitution that were passed to protect the rights of minorities (specifically black people) around to protect the 'right' of white racists in government to discriminate against racial minorities.

The result is predictable. The piece is a fairly long read, laying out as it does some of the racist history of the US in regards to voting while examining how the Roberts court has enabled a resurgence of that racism.

'Whites Only'

On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.

Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.

Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.

When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.

“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.

“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”

[...]

[Brian Peacock]

A sobering read.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Yeah. Roberts presents himself as a mild-mannered conservative and perhaps in regard to some issues he is. Nonetheless as far as voting rights go (I think most people would agree they're central to a functioning democracy) he's a regressive dirt-bag. It seems he's wanted to destroy the Voting Rights Act since he was in the Reagan administration and at long last has almost entirely succeeded in that mission. It's not as if it's all down to him but he's played a significant role. It's going to be hard work to rebuild what he and his ilk have destroyed. The Republican Party will see to that.

[Brian Peacock]

The VRA simply says that everyone should have equal access to democratic processes; that no demographic should be singled out for any reason when it comes to exercising their democratic rights. If a nation cannot hold to that fundamental principle then it cannot stake a credible claim to being a democratic society.