theintercept--2020-07-05--National Review Is Trying to Rewrite Its Own Racist History

who has gone from running Mitt Romney ’ s campaign for president in 2012 to a perch as a leading Never Trumper , is out with a new book : his mea culpa of sorts , “ It Was All a Lie : How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
” Some of Stevens ’ s former colleagues don ’ t like it , and one of them , Matthew Scully , savaged it in National Review .
“ Perhaps the most devastating book review you ’ ll ever read , ” National Review editor Rich Lowry promised .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unfriendly , countering that Stevens is , in so many words , a clown , a hack , a liar , a grifter — and wrong .
I ’ m not here to referee the bulk of their dispute , but one particular claim by Scully in his review merits a closer look .
In his book , Stevens apologizes for his role in propping up a Republican Party he now considers to be little more than a “ white grievance party ” cynically exploiting racism in the pursuit of power .
Scully @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say in the book , and he zeroes in on Stevens ’ s claim that , in hindsight , he should have seen all along that Republicans were getting ahead by exploiting racism .
Stevens cites the rise of the New Right with Barry Goldwater ’ s campaign in 1964 straight through to President Donald Trump .
Scully is appalled at such libel upon the GOP , and comes to the spirited defense of Goldwater and one of his chief advocates , William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was a founder of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the modern conservative movement , who , Stevens wrote , was simply “ a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
” “ As a rule of thumb , ” Scully responds in the reportedly devastating review , “ anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as ‘ ugliness and bigotry ’ the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has , for that reason alone , no business involving himself in Republican affairs.
” Scully might want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his own magazine before offering such a definitive judgment .
A review of that record shows there is no doubt which side of history Buckley placed himself on .
Now , he stands athwart it with Trump , like it or not .
Stevens , if anything , was being too polite .
as Congress was debating the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction , Buckley penned an op-ed that scrubbed away the euphemisms to get straight to the heart of the matter .
“ Let us speak frankly , ” Buckley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why The South Must Prevail.
” “ The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote , ” he goes on .
“ In some parts of the South , the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all .
It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White .
The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.
” Buckley goes on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kosher from a sophisticated , conservative perspective .
“ The central question that emerges , ” he writes , “ is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail , politically and culturally , in areas in which it does not predominate numerically ?
” His answer is clear : The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because , for the time being , it is the advanced race .
It is not easy , and it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ median cultural superiority of White over Negro : but it is a fact that obtrudes , one that can not be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists .
The question , as far as the White community is concerned , is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage .
The British believe they do , and acted accordingly , in Kenya , where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism , and elsewhere ; the South , where the conflict is by no means dramatic , as in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between its culture and the Negroes ’ , and intends to assert its own .
NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South ’ s premises are correct .
If the majority wills what is socially atavistic , then to thwart the majority may be , though undemocratic , enlightened .
It is more important for any community , anywhere in the world , to affirm and live by civilized standards , than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority .
Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “ civilized standards ” he is intent on upholding .
Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority , in which case it must give way , and the society will regress ; sometimes the numerical minority can not prevail except by violence : then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence .
By 1957 , when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow , a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper .
Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South , Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing .
Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom .
Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation of tyrants or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro , but how to equip the Negro—and a great many Whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote .
The South confronts one grave moral challenge .
It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class .
It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services , as menials , are economically useful .
Let the South never permit itself to do this .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races , and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means , the South is in step with civilization , as is the Congress that permits it to function .
Buckley ’ s argument , “ undemocratic ” as it may be , is an articulate defense of white supremacy — with a capital W , as was the house style at the magazine then — as the proper means toward the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that good society through disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence was justified .
The column appears not just in the magazine ’ s archives but also the 2008 book , “ From The New Deal to The New Right : Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism , ” published by Yale University Press and authored by Joseph E. Lowndes .
The thesis of Lowndes ’ s book , that the fusion of Southern white supremacists and the business class was forged with the intellectual guidance of National Review , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a paper from Cambridge University Press called , “ ‘ Will the Jungle Take Over ?
’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization.
” Buckley made his argument in the context of an internal debate over the direction of the Republican Party as the New Deal realignment was reshaping politics .
One wing of the party , dominated by the Rockefellers and other Northeastern politicians , argued for a multiracial , moderate , pro-business party that continued to compete across the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Buckley , and the National Review as its lead champions — argued for an alliance between Southern segregationists gradually leaving the Democratic Party and pro-business forces around the country .
a vastly different history of this realignment .
Goldwater , who served as an Arizona senator , ran for president in 1964 : a failed campaign but one that is credited with birthing the modern Republican Party .
In June of that year , he famously cast his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , citing constitutional objections .
Goldwater @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a “ carefully crafted platform of coded racism , ” but was simply a principled , small-government conservative : To see what Goldwater ’ s “ carefully crafted platform of coded racism ” actually looked like , you have to go fetch it yourself .
Republicans in 1964 pledged “ full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , and all other civil rights statutes ; .
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such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial , for whatever unlawful reason @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
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continued opposition to discrimination based on race , creed , national origin or sex .
We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart , conscience , and education , as well as of equal rights under law.
” Across the South , we ’ re to believe , ears went up at the dog whistle in this language , so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up .
Even if Stevens ’ s point is that 1964 marked a sharp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that proves only that the sum of Goldwater ’ s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson ’ s activist government and Great Society agenda .
As NR ’ s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained , African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal .
Everything isn ’ t about race ; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country ’ s interests .
And this despite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in that era , including LBJ , had disgraceful records on civil rights .
On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men , whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “ Goldwater Girl ” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools , in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard , and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP .
Easy to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act , despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that , and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party .
But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact .
Most students of American political history are probably scratching their heads at how Scully could attempt to deny that Republicans exploited racial grievance to build its base of white voters in the South .
Here , again , the real history @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Linking the business wing of the GOP with the racist wing of Democratic Party was not the easy task it seems in hindsight , but required decades of effort to help these disparate camps find their shared interests and fuse together .
Scully is right that Black Americans ’ drift away from the GOP began long before the Civil Rights Act .
A majority of Black voters went for virulent racist Woodrow Wilson in 1912 , attracted by his progressive economic platform , the first time since winning the right to vote that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrat for president .
That trend continued over the next several decades .
In 1948 , Harry Truman insisted on including a strong civil rights plank in the party ’ s platform .
Southerners walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest and ran Strom Thurmond as their “ Dixiecrat ” nominee .
Voters , even white ones in the South , reacted to Thurmond with a yawn .
He won 2.4 percent of the vote , just over a million , which was roughly what the Populist Party ’ s candidate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ won Florida , Georgia , North Carolina , Texas , and the rest of the South and border states other than the four most hardcore : South Carolina , Louisiana , Alabama , and Mississippi .
The Dixiecrat revolt was crushed .
It was clear that the South couldn ’ t win the fight alone , and for that , needed conservative allies in the North .
The problem was that the rest of the country , Northern Republican conservatives included , wanted nothing to do with the explicit , raw racism on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more subtle kind that is more familiar today .
But those Republicans did want something else : an end to the New Deal .
In order to forge the alliance between the racist Democrats in the South , then , and the business wing of the Republicans in the North , they had to fuse two , unlinked political movements — the drive for segregation and the rollback of the New Deal .
That required the South to go along with attacking programs that were extremely popular with the people of the South @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behind segregation and the preservation of the white Southern way of life .
Getting each to accept the other was not inevitable , nor was it easy .
That ’ s where the National Review comes in .
The move was made by linking the New Deal to a big , overreaching government that , yes , had electrified the country , built Social Security , dug the country out of the Depression , and so on , but also wanted to forcibly integrate society and ensure the franchise for Black voters .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ insults upon the Constitution , and Southern segregationists were primarily against the latter .
Buckley argued to Southerners that their defense of Jim Crow through the rhetoric of states ’ rights was too often “ opportunistic ” rather than principled — inarguably true — and that if they didn ’ t embrace a broader ideology of limited government , they wouldn ’ t find the allies they needed to succeed .
With Southerners willing to break from the New Deal , the Northern Republican elites were open to some level of compromise on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continue without party leaders needing to endorse white supremacy .
They satisfied their own consciences by pretending that their new allies weren ’ t racist ; rather , they simply deeply believed in the principle of local democracy and states rights .
That game of pretend is still going on in the National Review today .
was founded in 1955 as a project to undermine the New Deal , with the famous motto , “ It stands athwart history , yelling Stop.
” It invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be bandied about in polite society .
One 1956 editorial , titled “ The South Girds Its Loins , ” shows how it was typically done .
Those who oppose the South ’ s resistance tend to rest their case , simply , on the fact that they disapprove of racial discrimination of any kind .
It has been surprisingly difficult to fix their attention on the fact that , as far as the South and its sympathies are concerned , something else is at stake .
Indeed , support for the Southern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question of whether Negro and White children should , in fact , study geography side by side ; but on whether a central or local authority should make that decision .
What makes the earlier passage from Buckley , explicitly justifying violence to perpetuate white dominance , so startling is not that the ideas in it are unusual or surprising , but that they are so nakedly on display .
It was obvious to Buckley ’ s colleague and co-founder , L. Brent Bozell Jr. , how damaging that messaging could be to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moderate , pro-business northern Republicans and segregationist Democrats .
In the next issue , he pushed back .
“ This magazine , ” Bozell wrote , “ has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong , and capable of doing grave hurt to the conservative movement.
” Bozell argued that Buckley was making a mockery of the rule of law , undermining conservative values .
Buckley responded with a “ clarification ” that the constitutional amendments that gave Black people the right to vote and the right to equal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by much of the South as inorganic accretions to the original document , grafted up int by a victor-at-war by force.
” But he conceded to Bozell that conservatives should be more careful in how they frame their attacks on the right to vote by “ enacting [ voter suppression ] laws that apply equally to blacks and whites.
” Buckley was anticipating the color-blind logic Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would use to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013 .
Bozell ’ s framing is what allows Scully to now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upright of men , ” without a racist bone in his body , and therefore the project itself could never have exploited racial grievance .
We don ’ t need to see straight into the heart of Goldwater , though , to understand how the Republican Party really evolved .
In 1962 , regular National Review writer James Kilpatrick published a book called “ The Southern Case for Segregation.
” His case : “ the Negro race , as a race , plainly is not equal to the white race , as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in the wider world beyond , by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years , has the Negro race , as a race , ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race , as a race.
” The problem , he argued , was that Black leaders refuse to admit their own inferiority .
“ A really massive , significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question , ‘ Why are we treated as second-class citizens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to it : Because all too often that is what we are .
… The Negro says he ’ s the white man ’ s equal ; show me , ” he wrote .
Kilpatrick and Buckley were close .
Buckley assigned Kilpatrick to cover major segregation cases for the magazine , and once called him “ the primary editorialist on our side of the fence .
… In fact , I sometimes jocularly refer to him as ‘ Number one , ’ ” according to “ The Fire is Upon Us : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the Debate Over Race in America.
” In 1958 , Kilpatrick connected Buckley with Bill Simmons , a leader of Citizens Council , an abjectly white supremacist organization , suggesting a partnership with National Review had potential .
Simmons sent Buckley the organization ’ s mailing list , along with other offers of support .
Buckley wrote back to thank him , in an anecdote relayed in “ The Fire is Upon Us ” : “ I feel that our position on states ’ rights is the same as your own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far as political decentralization is concerned , pursuing the same ends.
” This was Buckley quite actively seeking an alliance with active and explicit white supremacists in order to fuse together his movement with theirs .
Whatever he felt about them personally , his goal was to empower them .
Kilpatrick ’ s objectively white supremacist book was reviewed fondly in the pages of National Review by Bozell .
Bozell , who married Buckley ’ s sister ( producing , among 10 children , conservative provocateur L. Brent Bozell III ) , would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s defining 1960 book , “ The Conscience of a Conservative , ” and to serve as a top adviser to his 1964 presidential campaign — a campaign National Review helped make possible — refining the conservative language on race so that its meaning was easy to grasp but its words were slippery .
“ Bozell would help ensure that his would be the political course modern American conservatism would steer , ” concluded Lowndes .
The language Bozell helped make famous was around local control .
He used the concept of “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” which essentially said that a state , or group of states , was free to reject a federal law it found unconstitutional .
Civil rights laws , considered unconstitutional in the South among white leaders , could therefore be ignored , and the states themselves could set the policy .
Here , Goldwater would say that he personally felt that the Southern states ought to embrace civil rights , but that it was up to them .
The result was the same as if he stridently opposed civil rights — and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flocked to Goldwater .
“ I don ’ t like segregation , ” Goldwater said in 1962 .
“ But I don ’ t like the Constitution kicked around either.
” The next year , National Review writer William Rusher , in an article called “ Crossroads for the GOP , ” argued that “ Goldwater , and Goldwater alone , can carry enough Southern and Border States to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North.
” This could be done , Rusher suggested , without resorting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same magazine issue , Lowndes found , included two cartoons , one of a bearded Confederate general holding aloft a GOP flag , and another of Confederate soldiers firing cannons , with the cannonballs labeled “ Republican.
” The cartoons are not reprinted in his book , though perhaps Scully or Lowry could dig them out of the archives .
( Check the February 12 , 1963 issue . )
After the ’ 64 convention — in which the civil rights plank , Scully neglects to mention , was watered down by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ none other than Strom Thurmond rallied to Goldwater ’ s banner .
He made a television announcement early in the fall that he was leaving the Democratic Party ( again ) .
“ The Democratic Party , ” he said , “ has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups , power-hungry union leaders , political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors.
” His indictment continued : The party “ has rammed through Congress unconstitutional , unworkable and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he ’ d be joining the “ Goldwater Republican Party , ” joining him in the fight “ to make the Republican Party a party which supports freedom , justice and constitutional government.
” He was already a reader of the National Review , having been gifted a subscription by Buckley ’ s father who assured him that his son “ is for segregation and backs it in every issue.
” Buckley , in a column in July 1963 , warned that if Democrats tried to paint Goldwater ’ s movement as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just become that .
If the Democrats , in their anxiety to discredit Goldwater and the conservative wing of the Republican Party , hammer away at the themes that such sentiments as Goldwater ’ s add up to an anti-Negro policy , then those who side with Goldwater may begin reconstructing their habits of thought and argument ; and eventual their policies .
Thereafter , they might proceed , resignedly , on the assumption that what is anti-Negro and what is traditionally American are apparently the same thing .
And that therefore one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trucking to the Negro vote .
That same year , conservative reporter Robert Novak attended an annual RNC meeting in Denver , concluding that “ a good many , perhaps a majority of the party ’ s leaders , envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact , though not in name , the White Man ’ s Party.
” Six years earlier , Buckley had made the forceful argument in the pages of National Review that “ the White community is so entitled [ to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the time being , it is the advanced race.
” Now Goldwater , with the enthusiastic support of Thurmond , was running on a platform that would legally allow such white supremacy to continue in the South .
He lost badly to Lyndon B. Johnson , but Richard Nixon implemented the strategy in 1968 , and the parties were realigned .
The GOP was now the White Man ’ s Party — courtesy of Goldwater , Buckley , and National Review .
The tragedy of Buckley is that he did personally evolve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ civil rights movement and the white violence that met it did help Buckley genuinely evolve .
He came around to support federal enforcement of civil rights laws , the rights of Black people to vote , and even affirmative action to right years of injustice .
He attacked the John Birch Society and warred with anti-Semites .
When Kilpatrick eventually gave up defending segregation , Buckley cheered him .
But like so many too-clever operatives before him and since , the forces he empowered became too powerful for him and his magazine .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Citizens Council for his own movement ’ s gain , but it worked the other way around .
Today , it ’ s unfolding as farce .
In January 2016 , National Review dedicated an entire issue to taking down Trump , making a full-throated conservative case against him .
One of the columns is drafted by Bozell ’ s son , L. Brent Bozell III .
“ Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all , ” Bozell III suggested , comparing him unfavorably to Ronald Reagan , who , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reader of National Review and “ supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him.
” National Review has since been brought around , and is four-square behind Trump .
He has the right instincts and enemies , the magazine argues , even if his language could use some greater sophistication .
But now that Buckley ’ s ghost has bent the knee to the Citizens ’ Council , nobody in Trump ’ s world cares what National Review thinks .
The magazine ’ s faux-intellectual discourse is no longer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resignedly or not — built up .
All that ’ s left to do for the magazine is hug closer to Trump , and celebrate each new lifetime judicial confirmation .
After all , there may be some differences , but , in the words of Buckley , both partners are “ pursuing the same ends.
” What could go wrong ?

Stuart Stevens, who has gone from running Mitt Romney’s campaign for president in 2012 to a perch as a leading Never Trumper, is out with a new book: his mea culpa of sorts, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
Some of Stevens’s former colleagues don’t like it, and one of them, Matthew Scully, savaged it in National Review. “Perhaps the most devastating book review you’ll ever read,” National Review editor Rich Lowry promised.
The review is, to be sure, unfriendly, countering that Stevens is, in so many words, a clown, a hack, a liar, a grifter — and wrong. I’m not here to referee the bulk of their dispute, but one particular claim by Scully in his review merits a closer look.
In his book, Stevens apologizes for his role in propping up a Republican Party he now considers to be little more than a “white grievance party” cynically exploiting racism in the pursuit of power. Scully objects to much of what Stevens has to say in the book, and he zeroes in on Stevens’s claim that, in hindsight, he should have seen all along that Republicans were getting ahead by exploiting racism. Stevens cites the rise of the New Right with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 straight through to President Donald Trump.
Scully is appalled at such libel upon the GOP, and comes to the spirited defense of Goldwater and one of his chief advocates, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was a founder of the National Review and, in many respects, the modern conservative movement, who, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”
William F. Buckley, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”
“As a rule of thumb,” Scully responds in the reportedly devastating review, “anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as ‘ugliness and bigotry’ the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs.”
Scully might want to take a dive through the archives of his own magazine before offering such a definitive judgment. A review of that record shows there is no doubt which side of history Buckley placed himself on. Now, he stands athwart it with Trump, like it or not. Stevens, if anything, was being too polite.
In 1957, as Congress was debating the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction, Buckley penned an op-ed that scrubbed away the euphemisms to get straight to the heart of the matter.
“Let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote in the editorial, titled “Why The South Must Prevail.”
“The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote,” he goes on. “In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”
Buckley goes on to weigh whether such a position is kosher from a sophisticated, conservative perspective. “The central question that emerges,” he writes, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer is clear:
The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as “enlightened,” Buckley then grapples with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “civilized standards” he is intent on upholding.
Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
By 1957, when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation, lynchings were continuing in the South, a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow, a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper. Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South, Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing.
Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro—and a great many Whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote. The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
Disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence were justified, Buckley wrote, to maintain society.
Buckley’s argument, “undemocratic” as it may be, is an articulate defense of white supremacy — with a capital W, as was the house style at the magazine then — as the proper means toward the goal of a good society. Maintaining that good society through disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence was justified. The column appears not just in the magazine’s archives but also the 2008 book, “From The New Deal to The New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism,” published by Yale University Press and authored by Joseph E. Lowndes. The thesis of Lowndes’s book, that the fusion of Southern white supremacists and the business class was forged with the intellectual guidance of National Review, was buttressed by research a decade later: a paper from Cambridge University Press called, “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization.”
Buckley made his argument in the context of an internal debate over the direction of the Republican Party as the New Deal realignment was reshaping politics. One wing of the party, dominated by the Rockefellers and other Northeastern politicians, argued for a multiracial, moderate, pro-business party that continued to compete across the country. The other wing — with Goldwater, Buckley, and the National Review as its lead champions — argued for an alliance between Southern segregationists gradually leaving the Democratic Party and pro-business forces around the country.
Scully prefers a vastly different history of this realignment. Goldwater, who served as an Arizona senator, ran for president in 1964: a failed campaign but one that is credited with birthing the modern Republican Party. In June of that year, he famously cast his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing constitutional objections. Goldwater, Scully argues, was not involved in a “carefully crafted platform of coded racism,” but was simply a principled, small-government conservative:
To see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.” Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights. On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.
Photo: Warren K Leffler/Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Most students of American political history are probably scratching their heads at how Scully could attempt to deny that Republicans exploited racial grievance to build its base of white voters in the South. Here, again, the real history of the National Review is instructive. Linking the business wing of the GOP with the racist wing of Democratic Party was not the easy task it seems in hindsight, but required decades of effort to help these disparate camps find their shared interests and fuse together.
Scully is right that Black Americans’ drift away from the GOP began long before the Civil Rights Act. A majority of Black voters went for virulent racist Woodrow Wilson in 1912, attracted by his progressive economic platform, the first time since winning the right to vote that Black voters had cast it for a Democrat for president. That trend continued over the next several decades. In 1948, Harry Truman insisted on including a strong civil rights plank in the party’s platform. Southerners walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest and ran Strom Thurmond as their “Dixiecrat” nominee.
Voters, even white ones in the South, reacted to Thurmond with a yawn. He won 2.4 percent of the vote, just over a million, which was roughly what the Populist Party’s candidate had won in the 1890s. Truman won Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and the rest of the South and border states other than the four most hardcore: South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Dixiecrat revolt was crushed.
It was clear that the South couldn’t win the fight alone, and for that, needed conservative allies in the North. The problem was that the rest of the country, Northern Republican conservatives included, wanted nothing to do with the explicit, raw racism on display in the South, preferring the more subtle kind that is more familiar today.
But those Republicans did want something else: an end to the New Deal. In order to forge the alliance between the racist Democrats in the South, then, and the business wing of the Republicans in the North, they had to fuse two, unlinked political movements — the drive for segregation and the rollback of the New Deal. That required the South to go along with attacking programs that were extremely popular with the people of the South, and for Northern Republicans to get behind segregation and the preservation of the white Southern way of life.
Getting each to accept the other was not inevitable, nor was it easy. That’s where the National Review comes in.
The move was made by linking the New Deal to a big, overreaching government that, yes, had electrified the country, built Social Security, dug the country out of the Depression, and so on, but also wanted to forcibly integrate society and ensure the franchise for Black voters. Buckley was primarily against all the former insults upon the Constitution, and Southern segregationists were primarily against the latter. Buckley argued to Southerners that their defense of Jim Crow through the rhetoric of states’ rights was too often “opportunistic” rather than principled — inarguably true — and that if they didn’t embrace a broader ideology of limited government, they wouldn’t find the allies they needed to succeed.
With Southerners willing to break from the New Deal, the Northern Republican elites were open to some level of compromise on segregation that would allow white supremacy to continue without party leaders needing to endorse white supremacy. They satisfied their own consciences by pretending that their new allies weren’t racist; rather, they simply deeply believed in the principle of local democracy and states rights. That game of pretend is still going on in the National Review today.
The magazine was founded in 1955 as a project to undermine the New Deal, with the famous motto, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” It invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied about in polite society.
One 1956 editorial, titled “The South Girds Its Loins,” shows how it was typically done.
Those who oppose the South’s resistance tend to rest their case, simply, on the fact that they disapprove of racial discrimination of any kind. It has been surprisingly difficult to fix their attention on the fact that, as far as the South and its sympathies are concerned, something else is at stake. Indeed, support for the Southern position rests not at all on the question of whether Negro and White children should, in fact, study geography side by side; but on whether a central or local authority should make that decision.
National Review invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied about in polite society.
What makes the earlier passage from Buckley, explicitly justifying violence to perpetuate white dominance, so startling is not that the ideas in it are unusual or surprising, but that they are so nakedly on display. It was obvious to Buckley’s colleague and co-founder, L. Brent Bozell Jr., how damaging that messaging could be to the nascent efforts at an alliance between moderate, pro-business northern Republicans and segregationist Democrats. In the next issue, he pushed back.
“This magazine,” Bozell wrote, “has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing grave hurt to the conservative movement.” Bozell argued that Buckley was making a mockery of the rule of law, undermining conservative values. Buckley responded with a “clarification” that the constitutional amendments that gave Black people the right to vote and the right to equal protection of the laws “are regarded by much of the South as inorganic accretions to the original document, grafted up int by a victor-at-war by force.” But he conceded to Bozell that conservatives should be more careful in how they frame their attacks on the right to vote by “enacting [voter suppression] laws that apply equally to blacks and whites.” Buckley was anticipating the color-blind logic Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would use to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Bozell’s framing is what allows Scully to now claim that Goldwater was “the most upright of men,” without a racist bone in his body, and therefore the project itself could never have exploited racial grievance. We don’t need to see straight into the heart of Goldwater, though, to understand how the Republican Party really evolved.
Photo: John Lent/AP
In 1962, regular National Review writer James Kilpatrick published a book called “The Southern Case for Segregation.” His case: “the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.”
The problem, he argued, was that Black leaders refuse to admit their own inferiority. “A really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, ‘Why are we treated as second-class citizens?’ and return a candid answer to it: Because all too often that is what we are. … The Negro says he’s the white man’s equal; show me,” he wrote.
Kilpatrick and Buckley were close. Buckley assigned Kilpatrick to cover major segregation cases for the magazine, and once called him “the primary editorialist on our side of the fence. … In fact, I sometimes jocularly refer to him as ‘Number one,’” according to “The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.”
In 1958, Kilpatrick connected Buckley with Bill Simmons, a leader of Citizens Council, an abjectly white supremacist organization, suggesting a partnership with National Review had potential. Simmons sent Buckley the organization’s mailing list, along with other offers of support. Buckley wrote back to thank him, in an anecdote relayed in “The Fire is Upon Us”: “I feel that our position on states’ rights is the same as your own and that we are therefore, as far as political decentralization is concerned, pursuing the same ends.” This was Buckley quite actively seeking an alliance with active and explicit white supremacists in order to fuse together his movement with theirs. Whatever he felt about them personally, his goal was to empower them.
Kilpatrick’s objectively white supremacist book was reviewed fondly in the pages of National Review by Bozell.
Bozell, who married Buckley’s sister (producing, among 10 children, conservative provocateur L. Brent Bozell III), would go on to ghostwrite Barry Goldwater’s defining 1960 book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and to serve as a top adviser to his 1964 presidential campaign — a campaign National Review helped make possible — refining the conservative language on race so that its meaning was easy to grasp but its words were slippery. “Bozell would help ensure that his would be the political course modern American conservatism would steer,” concluded Lowndes.
“I don’t like segregation,” Goldwater said in 1962. “But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.”
The language Bozell helped make famous was around local control. He used the concept of “interposition,” similar to “nullification,” which essentially said that a state, or group of states, was free to reject a federal law it found unconstitutional. Civil rights laws, considered unconstitutional in the South among white leaders, could therefore be ignored, and the states themselves could set the policy. Here, Goldwater would say that he personally felt that the Southern states ought to embrace civil rights, but that it was up to them. The result was the same as if he stridently opposed civil rights — and white Southern voters knew it, and flocked to Goldwater. “I don’t like segregation,” Goldwater said in 1962. “But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.”
The next year, National Review writer William Rusher, in an article called “Crossroads for the GOP,” argued that “Goldwater, and Goldwater alone, can carry enough Southern and Border States to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North.” This could be done, Rusher suggested, without resorting to exploitation of racial grievance. But the same magazine issue, Lowndes found, included two cartoons, one of a bearded Confederate general holding aloft a GOP flag, and another of Confederate soldiers firing cannons, with the cannonballs labeled “Republican.” The cartoons are not reprinted in his book, though perhaps Scully or Lowry could dig them out of the archives. (Check the February 12, 1963 issue.)
After the ’64 convention — in which the civil rights plank, Scully neglects to mention, was watered down by removing the word “enforcement” — none other than Strom Thurmond rallied to Goldwater’s banner. He made a television announcement early in the fall that he was leaving the Democratic Party (again). “The Democratic Party,” he said, “has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors.” His indictment continued: The party “has rammed through Congress unconstitutional, unworkable and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property rights of the individual.”
He said that he’d be joining the “Goldwater Republican Party,” joining him in the fight “to make the Republican Party a party which supports freedom, justice and constitutional government.”
He was already a reader of the National Review, having been gifted a subscription by Buckley’s father who assured him that his son “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.”
Buckley, in a column in July 1963, warned that if Democrats tried to paint Goldwater’s movement as racist, it might “resignedly” just become that.
If the Democrats, in their anxiety to discredit Goldwater and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, hammer away at the themes that such sentiments as Goldwater’s add up to an anti-Negro policy, then those who side with Goldwater may begin reconstructing their habits of thought and argument; and eventual their policies. Thereafter, they might proceed, resignedly, on the assumption that what is anti-Negro and what is traditionally American are apparently the same thing. And that therefore one must now choose between staying free and trucking to the Negro vote.
That same year, conservative reporter Robert Novak attended an annual RNC meeting in Denver, concluding that “a good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leaders, envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party.”
Photo: Lou Krasky/AP
Six years earlier, Buckley had made the forceful argument in the pages of National Review that “the White community is so entitled [to block Blacks from voting] because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Now Goldwater, with the enthusiastic support of Thurmond, was running on a platform that would legally allow such white supremacy to continue in the South. He lost badly to Lyndon B. Johnson, but Richard Nixon implemented the strategy in 1968, and the parties were realigned.
The GOP was now the White Man’s Party — courtesy of Goldwater, Buckley, and National Review.
The tragedy of Buckley is that he did personally evolve on questions of Jim Crow. The civil rights movement and the white violence that met it did help Buckley genuinely evolve. He came around to support federal enforcement of civil rights laws, the rights of Black people to vote, and even affirmative action to right years of injustice. He attacked the John Birch Society and warred with anti-Semites. When Kilpatrick eventually gave up defending segregation, Buckley cheered him.
But like so many too-clever operatives before him and since, the forces he empowered became too powerful for him and his magazine. Buckley may have thought he was exploiting the Citizens Council for his own movement’s gain, but it worked the other way around.
Today, it’s unfolding as farce. In January 2016, National Review dedicated an entire issue to taking down Trump, making a full-throated conservative case against him.
One of the columns is drafted by Bozell’s son, L. Brent Bozell III. “Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all,” Bozell III suggested, comparing him unfavorably to Ronald Reagan, who, Bozell III noted, was a devoted reader of National Review and “supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him.”
National Review has since been brought around, and is four-square behind Trump. He has the right instincts and enemies, the magazine argues, even if his language could use some greater sophistication. But now that Buckley’s ghost has bent the knee to the Citizens’ Council, nobody in Trump’s world cares what National Review thinks. The magazine’s faux-intellectual discourse is no longer needed by the forces that Buckley — resignedly or not — built up. All that’s left to do for the magazine is hug closer to Trump, and celebrate each new lifetime judicial confirmation. After all, there may be some differences, but, in the words of Buckley, both partners are “pursuing the same ends.” What could go wrong?


theintercept--2020-07-04--As Coronavirus Surges in ICE Detention, a Message in the Skies Says “RELEASE”

landmarks of downtown Los Angeles are an awful lot of buildings dedicated to imprisoning people .
The Twin Towers , which claims the dubious distinction of being the world ’ s largest jail , sits next to Men ’ s Central , and nearby there ’ s the Metropolitan Detention Center , a federal facility , as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office and the immigration courts .
Yesterday afternoon , a constellation of words appeared above these edifices , visible for miles around the city .
“ CARE NOT CAGES , ” “ CHINGA TU MIGRA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other phrases emerged in a circle behind a fleet of planes .
The skywriting was part of a nationwide artist intervention entitled “ In Plain Sight , ” designed to draw attention to the hundreds of places in communities across the country where immigrants and others are detained each day .
More messages will show up over different sites today and tomorrow .
Above Los Angeles , the planes were behind schedule .
Earlier in the day , members of local immigrant rights groups gathered with artist Beatriz Cortez on the edge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ICE ” in candy colors in the middle of a street .
A marimba band played , the day grew hot , and eventually most everyone went home to wait to see Cortez ’ s own phrase , “ NO CAGES NO JAULAS , ” suspended over the immigration court downtown .
Political messages in the sky seem as natural as a sunny day in Los Angeles right now ; when I went to the beach for the first time in months in early June , a little plane buzzed over , dragging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Since the killing of George Floyd , all-caps slogans protesting police violence and affirming Black lives are everywhere : in windows , taped to windshields , spray-painted on toppled statues , embroidered onto face masks , hung on sheets dangled from overpasses .
Of course this kind of mushrooming is typical at heated moments of protest , but the signs have a different resonance now , at a time when we are muted by our masks , kept indoors by the virus .
They become a way of saying : I am @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as quickly co-opted by mayors authorizing murals and brands commissioning artwork for their boarded-up shop windows ) .
In that way , “ In Plain Sight ” fits right into the moment , and in-person gatherings like Cortez ’ s highlight , as she put it , “ the Central American groups that have been fighting for these things for 40 years.
” “ Rather than being an artwork about immigration , this is an artwork that seeks to serve and amplify the on-the-ground work that ’ s been done by our partner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ founded the project along with another Los Angeles based artist , rafa esparza .
“ In Plain Sight ” was born out of a group text with artists who had been making work to protest the separation of families at the border and other abuses , but the idea to use skywriting came when Cassils had just returned from Europe and saw a plane spell out “ Happy 4th ” last July , a sight that evoked for them a “ militaristic display of patriotism.
” “ What would it be like , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and reclaim this idea of what is it to be patriotic on the 4th of July , in this country , in this moment ?
” The vaporous letters of skywriting , at once ephemeral and numinous and pleasantly kitschy , have appealed to artists for decades , though the expense makes its use fairly rare .
( Technically , what “ In Plain Sight ” uses is not skywriting — one plane looping around to make alphabet shapes — but skytyping , in which several planes fly in formation , guided by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the form of letters . )
The technique has been used for advertising since the 1920s , and was popularized by brands like Pepsi , which had its own fleet of whirling messengers .
But Instagram has made skywriting exponentially more valuable , since the temporary display lives on in every passerby ’ s post , and the press materials for “ In Plain Sight ” stressed its ’ grammable nature ; like much public art , the project merges commercial tactics with artistic intent in the name of raising awareness .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Puma , and was struck by the enormous amount of money that went toward a single ad campaign for shoes .
“ As performance artists , we ’ re dealing with very little means , ” they said .
“ But after seeing the audacity of the money spent on shoes , and learning abut the insanity of the problem [ of immigration detention ] and the scope and scale , we thought , we need to make this big .
We approached the skytyping corporation here in LA and we asked them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gig you ’ ve ever done ?
’ and they said , ‘ Well , we ’ ve done a nationwide campaign of 80 messages nationwide , for Geico.
’ So we decided we would go for that.
” The often mysterious phrases that emanate from the tails of the planes are followed by the hashtag # xmap , directing people to a website showing the hundreds of immigration detention facilities across the country and offering connections to local immigrant rights and other groups organizing to end detention .
“ To stand in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to abolish ICE meant that we also had to engage with the history of violence and incarceration in the U.S. , ” said esparza .
That meant inviting messages from Black and Indigenous artists and activists , as well as Japanese American artists whose relatives had been in internment camps in World War II .
After George Floyd ’ s murder , he said , “ to stand in solidarity with the movement for Black lives , I wouldn ’ t call it a pivot , we just always had it.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or elegiac , like the name of Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia , the first person to die of Covid-19 in immigration custody , chosen by Dread Scott to be flown over the Statue of Liberty , while over the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn , another artist will write Mejia ’ s sister ’ s words about his death : “ My pain is so big.
” Esparza collaborated with Tijuana-based artists for three messages in Spanish near the border : NO TE RINDAS ( “ Don ’ t give up ” ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The border crossed us ” ) ; and SOY NUBE DE ESPERANZA ( “ I am a cloud of hope ” ) .
Others are crystal clear : the many variations on “ Abolish ICE , ” or “ YER TAX $ CAGE KIDS ” over the San Diego ICE field office .
That urgency is needed .
Over 22,800 people are currently in ICE custody .
While that ’ s many thousands less than it was before the coronavirus struck — in 2019 , the average daily detained population was about 50,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s taken lawsuits to force the agency to free people .
Just last week , a judge ordered the government to release children who had been held for weeks with their parents .
“ The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures , ” the judge wrote .
Fear ripped through immigrant detention centers as the virus spread , with people inside desperately protesting unsanitary and crowded conditions and lack of medical attention .
Guards met protests with retaliation , including pepper-spray , solitary confinement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Recently , cases in ICE detention have jumped — a facility in Eloy , Arizona , owned and operated by the private contractor CoreCivic , reported 222 confirmed infections last week .
The message over Eloy ?
A single word : “ RELEASE .
”

Clustered among the landmarks of downtown Los Angeles are an awful lot of buildings dedicated to imprisoning people. The Twin Towers, which claims the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest jail, sits next to Men’s Central, and nearby there’s the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal facility, as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office and the immigration courts.
Yesterday afternoon, a constellation of words appeared above these edifices, visible for miles around the city. “CARE NOT CAGES,” “CHINGA TU MIGRA,” “ABOLITION NOW,” and other phrases emerged in a circle behind a fleet of planes. The skywriting was part of a nationwide artist intervention entitled “In Plain Sight,” designed to draw attention to the hundreds of places in communities across the country where immigrants and others are detained each day. More messages will show up over different sites today and tomorrow.
Above Los Angeles, the planes were behind schedule. Earlier in the day, members of local immigrant rights groups gathered with artist Beatriz Cortez on the edge of MacArthur Park to chalk “DEFUND ICE” in candy colors in the middle of a street. A marimba band played, the day grew hot, and eventually most everyone went home to wait to see Cortez’s own phrase, “NO CAGES NO JAULAS,” suspended over the immigration court downtown.
Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants
Political messages in the sky seem as natural as a sunny day in Los Angeles right now; when I went to the beach for the first time in months in early June, a little plane buzzed over, dragging a banner declaring “Black Lives Matter.” Since the killing of George Floyd, all-caps slogans protesting police violence and affirming Black lives are everywhere: in windows, taped to windshields, spray-painted on toppled statues, embroidered onto face masks, hung on sheets dangled from overpasses. Of course this kind of mushrooming is typical at heated moments of protest, but the signs have a different resonance now, at a time when we are muted by our masks, kept indoors by the virus. They become a way of saying: I am there with you (a message just as quickly co-opted by mayors authorizing murals and brands commissioning artwork for their boarded-up shop windows).
“To stand in solidarity with folks who were saying they want to abolish ICE meant that we also had to engage with the history of violence and incarceration in the U.S.”
In that way, “In Plain Sight” fits right into the moment, and in-person gatherings like Cortez’s highlight, as she put it, “the Central American groups that have been fighting for these things for 40 years.”
“Rather than being an artwork about immigration, this is an artwork that seeks to serve and amplify the on-the-ground work that’s been done by our partner organizations,” said Cassils, who founded the project along with another Los Angeles based artist, rafa esparza. “In Plain Sight” was born out of a group text with artists who had been making work to protest the separation of families at the border and other abuses, but the idea to use skywriting came when Cassils had just returned from Europe and saw a plane spell out “Happy 4th” last July, a sight that evoked for them a “militaristic display of patriotism.”
“What would it be like,” they said, “to usurp and reclaim this idea of what is it to be patriotic on the 4th of July, in this country, in this moment?”
The vaporous letters of skywriting, at once ephemeral and numinous and pleasantly kitschy, have appealed to artists for decades, though the expense makes its use fairly rare. (Technically, what “In Plain Sight” uses is not skywriting — one plane looping around to make alphabet shapes — but skytyping, in which several planes fly in formation, guided by a computer to puff out digital dots in the form of letters.)
The technique has been used for advertising since the 1920s, and was popularized by brands like Pepsi, which had its own fleet of whirling messengers. But Instagram has made skywriting exponentially more valuable, since the temporary display lives on in every passerby’s post, and the press materials for “In Plain Sight” stressed its ’grammable nature; like much public art, the project merges commercial tactics with artistic intent in the name of raising awareness. Cassils had been doing some work for Puma, and was struck by the enormous amount of money that went toward a single ad campaign for shoes.
“As performance artists, we’re dealing with very little means,” they said. “But after seeing the audacity of the money spent on shoes, and learning abut the insanity of the problem [of immigration detention] and the scope and scale, we thought, we need to make this big. We approached the skytyping corporation here in LA and we asked them, ‘What’s the biggest gig you’ve ever done?’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ve done a nationwide campaign of 80 messages nationwide, for Geico.’ So we decided we would go for that.”
The often mysterious phrases that emanate from the tails of the planes are followed by the hashtag #xmap, directing people to a website showing the hundreds of immigration detention facilities across the country and offering connections to local immigrant rights and other groups organizing to end detention.
“To stand in solidarity with folks who were saying they want to abolish ICE meant that we also had to engage with the history of violence and incarceration in the U.S.,” said esparza. That meant inviting messages from Black and Indigenous artists and activists, as well as Japanese American artists whose relatives had been in internment camps in World War II. After George Floyd’s murder, he said, “to stand in solidarity with the movement for Black lives, I wouldn’t call it a pivot, we just always had it.”
Some of the messages are purposefully enigmatic or elegiac, like the name of Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, the first person to die of Covid-19 in immigration custody, chosen by Dread Scott to be flown over the Statue of Liberty, while over the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, another artist will write Mejia’s sister’s words about his death: “My pain is so big.” Esparza collaborated with Tijuana-based artists for three messages in Spanish near the border: NO TE RINDAS (“Don’t give up”); LA FRONTERA NOS CRUZO (“The border crossed us”); and SOY NUBE DE ESPERANZA (“I am a cloud of hope”).
Related Authorities Transferred Hundreds of People Between Shadowy Immigration Prisons, Ignoring Coronavirus Threat
Others are crystal clear: the many variations on “Abolish ICE,” or “YER TAX $ CAGE KIDS” over the San Diego ICE field office.
That urgency is needed. Over 22,800 people are currently in ICE custody. While that’s many thousands less than it was before the coronavirus struck — in 2019, the average daily detained population was about 50,000 — in many cases, it’s taken lawsuits to force the agency to free people. Just last week, a judge ordered the government to release children who had been held for weeks with their parents.
“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” the judge wrote.
Fear ripped through immigrant detention centers as the virus spread, with people inside desperately protesting unsanitary and crowded conditions and lack of medical attention. Guards met protests with retaliation, including pepper-spray, solitary confinement, and transfers to different facilities. Recently, cases in ICE detention have jumped — a facility in Eloy, Arizona, owned and operated by the private contractor CoreCivic, reported 222 confirmed infections last week. The message over Eloy? A single word: “RELEASE.”


theintercept--2020-07-02--There's a War Going On Over Kamala Harris's Wikipedia Page, With Unflattering Elements Vanishing

At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris ’ s “ tough-on-crime ” record from her Wikipedia page , her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes , her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct , and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “ it is not progressive to be soft on crime ” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public gets to know her on the national stage .
The edits , according to the page history , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s volunteer editor brigade , and have drawn the page into controversy , though it ’ s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning .
Presidential vetting operations have entire teams of investigators , but for the public , when the pick is announced , the most common source for information about the person chosen is Wikipedia .
And there , a war has broken out over how to talk about Harris ’ s career .
California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris is widely seen as a front-runner for a spot on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with vetting well underway .
In 2016 , The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton ’ s vice presidential pick , noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine ’ s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate ’ s in the weeks leading up to the announcement .
The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin ’ s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain ’ s announcement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks : Harris had 408 , Stacey Abrams had 66 , Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22 , and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four .
Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris ’ s edits were coming from a single person .
Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California , which has increasingly become a political liability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police reform legislation after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor .
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary , she branded herself as a “ progressive prosecutor ” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change .
But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past .
A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud , despite recommendations from her staff attorneys , has also been deleted : In 2013 , Harris did not prosecute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence “ suggestive of widespread misconduct ” according to a leaked memo .
… In 2017 , she said that her office ’ s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “ following the facts and the evidence … like any other case ” .
In 2016 , Mnuchin donated $ 2,000 to her campaign , making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin , but as senator , she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury .
A section on an Ethics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted .
A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017 , where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , was removed altogether .
The Wikipedia user , who goes by the username “ Bnguyen1114 , ” has made hundreds of edits to Harris ’ s page throughout the last several months , often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors , who pointed out that the language was getting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literature .
“ You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris ’ s office , cataloging every single one and adding it to the article , ” one Wikipedia editor said .
“ That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.
” On June 11 , the Wikipedia user removed this section referencing the Orange County scandal from the page , saying that they were proofreading for length : Later that year , Harris appealed a judge ’ s order to take over the prosecution of a high-profile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 250 prosecutors from the Orange County District Attorney ’ s office over allegations of misconduct by Republican D.A .
Tony Rackauckas .
Rackauckas was alleged to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence .
Harris noted that it was unnecessary to ban all 250 prosecutors from working on the case , as only a few had been directly involved , later promising a narrower criminal investigation .
The U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation into Rackauckas in December 2016 , but he was not re-elected .
In her first bid for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tough-on-crime ” approach in the San Francisco district attorney race and unseated Terence Hallinan , who was considered one of the “ most left-wing politicians in the country.
” Under Hallinan , the district attorney ’ s office focused on rehabilitative justice initiatives instead of incarceration , which led to the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California .

California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris is widely seen as a front-runner for a spot on the ticket with presumptive nominee Joe Biden, with vetting well underway.
Presidential vetting operations have entire teams of investigators, but for the public, when the pick is announced, the most common source for information about the person chosen is Wikipedia. And there, a war has broken out over how to talk about Harris’s career.
At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris’s “tough-on-crime” record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.
In 2016, The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate’s in the weeks leading up to the announcement. The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain’s announcement.
Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.
Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California, which has increasingly become a political liability, while taking a lead on Democratic police reform legislation after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, she branded herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change. But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past.
A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud, despite recommendations from her staff attorneys, has also been deleted:
In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWest despite evidence “suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo. … In 2017, she said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “following the facts and the evidence … like any other case”. In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin, but as senator, she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.
A section on an Ethics Commission finding Harris guilty of a campaign spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted. A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.
The Wikipedia user, who goes by the username “Bnguyen1114,” has made hundreds of edits to Harris’s page throughout the last several months, often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors, who pointed out that the language was getting pulled directly from press releases and campaign literature. “You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris’s office, cataloging every single one and adding it to the article,” one Wikipedia editor said. “That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.”
On June 11, the Wikipedia user removed this section referencing the Orange County scandal from the page, saying that they were proofreading for length:
Later that year, Harris appealed a judge’s order to take over the prosecution of a high-profile mass murder case and to eject all 250 prosecutors from the Orange County District Attorney’s office over allegations of misconduct by Republican D.A. Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas was alleged to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence. Harris noted that it was unnecessary to ban all 250 prosecutors from working on the case, as only a few had been directly involved, later promising a narrower criminal investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation into Rackauckas in December 2016, but he was not re-elected.
In her first bid for public office, Harris embraced a “tough-on-crime” approach in the San Francisco district attorney race and unseated Terence Hallinan, who was considered one of the “most left-wing politicians in the country.” Under Hallinan, the district attorney’s office focused on rehabilitative justice initiatives instead of incarceration, which led to the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California.
While campaigning in the Mission District, SF Weekly reported at the time, Harris slammed Hallinan for failing to prosecute anti-war protesters for property destruction. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” she said.
On June 8, the Wikipedia user removed this quote from the page, saying that the changes made were “minor edits for length.”
In a paragraph about Harris announcing a new state law requiring law enforcement agencies to collect statistics on how many people are shot, seriously injured, or killed by police officers throughout the state, the user removed the following sentence: “Harris was later criticized by criminal justice advocates for her measured approach.”
This user also tried to make edits to the “Bernie Bro” Wikipedia page, a term that refers to the persistent myth that Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign had a monolithic base of support concentrated only among young white men.
According to the user’s edit history, they tried to remove a paragraph explaining that although Sanders’s base skewed white in 2016, the Vermont senator actually had the most diverse base of any of the Democratic presidential candidates.
Harris’s most fervent online supporters, or stans, call themselves the “KHive.” Though members of the KHive are excited by the prospect of Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, shattering another glass ceiling, they also cite her policy positions as a reason for their support. They generally consider her background as a prosecutor to be a political strength.