Racism

Just as you would expect, the 2016 BET Awards were full of Black Lives Matter references and reminders to register to vote and then get out the vote for Hillary Clinton. After the opening of the award ceremony featured Beyoncé and her back-up dancers marching into the auditorium to a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, actor and producer Terence J went on to say, “Your vote is your voice,” and…

Concluding his Real Time show on Friday, HBO comedian Bill Maher called on President Barack Obama to go on an "apology tour" around the world to "drive Republicans nuts" and, presumably if Donald Trump loses the presidential election, to send a message that America is "back on our meds." On one of his most anti-America rants, Maher asserted that America "did some bad s***" in its history and has…

NPR's Asma Khalid made it clear in a series of posts on Twitter during the evening/early morning after the Brexit vote that she opposed the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union. Khalid initially expressed her shock after the British television network ITV projected that there was an 80 percent probability that 'Leave' would win. She later spotlighted a British Muslim's Tweet that…

On Wednesday night’s episode of NBC’s The Night Shift, “Three-Two-One,” a riot breaks out in response to a verdict about to be rendered on a 45-year-old white man charged with shooting and killing a black man as he waited roadside for a tow truck. The accused man’s story was one of self-defense but the Black Lives Matter crowd of protesters isn’t having any of it. The hospital staff at San…

The highly anticipated fourth season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black launched last Friday and I have to believe that true fans of the show were not disappointed. The story remains true to life in a minimum security prison, as you might imagine it to be, and managed to get all the way to the twelfth episode (out of thirteen) before politics entered. 

On Lifetime’s UnReal, a scripted drama about the behind-the-scenes making of a reality dating show, the recurring storyline of contestant Beth Ann (Lindsay Musil) being used as the chosen racist, white supremacist continues.

Alexandros Orphanides’s June 19 anti-imperialist tirade on The Huffington Post has as much jargon as a chemistry textbook, but fewer defensible arguments than the National Inquirer. According to Orphanides, the immigration problem facing us today isn’t the influx of illegal immigrants into the U.S. in 2016, but the illegal immigrants that infested North America in 1607.

According to Huffington Post, the Grand Old Party will become the Dead Old Party at the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland. Cause of death? Support for presumptive nominee Donald Trump.

Showing the continuing conflation of big-time sports journalism and liberal activism, Howard Bryant's “Ali Everlasting” tribute for ESPN Magazine used the boxing legend as a tool to condemn American racism and inequality Meanwhile at Sports Illustrated, lefty journalist Charles Pierce bashed the former Cuban embargo for "shredding" the Cuban economy:

On Wednesday, comedian and Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj spoke at the 72nd Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner attended by both politicians and the media. After using jokes to call all conservatives, the GOP and Fox News employees blood-loving racists, Minhaj—in all seriousness—accused Congress of being complicit in the deaths of “thousands of Americans” for the sake of…

Senior Justice Writer at the New York Daily News, Shaun King, discovered the cure for mass shootings: ban all white men. In response to the mass murder of 50 people this weekend by Omar Mateen, King tweeted: “We would cut mass shootings down by 75% if our nation banned all white men from this country. Wonder why nobody calls for that?”

New York Times liberals don’t come any more knee-jerk than Andrew Rosenthal, son of the paper’s long-serving former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal. Rosenthal served nine years as the paper’s Editorial Page editor, and his first opinion column, "Why Republicans Won't Renounce Trump," plays on a seemingly deathless themes: Racist Republicans and the Willie Horton ad from the 1988 campaign, which…

When liberals call Republicans “deniers,” it typically has to do with climate change. Jonathan Chait alleges big-time GOP denial on a non-scientific matter. “Republican voting support is increasingly coterminous with white racial resentment even as conservatives firmly believe in their own racial innocence,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post. “Conservatives deny the existence of racism in the…

Conservative Paul Ryan and liberal Lithwick agree that Donald Trump’s recent digs at Gonzalo Curiel were racist, but disagree about their significance. Ryan considers the attacks peculiar to Trump, while Lithwick sees them as of a piece with the Republican party’s “wider assault on the judiciary in the Obama era.” Lithwick even wondered rhetorically, “Do Trump’s smears of Judge Curiel differ all…