Month: March 2020

Coronavirus Briefings: The Most Entertaining Hour of Television

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I’ve been watching the Coronavirus briefings every day. I do this partly to stay informed but mostly because they’re so damned entertaining.

If it’s not Trump grandstanding about how successful a president he had been before COVID-19, it’s him throwing a tantrum when reporters do things like quote his own words and ask questions that remind us that this is a serious health crisis.

But today, though a short episode, will probably go down in my memory as the best episode of all. One of Trump’s friends, Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow, took to the podium to talk about how his company was helping in the fight against COVID-19. They are making….something. I can’t even remember.

Anywho, at the end of his speech about what was relevant, he turned to Trump and asked if he could read a supplement to his speech; something he just scribbled down last minute.

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He then goes into a…2 years of speech and debate and IDEK what to call it…about how on November 8, 2016, God showed us grace (by allowing Trump to win, I guess) and that soon evolved into how “we” need to put God and the Bible back in our schools and our lives.

“God gave us grace on November 8th, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools and lives; a nation had turned its back on God. And I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families.”

We’ll call it a geshrai.

That inspirational tidbit was eventually followed by Greg Hayes of United Technologies that is teaming with Raytheon getting up there and throwing low-key shade about how they didn’t need to wait for the POTUS to invoke the Defense Production Act in order for them to help. The subtext and shade of that was that Trump invoked it after talks with GM fell through for the manufacturing of ventilators.

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As a grand finale, after Yamiche Alcindor, the PBS reporter who got under Trump’s skin severely yesterday by quoting him, asked her question today, and Trump called her question “snarky.” After that he cut and run like a wildebeest that just spotted a lion coming in his direction.

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Never did I think that this would become my favorite time of day. Then again, I didn’t think that I’d be forced inside by a virus that came from Asia and has been killing people all over the world so….

Black Folks Are Tired: On “Kung-Flu,” the “Chinese Virus,” and Expectations of Advocacy

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I’m sure everyone has heard by now that a White House staffer was accused by Weijia Chang, a CBS reporter and Asian-American, of calling COVID-19 the, “Kung-Flu.” In a now viral tweet, Chang rhetorically asked, “I wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.” On top of that, our Commander-in-Chief has been referring to the illness as the “Chinese virus” for well over a week at this point.

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Many Asian-Americans are expressing concern that characterizing COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” will further flame racist fires that they say they are experiencing. Several news reports like this one are popping up that detail Asian-Americans, some not even Chinese, dealing with slurs, physical assaults, and other poor treatment at the hands of non-Asians who believe that the victims are automatically carrying and spreading the virus on account of their ethnicity.

Of course, many on the left are pleading for others to take up for Asian-Americans to help extinguish this apparent onslaught of problematic behavior and combat anti-Asian racism.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we…start with this bullshit!

Anti-Blackness is a global problem and Asians and Asian-Americans have been some of the biggest perpetrators of anti-Blackness. Just yesterday, I came across this article where Chinese people were expressing their wish that after this pandemic is over, we niggas stay away from their country.

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Peter Liang, a police officer, was acquitted after he chose to add his name to the Hall of Fame of officers who saw a Black face and shot first and asked questions later when he killed Akai Gurley, an unarmed man, and didn’t even bother to call for help. And when that happened, did Asians join with Black Lives Matter to express their anger that yet another Black person was gunned down by implicit bias? Neaux. They rallied behind Peter Liang.

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But, let’s take it all the way back before many of us were born (or old enough to know better). Latasha Harlins was 15 years-old when an Asian store owner thought she was stealing and shot her in the back of the head, killing her. The store owner was found guilty of manslaughter but served no jail time.

On top of that, many Black people are able to recount the poor attitudes and treatment doled out by Asian owners and employees towards Black people; owners who have made hand-over-fist off of their Black patrons in overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods.

In a larger context, there would be no rights for any other ethnic groups were it not for the work done by Black people for decades. Period. Black people are tired of people telling us we have to advocate for groups that prove over and over that they hate us. We’ve done a 400+ year bid at the hands of white people, first, then non-Black Latinos, Asians, Italians, etc. I promise Asians, the “model minority,” will be just fine.

We have our own battles to fight; many we’ve been fighting since we got here around 1619. We already know what it’s like to not be able to walk around in peace without racist slurs thrown at us for no reason. We know what it’s like to have to fear for our children merely going to school. We know what all of this shit is like.

We also know what it’s like to walk into an Asian-owned store and be followed around and told to hurry and buy something because they think we might be stealing. We know what it’s like to hear non-Black Latinos use “the n-word” against us. We know what it’s like for the same Italians whose pizza restaurants we patronize to treat us like garbage even though we help put food on their table.

Black people have been asking people…EVERYBODY…to recognize our humanity for ages.

So…we’re tired. Ask the white people, who started that shit, to help.

Here’s a tip to the Asian-Americans who are concerned with how they’re being treated though…and listen closely because this comes from an expert…a real life African-American…

it wasn’t the Coronavirus that made them dislike you.

Chew on that.

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The Hillary Documentary: It’s Clear Why She Lost

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I just finished watching the Hulu documentary “Hillary.” It’s broken down into 4 episodes and pretty much chronicles her life from her childhood through where she is today.

There were a couple of things that I just couldn’t help but forget, partly because she stated them more than once, that made it obvious why she was defeated by Donald Trump.

First was her assertion that she simply could not understand why people didn’t find her trustworthy. She’s annoyed by it. You have a white woman who grew up in a Republican household, was a Goldwater Girl, was voted president of the Republican group at her college, and even, as a child throwing a temper tantrum told her dad she was going to get revenge by marrying a Democrat. It may sound minor but the thing is…people, especially Black people, aren’t so quick to overlook one’s past and readily accept their claim of a new way of thinking. This goes double for a group of people who were harmed by the person or group you “used to” support. That crime bill her husband signed as president didn’t help matters much either.

Secondly, white women. By now we know that 53% of white women turned on Hillary in the election and voted for Trump. On one of the episodes, they play a clip of Hillary being interviewed about her husband, then governor Bill Clinton, using the law firm she was employed by for litigation involving government matters. The concern was that she was in a position to sort of double dip since her firm handled State of Arkansas business.

In this particular interview, she says something like, “I could haven stayed home and baked cookies but I decided to fulfill my career in the law.”

Welp. You can guess how that turned out. In the next few scenes, white women who were homemakers express how pissed they were at her for those comments. They basically found them degrading, condescending, and every other word you could use to describe stay-at-home moms feeling insulted.

IDK if Hillary knows this, but many of those women were still alive during the 2016 election and they didn’t forget.

Additionally, one of the women on her team who would hold focus groups confirmed what I’ve been saying since…forever (call me Swami K). Many of the women did not like that she stayed married to Bill after the Monica Lewinsky situation. These women admitted that their husbands had cheated on them too and they decided to stay, but when it came to Hillary trying to lead the country with that same history, they weren’t into it.

Basically, they saw Hillary staying with Bill as a sign that she was more about the benefits of being married to him; too ambitious. And if you think about it, back to the trustworthiness issue, it’s hard to play the uber feminist role she played while staying with a husband who cheated on you more than once.

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Besides these two things, there are times when she comes off as…smug and very flippant. At one point, she talked about the “super predator” comment and the interviewer asked if she had to apologize for it. Hillary says, “I don’t know. I was talking about a lot of stuff people didn’t care about,” and shrugged.

This is also the documentary where Hillary proclaims that nobody wants to work with Bernie Sanders, although she and her team seemed mighty worried that he might beat her at one point.

I don’t know if the intent of this documentary was to humanize her or if someone just found her interesting enough to do a documentary on her but IDK if they accomplished that at all.

You can catch it on Hulu. It’s called, “Hillary.”

Pete and Amy Are Going Home…Where They Should Have Stayed In The First Place

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Note: I legit thought about my title speaking for itself and not writing anything else. No lie.

Last night, white people’s favorite mayor and the person white Liberals claimed would lead us in a new direction, Pete Buttigieg finally ended his bid for the Democratic nomination.

About an hour ago, Amy Klobuchar ended her bid as well and according to The New York Times, plans to endorse Biden (of course).

All I can say is…thank goodness!

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First of all, don’t get it twisted. I am well aware of the fact that this is the same old DNC bullshit that went on in 2016. The same bullshit that has people like me not feeling any of this shit right now. I am so unenthused that I forgot that tomorrow is Super Tuesday and I never forget election dates.

But, I am glad that Buttigieg and Klobuchar are finally going home. I wish they’d never have shown up in the first place, to be quite honest. You can read more on why here and here and here.

I used to be a Democrat. I used to be a voter who would just choose the Democratic candidate in all races. I felt like the Republicans were largely unabashed racists and sexists and needed to be stopped at all costs.

That has changed.

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Part of what changed it was randos like Buttigieg and Klobuchar coming out of nowhere and having the audacity to pretend like they were presidential material. Pete Buttigieg, to me, was every smug white boy who whited his way into everything good that has ever happened to him. Amy Klobuchar was every white woman who makes excuses for her husband using “the n-word” and claims she wants to help women but all the women she helps are white (but she’s not racist because her kid’s one Black friend with matted locs spends the night aaaaall the time).

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And there’s a part of me that is pissed because Kamala Harris, who I felt had way more business being in the field, dropped out of the race while Amy sat there using other people’s oxygen knowing good and gatdamned well she had neither the capability nor the intention of seeing this all the way through; let alone winning.

While I do feel that anyone who meets the criteria to be president should be able to run, the Democrats made a mess of things this time around and I think they truly hurt their credibility. If the DNC can engage in the kind of fuckery that they did in 2016 and now (I mean…it’s obvious), then the DNC can throw its weight around and not allow this catch-all primary thing to happen again.

On that note, bye Pete and Amy! Hope to never hear from you again!!!

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