At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it? ... “Useful Idiots” co-host Katie Halper and I won’t be live-chugging on video tonight, but I’ll be playing along on Twitter… Robinson’s story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered “invisible.”. Under pressure from people like this, companies might address long-overdue inequities in boardroom diversity. A Substack newsletter by Matt Taibbi. Robinson’s story moreover did not render “whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” It did the opposite. Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars. Matt Taibbi's Most Recent Stories. No, you may not touch my penis at this time!” – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation, law firm, university, newsroom, etc. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? We want to hear from you! “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”. DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. Clearly, a situation needing fixing! He offers what he thinks is the best approach for protecting speech rights: “We seek to mobilize the working class in defense of its democratic rights, of its right to know the truth. Using random quotes from DiAngelo for target practice. In other cases, as in the instance of a gun-rights rally held at the Virginia State Capitol — many of whose attendees were apparently vocal opponents of Trump — livestream coverage by indy outlets like Jordan Chariton’s Status Coup was shut down, allegedly because it violated Google’s “firearms policy.”. “For the first time in the entire four years of Trump’s tenure, I’m worried on a very severe level,” says Matt. reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. “All he needed to do to be seen as a hero was not sound like an idiot and read updates,” says Katie. This sequence of events is ominous because a similar matched set of hearings and interrogations back in 2017 — when Senators like Mazie Hirono at a Judiciary Committee hearing demanded … This is just "Let's get nasty about something naughty to get nasty about!" His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey to Mike Taibbi, an NBC television reporter, and his wife. Useful Idiots is an informative and irreverent politics podcast with journalist Matt Taibbi and podcaster/writer Katie Halper. Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech: One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end. Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I -VT) attends the National Action Network's annual convention on April 5, 2019 in New York City. “In July of 2017, we noticed that search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site had fallen by approximately 75 percent in the span of just a few months,” says Damon. A day later, facing intense public pressure and threats of Senate inquiry, the company relented and said it would change its policy.Twitter’s legal chief, the New York Times said, was worried that the firm “could end up blocking content from journalists,” implying that it hadn’t already done just that.The company said it would henceforth allow similar content to be … Matt Taibbi: False accusations of racism are destroying the media. Early life and education. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said. This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility, could have amazing consequences. For your security, we need to re-authenticate you. DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly.