Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The Unblackening of Clinton Critics: Why the Voice of Larry Wilmore Had to Be Silenced

The biggest lie of the 2016 presidential election is the whopper Democrats routinely tell about their appeal to minorities.

These minorities are supposed to include the Latino population, but that's obviously not true--since Barack Obama earned the title Deporter-in-Chief by ordering the deportation of 7,000 immigrant children without so much as a court hearing on the subject. Even though some of those children came from countries savaged by Hillary Clinton's anti-democratic policies throughout Latin America, the Democrats like to pretend (without a scintilla of evidence) that America will treat Latinos at home and abroad better under Clinton than we have under Obama. (We won't.)

Minorities are also supposed to include Muslims, but it's hard for a president who uses drone strikes for extra-judicial assassinations of Muslim civilians (whether they are American citizens or not) to make the case that Democrats are as mindful of Muslim rights as they pretend to be. Clinton's unwavering commitment to interventionism should lead Muslims to expect her foreign policy to boil down to three sentences: "We went to the Muslim world. We saw the Muslim world. The Muslim world died." [Laughter.]

Minorities are also supposed to include the LGBTQ community--a community that is protected within the U.S. by laws and customs, not the presidency. Outside the U.S., if you want to torture, imprison, or execute people for their sexual orientations/identities, you'll need to make significant donations to the Clinton Foundation.

So who are these minorities that are so drawn to the Democrats? The way the Clinton media machine tells the story, there's only one minority community that really matters: the African-American community.

A central component of the DNC narrative in 2016 has been that Hillary Clinton appeals to "diverse" communities, but when Clinton was trounced by Bernie Sanders in Hawaii (the most ethnically diverse state in the country--with whites comprising less than 25% of the population), Clinton's surrogates refused to budge from their position that Sanders had no appeal in "diverse" communities

So when the Democrats accused Sanders of failing to appeal to diverse populations, what they really meant was that he wasn't appealing to black Americans.

But is that true?

The Clinton media machine doesn't care what's true. It doesn't care what Michelle Alexander has to say or how many people are listening to her (both inside and outside the black community).

It doesn't care what critics from the black left (such as Benjamin Dixon and others associated with Black Agenda Report) have been telling us for decades about how the Democratic Party shamelessly exploits black Americans for the political power it then uses to exploit those voters as citizens.

It certainly doesn't care if a Hindu from Hawaii (Tulsi Gabbard) wants to make a speech on Sanders' behalf at the Democratic National Convention.

But it cares a great deal about whether a black woman from Cleveland (Nina Turner) wants to do the same thing.

In fact, in Turner's case, the DNC cared enough to interfere by scrapping her speech at the last minute--because the worst sin that can be committed by corporate media in 2016 is to devote airtime to black voices that dare to be critical of Hillary Clinton (even if that criticism boils down to nothing more than supporting an alternative to her).

Accordingly, Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show had to be canceled.

The official story from Comedy Central is that Wilmore's show was canceled because of poor ratings. Wilmore's show inherited the time slot that used to belong to The Colbert Report and is down to just over half as many viewers as the Colbert vehicle claimed.

By that logic, however, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah should also have been canceled, since Noah has retained just over half of the viewers who used to tune in to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Ratings aren't the issue. The issue is that Wilmore dares to be critical of Hillary Clinton and DNC hypocrisy while Noah dares nothing and does nothing.

When Clinton first announced her candidacy, Wilmore brilliantly compared her to Khaleesi from Game of Thrones and suggested (based on a line of dialogue from the series) that Clinton's campaign slogan should be: "Hillary for America. I will take what is mine with fire and blood. I WILL TAKE IT."



At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Wilmore created anxiety among white liberal elites by observing: "Bernie's been hanging out with Killer Mike, or as Hillary Clinton calls him, Superpredator Mike."


If Wilmore were white, he would be able to get away with this kind of schtick because the corporate media has done everything possible to accommodate the DNC myth of the Bernie Bro. White males can make cutting comments about Clinton because their criticism fuels the argument that the only people opposed to warmongering corporatism are white, privileged misogynists.

But when Clinton is criticized by one of the people who is supposed to be part of her firewall (a black man working in corporate media, no less!), that is cause for alarm.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when she does everything possible to prop up the school-to-prison pipeline.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her response to Black Lives Matter is less political (i.e. supporting reform of police departments throughout the country) than politically expedient (i.e. co-opting Black Lives Matter though a cynical manipulation of Mothers of the Movement).

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her closest political allies include Rahm Emmanuel (who has essentially sold out Chicago's minority communities to Wall Street) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (who advocates for the payday lending industry that exploits minorities throughout Florida).

In fact, it's so hard to say that Clinton is a friend of the African-American community that the only way the networks can manage to say it with a straight face is to ensure that NO black voices of criticism are ever heard in response.

If one such voice ever got through, then the balloon of Clinton's arrogance about her firewall might pop.

And we can't have that--so take a long walk off a short dock, Mr. Wilmore.



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