Indefatigably feckless dudebro Steven Whiddon and erstwhile exec direc of the media district BID. He’s off the bus for as yet undetermined reasons.California politics is a tough way to make a living. We play hardball out here on the coast! If you can’t hit major league pitching you gotta leave the bright lights big city and head back in bowed-down shame to Santa Monica or West Hollywood or some other no-count small town.
Another attorney from California that we’d have all been better off without, singing the blues in Beverly Hills in 1962The emails are available here. There’s a lot of chaff, as usual, but a lot of tasty morsels as well. My colleagues will certainly be giving this material the fine-toothed comb treatment in the future, but I thought it’d be nice to announce the availability of the documents to satisfy your hunger and thirst for the truth which, as is well-known, shall set you free.
Picture of famed future president and California attorney is, according to Wikimedia, in the public domain. Take that, Helen Gahagan Douglas!
Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, ‘[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you.’ And what should we do we do about that in Hollywood in 2015, Lee?The late Lee Atwater, erstwhile bought-and-souled Robert Johnson of the Republican party, in a rare moment of lucidity, once explained how white politicians enforced and maintained white supremacy in the United States in the last half of the Twentieth Century:
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. Everybody uses this same picture of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first Ku Klux Klan, looking like he just finished eating the body of a lynched ex-slave but he’s still hungry for more, so we thought we’d use it too.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’1
From 1865 through nineteen-fifty-something, politicians and demagogues, e.g. Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first incarnation of white businessman’s social group the Ku Klux Klan and Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile president of white supremacist organization Harvard University, could just use the magical incantation of “nigger, nigger, nigger,” and their will would be done. Woodrow Wilson, vocal admirer of D. W. Griffith’s seminal work of cinematic white supremacy. Why do white people have such thin lips?
But, as Lee points out, things started to get more complicated. Instead of saying “nigger,” white supremacists had to talk about states’ rights, and, later taxation. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy, which got him elected in 1968 using those precise codewords which his audience heard as “nigger, nigger, nigger,” the same Southern Strategy that a star-struck Lee Atwater is glorifying to the heavens as he breathlessly describes its genius.
By now, though, we’re well into the 21st Century and by now, as the incomparable Steven Johnson has so convincingly argued, everyone is way, way smarter than they used to be.2 These days, even talking too vigorously about taxation will expose one as a revanchist white supremacist. Lee Atwater died unlamented by sane people in 1991, so he didn’t get to see the present state of the progression he so enviously described above. A new vocabulary was needed to maintain white supremacy and, as humans are so very adaptive, a new vocabulary was developed. And wouldn’t Lee have been proud? Continue reading Nathan Bedford Forrest, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, and the Vicious Crypto-White-Supremacism of the Hollywood Area BIDs→
Richard Nixon takes a break from crying over spilt milk in the republic of Hell to speak from the grave, reminding one and all that the coverup is worse than the crimeLong-time readers of this blog will recall that on October 23, 2014, Sharyn Romano of the Hollywood Beautification Team essentially confessed on camera that she turns a blind eye to the criminal activities of her subordinates. We spent the last month feverishly anticipating the minutes of that meeting, wondering what fantastical description of this faux pas might be presented.
The safest thing, and what we were expecting, would have been to just not mention the hateful affair at all. Meeting minutes are a record of what was done in the meeting rather than a transcript of everything that was said. Since Sharyn’s report didn’t contain any action items it would have been totally reasonable to just note that she gave a report. But, for whatever reason, that’s not what happened. Continue reading Hollywood Media District Goes Full CYA, Approves Falsified Minutes→
![Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, '[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you.'](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Lee_Atwater_1989.jpg)
