Tag: Reading

Around 6:30 p.m., Jon Ehrens, a producer for WHYY, the local public-radio station, went out to document the chaos. He was nervous to record the men, but, at first, the Bat Boys didn’t seem to care. “I’m ready to fuck shit up,” one man said. “You know, I’ve been looking for a fight for the past six months.” Around eight-thirty, Haskell, the ringleader, announced that the men had made their point. As the group walked away, about two dozen men gathered to listen to Haskell speak. Ehrens began to record the speech, and Haskell shouted at him, telling him to leave. When Ehrens turned to leave, four of the men followed and jumped him, beating him and breaking his nose. Ehrens later tweeted a photograph of his bloody face. Soon after, he began to receive death threats.

Early on in “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” the first of three autobiographies Douglass wrote over his lifetime, he recounts what happened—or, perhaps more accurately, what didn’t happen—after his master, Thomas Auld, became a Christian believer at a Methodist camp meeting. Douglass had harbored the hope that Auld’s conversion, in August, 1832, might lead him to emancipate his slaves, or at least “make him more kind and humane.” Instead, Douglass writes, “If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways.” Auld was ostentatious about his piety—praying “morning, noon, and night,” participating in revivals, and opening his home to travelling preachers—but he used his faith as license to inflict pain and suffering upon his slaves. “I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture—‘He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes,’ ” Douglass writes. Douglass is so scornful about Christianity in his memoir that he felt a need to append an explanation clarifying that he was not an opponent of all religion. In fact, he argued that what he had written about was not “Christianity proper,” and labelling it as such would be “the boldest of all frauds.” Douglass believed that “the widest possible difference” existed between the “slaveholding religion of this land” and “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”

Word has it that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” is hard to understand. Not so. It’s a cinch—no more difficult than, say, playing mah-jongg inside a tumble dryer, while the principles of quantum mechanics are shouted at you in fluent Esperanto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan fiddles with the sound mix of the movie, thus drowning out important conversations. If you thought that Bane, the villain in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), verged on the inaudible, wait for the folks in “Tenet.” Most of them make Bane sound like Julie Andrews.

Does anything matter anymore in American politics? In the week since Donald Trump’s Convention ended with a personality-cult party on the White House lawn, the President has completely refocussed his campaign on threats to law and order from “Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters.” He has suggested there will be a “Rigged Election”; urged supporters in North Carolina to commit election fraud, by voting twice; and likened protesters demanding racial justice to “Domestic Terrorists.” The President personally ordered a review of federal aid, with the goal of withholding funds from “anarchist” Democratic-run cities that have allowed “themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.” And he has baselessly alleged that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is taking some sort of “enhancement” drug, and claimed that Biden is the pawn of shadowy “dark forces.”

During the meeting, James reportedly focussed on pressuring the owners to do far more than they have. All thirty teams have committed three hundred million dollars across the next ten years toward a foundation empowering the Black community—small change, considering that twenty-two of the league’s owners are billionaires. A million dollars a year is a rounding error for the Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, one of the richest men in the world. The DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic, has spent millions of dollars promoting right-wing causes and candidates; Betsy DeVos is a member of Trump’s Cabinet. Quicken Loans, the company run by Dan Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration fund, and, shortly afterward, benefitted from a tax break originally intended to help the poor. Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, is a Trump supporter who furloughed roughly forty thousand employees from his casino-and-restaurant empire during the shutdown. Tom Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, has made billions in private equity, and frequently donates to Democratic candidates; his firm owns companies that contract with law-enforcement agencies and Border Patrol, including one that makes its money by charging incarcerated people exorbitant rates and fees to make phone calls.

Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.

The likelihood of political violence was also apparent from the start. Trump’s 2016 rallies tipped over into displays of aggression directed at the media and at those who opposed him. Such is the chaos of today that we’ve nearly forgotten that, two years ago, Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Clinton, and fourteen others he believed had treated Trump unfairly. Sayoc pleaded guilty; his lawyers described him as “a Donald Trump super-fan” who suffered from mental illness, leaving him vulnerable to the antagonisms of the political climate. The twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius was charged with fatally shooting twenty-three people in El Paso last year. The language of an anti-immigrant manifesto he allegedly posted before the shooting was noted for its echoes of Trump’s rationalizations for building his border wall. (Crusius pleaded not guilty.) This May, the Michigan legislature temporarily shut down, after armed militia members entered the capitol to protest the state’s stay-at-home order. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

“You’re lucky,” Wesley remembers hearing from above. “I’m not going to kill you. The police are going to do that for me.”