Influences

In Baton Rouge, post-police shooting of Alton Sterling: three police killed, others wounded,  in ambush on July 16.

As the Noise Machine publicizes suspect Gavin Long's one-time membership in the Nation of Islam, Steve M. offers some more telling details on Long's path to planning a massacre—

... he got there by a circuitous route. He spent a long time obsessed with self-help and self-improvement, and wanted -- in an almost Trump-like way -- to sell his alleged greatness to other seekers of human perfection...

It's a story of someone with a military background—and mental instability—who gravitated to Afrocentric versions of sovereign citizenship, along with self-improvement. He also came under the influence of the "Men's Rights" movement. In other words, he had multiple crank ideas that, had he been a white supremacist cop-killer, would have made him "a lone wolf" whose actions were unfathomable and thus of no greater social significance.

Readying The Show

Republican convention preparations, appropriately underway.

Back, By No Popular Demand

The public spectacle returns.

Drunken swaggering, or just his usual lack of impulse control?
Sam's take.

The Butler, Doing It Again

This guy.

This week —

Anthony Senecal, who worked as Donald Trump's butler for 17 years before being named the in-house historian at the tycoon's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, has repeatedly published posts on his Facebook page that express profound hatred for President Barack Obama and declare he should be killed.

The posts were later taken down, and Trump "disavows" the remarks by the "former butler." All of a sudden, Senecal isn't an employee, he just hangs around as a Trump "historian.".

As the NYT quoted him, in a March interview,

"You're a Hispanic and you're in here trimming the trees and everything, and a guy walks up and hands you a hundred dollars," Mr. Senecal said. "And they love him, not for that, they just love him."

When Trump married the current wife

...Mr. Senecal greeted guests at the door, including Hillary Clinton. (In the interview, he offered a profane description for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race.)

Steve M. adds other sentiments from the Family Values heartland; one needs to take a shower after reading what's directed at Mrs. Obama and the kids.

Steve M. adds,

Here's what I want to know: When is the "respectable" political world going to recognize what a cesspool of hate and delusion conservatism has become in America?

Bottomless

Is the depth at which this walking malignancy functions.

Zimmerman's planned sale of his "American Firearm Icon" moved Charles Pierce to say, "I'm surprised he didn't mop up the blood and sell it by the pint."

The auction was later canceled, the BBC reports, adding Zimmerman's stated motives for the auction (beyond the unstated: further torment of Trayvon Martin's family)—

In an online posting to announce the auction, Mr Zimmerman said that he would use the profits to "fight" the Black Lives Matter movement and oppose Democrat Hillary's Clinton's presidential campaign.

RIP, "American Hero"

Sad to see this: the death of Michael Ratner today, at 72.

Will Bunch writes

...he kept going and going and won some of his greatest victories in the 21st Century, near what would prove to be the final years of his life. In his hometown of New York, he successfully fought to end the stop-and-frisk policies that unconstitutionally targeted blacks and Latinos. In the bigger arena, he challenged America's right to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without trial, and won his battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

His words from 2002 about the United States and the so-called "war on terror" were particularly prescient:

"A permanent war abroad means permanent anger against the United States by those countries and people that will be devastated by U.S. military actions. Hate will increase, not lessen; and the terrible consequences of that hate will be used, in turn, as justification for more restrictions on civil liberties in the United States."

How History Is Rewritten

An eye-opener from Adam Serwer: "The Secret History Of The Photo At The Center Of The Black Confederate Myth".

Rightists routinely conjure an entire false history from a spurious anecdote; here, a picture has been worth many thousands of false words. This photo has been used by modern Confederate apologists to create a story of rebel brothers-in arms—

Sergeant A.M. Chandler of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, Co. F., and Silas Chandler, family slave...
Library of Congress

There's no knowing what emotions are behind the subjects' expressions. The look on the face of Andrew Chandler, the young white slave-owner, suggests shell-shock. The expression on the face of his slave hints at the irony of Silas's being allowed to hold prop weapons, the only kind that would have been handed to a slave. Furthermore, it's difficult to think that the photographer who prepared this scene would have approached it as anything other than a joke.

Serwer describes the efforts of Silas Chandler's descendants to debunk the "brother-in-arms" nonsense. This fascinating read encompasses the uneasy relations between two Chandler families, descendants of master and of slave; what is known of Silas' history; how all this plays out in the context of Southern myth-making, old and new.

Following the Civil War, Southern partisans laid the foundation of the post-racial Confederacy shortly after its defeat. Knowing that the eyes of history would view the cause of slavery as, in the words of Ulysses Grant, "one of the worst for which a people ever fought," the vanquished Confederates sought to deny that they had ever fought to preserve slavery, or that their society had been built on the idea that white men were superior to black men.

More recently, the supposed participation of "black Confederate soldiers" has become a new theme for revisionists—

"You might think of the Black Confederate narrative as the modern version of the loyal slave narrative," said [historian] Kevin M. Levin. "The first references to black Confederate soldiers really don't appear until roughly the late 1970s, and it's in response to a changing memory of the Civil War."

In Serwer's account, it is a narrative that's taken in some historians who should know better.

Decades after the after the war's end, ex-slaves in Mississippi could apply for Confederate pensions based on their having been servants to masters at the battlefield. Silas Chandler applied for this pension in 1916; surviving paperwork confirmed his having gone to war only in (compelled) service to Andrew Chandler, not as a soldier himself.

Until recent years, the tintype was in the possession of Silas' descendants. It happened that great-grandson  Bobbie Chandler, who worked in print production at The Washington Times, gave the paper the photo to use for a story. Confederate "heritage" groups subsequently staged a 1994 "reunion," between Andrew Chandler Battaile Sr. (great-grandson of Andrew, Silas's master) and Bobbie Chandler. This was held at the Silas' grave, where a Confederate flag and iron cross were placed. Bobbie later acknowledged having made a mistake, after other members of the family insisted on having the flag and cross removed. Details here are not clear, but Battaile Sr.'s son—who also happens to be a "Confederate heritage" activist—gained possession of the tintype. Battaile Jr. seems to have been largely responsible for how widely publicized the photo became. Ultimately, he sold it for an undisclosed sum not shared with Silas' descendants.

"It's just continuing to make money off of a dead slave... them selling the tintype," says a great-granddaughter of Silas's. "So that's pretty low. That's about as low as you can go."

Low, certainly, from the standpoint of this particular family, as well as from a more general standpoint of justice. But in view of "changing memory," Silas Chandler's image was an exploitable bonanza, once it dropped into the hands of The Washington Times and promoters of "Confederate heritage."