For three years, Donald Trump has courted and enjoyed the support of the "alt-right," which is a euphemism for white supremacists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. They played a very large role in his election, with their temporary, barely sanitized public image providing putatively respectable cover for base racism, anti-Semitism and fascism.  

After his election, torch-carrying neo-Nazis marched, chanting their racist and anti-Semitic intent in no uncertain terms, and even murdered a woman. Trump refused to condemn them. To the contrary, he embraced them.

Since taking office, Trump and his supporters have rationalized, normalized and praised white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Just yesterday the president himself employed blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric at a rally, scapegoating a wealthy Jewish man as a political enemy and joining a crowd which chanted its desire to "lock him up."   

This morning, a man rushed into a synagogue, declared that "all these Jews must die," and murdered at least eight people. 

Donald Trump is not legally responsible for the criminal actions of others. But as the President of the United States and the leader of a major political party, large swaths of which have embraced neo-Nazism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism, he and his supporters are damn well morally responsible.

We are what we do and what Donald Trump has done is well-documented. Our president is a white supremacist. Our president is an anti-Semite. Our president has no problem with political violence as long as it is used as a weapon against those he calls his enemies. This is not an opinion, it is documented fact. Our nation is under attack from white supremacist terrorism, our president has done nothing to even remotely condemn it, let alone do anything about it. To the contrary he has encouraged it. As such, our president bears a large amount of moral responsibility for it. 

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of history.

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of how political, racial and religious violence is fostered and inspired.

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully blind to that which is going on before our very eyes.

​To suggest otherwise is to be complicit in the ugliness and horror which has overtaken this country. 

An awful lot of journalists were fired between 2015-17 because their companies went with a "video strategy" influenced strongly by Facebook's claimed video ad revenues and Facebook's direct encouragement of their media partners to pivot to video and away from a written product.

That didn't pan out the way anyone expected, however. Video engagement was far lower than expected and revenues followed suit. As a result of all of this a lot of video editors and producers were fired, joining their print journalism colleagues on the unemployment line. Online media, in many respects, is a flaming hole in the ground at the moment.

Why did the video strategy -- which Facebook claimed was the Way and the Truth -- not pan out?

​Well:  

To be clear: the current state of affairs in online media is largely the fault of media companies for desperately and stupidly chasing trends that even a moment's reflection should've revealed were idiotic (note: NO ONE prefers video news content online over print), but it sure as shit doesn't help that Facebook, allegedly, was lying to everyone about user behavior and ad revenues.​

There's a column at the National Review today which provides a good look into how blinkered and deluded conservatives are and how deeply buried in their ideology they have become. 

​The premise is not a bad one: "We're all in this together! What's good for my brother is good for me! Shared prosperity makes life better for everyone and brings forth harmony and not division!" It's a riff on Alexander Hamilton's understanding of what our nation was and could be.

​I'm not the biggest Alexander Hamilton fan in the world but, generally speaking, I agree with that stuff. Shared prosperity is important, as is our sense of community as a nation. 

​There are just a couple of problems, though:

• Nowhere in the column does the author acknowledge that contemporary conservatism aggressively champions economic policies that are massively exploitative and comically unequal;
• Nowhere does the author acknowledge that, whenever someone proposes something that may make economic prosperity a more mutual and less exclusive thing, his colleagues at the National Review and likeminded places decry it as "socialism" or worse and claim it will be the ruin of the country; and
• Nowhere does the author note that conservative policy treats billionaires as if they were godlike geniuses, gives preferential tax treatment to the shiftless children of the rich, allows businesses to poison the populace, fights minimum wage at every turn, approaches health care as if it were a mere privilege, assumes the poor are poor because they lack moral fiber and, in every other respect, works overtime to impede the very mutual economic gain which he claims to be championing rather than promote it.

My conservative friends: there is absolutely nothing wrong with believing that "mutual economic gain is the keystone of The Union." If you do believe that, however, try advancing at least a single, solitary economic initiative that promotes mutual economic gain as opposed to the massive number of policies you support which serves the interests of business and the wealthy alone, does harm to the poor and to working people and fosters vast and, eventually, destabilizing economic inequality.

Until you do that, you're spewing empty ideology which flies in the face of the reality which you conservatives have created. 

Two weeks ago I wrote a story about the history of the namesake for the University of North Carolina's football stadium. The upshot: in 1898, William Rand Kenan Sr. -- for whom Kenan Memorial Stadium is named -- led a white supremacist paramilitary force which rode through Wilmington, North Carolina on a horse-drawn wagon, massacring dozens and possibly hundreds of black citizens with a machine gun. The aim: to commit a coup d’etat overthrowing the local government, led by blacks and their white Republican allies.

My aim in writing that story was to bring to light a dark chapter of American history the specifics of which had been long-buried, but the reverberations of which have lived on for 120 years. History has whitewashed the Wilmington Massacre itself, but a direct result of the massacre was full and thorough ushering in of the Jim Crow era, the effects of which are still felt socially and economically to this day. What's more, many of those responsible for Wilmington -- while having their crimes either excused or forgotten -- went on to fame, fortune, greatness and, in the case of Kenan, were immortalized in monuments to their memory.

When I wrote that story, I hoped that it would start a conversation that might lead to a greater awareness of just how much of modern American society rests on a foundation created by slaveowners and white supremacists. I hoped that, eventually, someone might ask whether or not a giant college football stadium, for example, should stand as a memorial to a guy like William Rand Kenan Sr. 

I didn't think, however, that the conversation would last only two weeks: 

While it's being couched as merely changing the plaque, the fact is that the place is "Memorial" stadium, with said memorial being the plaque. If you change who is being memorialized I think it's fair to say that, technically speaking, you are changing the name of the stadium. Or certainly the purpose of its name. 

I likewise think that while changing the memorial to Kenan's son is something of a cute move by the university -- no new signs or letterhead or anything else needs to be ordered -- it is, in this case, significant enough.

As the university's chancellor noted in her official statement on the matter, the son -- William Rand Kenan Jr. -- is a far more important figure for the university. His multi-million dollar bequest to the university in the 1960s led to a $300 million+ foundation that continues to benefit the university in countless ways. While some of his money was, in fact, family money inherited from the Kenan's slave owning past, it was only a small fraction of it, earned at least a couple of generations before him. He built the vast majority of it through his work as an industrialist and inherited a great deal more through his sister who had married the oil man Henry Flagler who predeceased her.

To be sure, the slave holding past of the Kenans is significant and should be noted by the university (efforts are being made to do this) and, as I wrote in my story, Kenan Jr., like so many men of his time, chose to overlook and minimize what happened in Wilmington specifically and in America at large. They should not be absolved of that. It's the case, however, that Kenan Jr. was born after the Civil War, was not involved in Wilmington and does not have any documented history of active participation in white supremacist organizations, white supremacist history or white supremacist acts. Yeah, I realize that's a pretty low bar when it comes to memorializing someone, but in light of that and in light of his undeniable impact on the university during his lifetime and in the decades since his death, it does not strike me as inappropriate to memorialize him if UNC thinks it appropriate. Especially given that the alternative would be either keeping the current monument to a murderer or mounting a long and 100% certain-to-fail challenge to get any reference to the Kenans removed from the stadium. 

Being satisfied with the move from Kenan Sr. to Kenan Jr. is not just a matter of pragmatism, however. I think there's a benefit to be had in doing it this way.

As a result of the removal of the current monument and the stadium's re-dedication, the university is committing to working with UNC's "history task force," which is charged with contextualizing the university's past. If they were to simply change the name of the place to "Tar Heel Stadium" it'd be pretty easy to paper over the Kenans and their history and pretend it never happened. By changing it to William Rand Kenan Jr., one holds out hope that there will be a bit more room, in the new memorial, to explain both his history and the history of the stadium's name change. That's what "contextualization" is, after all. William Rand Kenan Sr.'s actions in  Wilmington were completely and utterly unknown by almost everyone before now. By keeping it Kenan, it'll be a lot harder to bury that uncomfortable history.  

And that should make everyone happy, right? So many people who dislike the revisiting of our country's slave-owning and white supremacist past decry that to do so is to "erase" history. They should be pleased then, because this does the exact opposite. It brings history that had been intentionally obscured by darkness back into the light. 

Good job, UNC. You have a long way to go to fully contend with your past, but at least in this instance you got it right.  

Last week I wrote a rundown of some of the many, many lies Brett Kavanaugh told under oath during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. An NBC News report from last night reveals that he may very well have told another one. A pretty damn serious one, in fact. 

​​The story surrounds the claims of Kavanaugh's college classmate, Deborah Ramirez, who says that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her. Her claims were first made public in an article in The New Yorker in late September. Kavanaugh claimed under oath that the first time he heard of her claims was in the New Yorker story, which he suggested blindsided him and which he characterized as "an orchestrated hit to take me out.”

The NBC story claims, however, that based on text messages exchanged between Kavanaugh, his nomination/legal team and old colleges friends, Kavanaugh and/or his surrogates were working behind the scenes to head off Ramirez's allegations at least two months before the New Yorker story broke:   

​If he and/or those working with him were trying to get people's stories straight about Ramirez's allegations in July it was, quite simply, a lie for him to say last week that the first he heard about those allegations was in the New Yorker story. A lie aimed at hiding the fact that he knew of a serious allegation beforehand and suggesting that an effort to suppress the allegation -- to craft "an anticipatory narrative" -- was undertaken. This would stand as a lie, by the way, irrespective of the truth of Ramirez's claims. 

If the text message bear this out -- and all it would require would be for them to show that, at some point before the New Yorker story, Kavanaugh and/or his team were texting people talking about Ramirez's allegations with at least some degree of specificity --  there is no defense for his testimony last week. It will stand as perjury and it should be disqualifying. ​More than that, it's the sort of thing that, in almost any other circumstance, would cause his state bar to investigate him with the eye toward a license suspension or disbarment.

Yet, it still seems, Republicans will attempt to ram him through and onto the Supreme Court.