Jackson Free Press

This weekend, I've seen a lot of excuses for Donald Trump's bigotry and xenophobia from his supporters, who don't seem to have many reasons for supporting him other than they are sick and tired of the way things are now. One gentleman showed up on my Facebook page to defend supporting Trump, saying it's not about bigotry and calling me "intolerant toward those holding different opinions" because I was willing to call out Trump's blatant bigotry.

I looked at his Facebook page, and he had reposted a letter to the RNC supposedly explaining why Trump supporters are fed up. The gist of it was about getting rid of "rabid, messy, mean raccoons":

You’ve been on vacation for two weeks, you come home, and your basement is infested with raccoons. Hundreds of rabid, messy, mean raccoons have overtaken your basement. You want them gone immediately…You call the city and four different exterminators, but nobody could handle the job. There is this one guy however, who guarantees you he will get rid of them, so you hire him. You don’t care if the guy smells, you don’t care if the guy swears, you don’t care how many times he’s been married, you don’t care if he was friends with liberals, you don’t care if he has plumber’s crack…you simply want those raccoons gone! You want your problem fixed! He’s the guy. He’s the best. Period. Here’s why we want Trump: Yes he’s a bit of an ass, yes he’s an egomaniac, but we don’t care. The country is a mess because politicians have become too self-serving. The Republican Party is two-faced & gutless. Illegal aliens have been allowed to invade our nation. We want it all fixed! We don’t care that Trump is crude, we don’t care that he insults people, we don’t care that he had been friendly with Hillary, we don’t care that he has changed positions, we don’t care that he’s been married three times, we don’t care that he fights with Megan Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell, we don’t care that he doesn’t know the name of some Muslim terrorist.

When I asked the gentleman on my Facebook page (whom I don't know) who he thought the "raccoons" are, he said he "assumed" that the piece he was reposting meant "illegal immigrants"—perhaps not knowing that he is speaking of human beings that Trump has said the most horrible things about, especially the darkish ones south of the U.S. border. He also added: "Not agreeing on issues or politicians or political parties is one thing but when either side turns to vile hate towards others that don't agree with them then that is bigotry."

I'm seeing this argument all the time now from Trump supporters: It is just as "racist" — ??? — to point out someone's bigotry as it is to be the bigot, at least according to their twisted rationalization. In addition to being incredibly absurd logic, this is a straight-up defense of …

Yesterday was a very good day for the JFP staff, and especially our writers and designers.

A new polling analysis published by examiner.com indicates something about Mississippi that has been in the works for a while: Based on recent elections, our state is trending blue.

Based on polling data on a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump showdown in 2016, Mississippi is one of the few Deep South states that would go for Clinton in that matchup.

This analysis might surprise many who think that Mississippi is the reddest state of the red (especially based on our statewide cavemen, er, elected officials). But several facts make it much more complicated than at first glance:

1. State Democrats have provided very few even-marginally-progressive options historically, giving younger and less-conservative choices to vote for, creating voter lethargy among those who might turn out and vote "blue" otherwise. That fact is actually changing this year, with several openly progressive (and female) Democrats getting at least some party support, instead of the pseudo-Republicans the party has tended to put up in the last 20 years.

2. More young people of all races are staying in Mississippi, and many of them are voting Democratic, and have since 2004.

3. Demographics, demographics, demographics. The irony of Mississippi being the state with the highest percentage of enslaved people in 1860 is that our state still has the highest percentage of African Americans and is more likely than much of Dixie to go blue first. Put simply, African Americans tend to vote Democratic, ever since the Republican Party embrace of Dixiecrats back in the late 1960s after national Dems supported civil-rights laws, and we have the highest percentage of black residents in the country.

4. And, let's be honest, even many Republicans don't want bat-shit-crazy Trump running this country.

5. Finally, to be honest again, a lot of white people like Clinton better than Obama (even if I'm not one of them).

So, there are no surprises here: Mississippi has been steadily trending blue for a while now. The question, as always, is: Will the people who can flip the state into the blue column turn out both this November (to save public-education funding and turn out a governor who makes us look like the most stuck-in-the-past state) and next November?

Time, and voter registration, will tell. Progressive (which is easy to be here by rejecting the radical right) Mississippians must find the will to stop giving up our power to sellouts to bigotry and backward ideas (and ideologues) to lift our state up. I've watched this will grow since we started this paper in 2002—and saw serious evidence of it when we turned back Personhood, shocking the nation—and I believe in upcoming elections we may well surprise the world once again. I've believed this was coming for nearly 15 years now.

Stay tuned and register to vote.

UPDAT Aug. 24, 2016: The examiner.com link above is broken, but here is an article and another about …

UPDATED Jan. 14: After a national firestorm and a No. 1 trend on Twitter, Biloxi Mayor Andrew “FoFo” Gilich said the Biloxi City Council on Tuesday, the day after the holiday, should change the city’s Code of Ordinances" to reflect the official federal name of the holiday, 'Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,' commonly known as 'Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.'”

“In my opinion,” Gilich said in a statement on the city's website, “that is the appropriate step to take, for the holiday to have the same name as the federal holiday.”

The statement also conflicts with what city workers put out in social media yesterday, blaming the State of Mississippi for making the city call King Day "Great American's Day."

"The name has since been traced back to a City Council on Dec. 23, 1985 to proclaim the third Monday of every January “to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as other great Americans who have made important contributions to the birth, growth and evolution of this country.”

Presumably, among the other "great Americans" is Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who the State of Mississippi also honors the same day.

Did the State of Mississippi Rename MLK Day 'Great Americans Day'? Short answer: Not that we can figure out. The City of Biloxi apparently did rename the holiday, however, with local ordinance 15-2-2 declaring the third Monday of January as "Great American's Day. No sign of a state law, yet, however.

Still, the City of Biloxi is claiming that the State of Mississippi made 'em do it on its Facebook page (see image below), even as social media is starting to blow up nationally criticizing Biloxi, and maybe the whole state, for quietly changing the name of Martin Luther King Jr. Day to "Great Americans Day." Considering that Biloxi is the home of Jefferson Davis' museum-home, run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, this does not completely surprise. (SCV are major opponents of changing the Mississippi flag).

The City of Biloxi posted this Friday: "Non-emergency municipal offices in Biloxi will be closed on Monday in observance of Great Americans Day, a state-named holiday.""

When challenged under the post, the unnamed Biloxi employee double-downed that this name came down from above: "The City of Biloxi did not declare nor name this holiday. The holiday was declared and named by the state Legislature. The city, in fact, as it has done for years, touted our upcoming MLK celebration in a Bmail and on the city website this afternoon."

The problem is that, so far, we have not found evidence that the state Legislature officially changed the name of the holiday, and lawmakers we've reached say they have no idea about it, either. Rep. Jay Hughes, D-Oxford, said on the Facebook page of Lea Campbell of the Mississippi Rising Coalition that the "Great Americans" name applies to a different holiday altogether: "Great Americans Day is a combination of all presidents days, …

Associate Publisher Kimberly Griffin has been featured on Richard Prince's 'Journal-isms' website.

Jackson City Councilman De'Keither Stamps, of Ward 4, says he voted against the Trilogy Engineering Inc. contract to do a corrosion study for the city last week because it is an "unfunded mandate" by the State of Mississippi—and one the taxpayers cannot afford. In two videos on his YouTube channel, Stamps said his main priority wasn't who was getting the contract, but that the State was demanding that the City suddenly pay $400,000 for a corrosion study, instead of helping the capital city.

"I know several of the subcontractors personally," he says in the most recent video (see below). The issue is I don’t want to spend $400,000 when we don’t have it. This is an unfunded mandate from the State of Mississippi. If they can help us, I’m all for it. … It’s not something we’ve budgeted for."

Stamps, who has unsuccessfully asked for an emergency declaration over the lead issue several times, says the City needs stand and/or federal assistance in order to make sure Jackson residents are safe, especially in areas where 90 percent of the water tested positive for at least trace elements of lead.

"I want to test every child in the whole city that’s in these affected areas," he said in the second video below.

This falls in the can't-make-it-up column.

Most of you know that Mitchell Moore of Campbell's Bakery, who is straight, and Eddie Outlaw of William Wallace Salon, who is gay, and others started the amazing "If You're Buying, We're Selling" campaign. They want Mississippi business owners to put stickers in their windows to indicate that they don't discriminate, in response to SB 2681, Mississippi's version of the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act." (See lots of business owners with the icon in their ads in this week's JFP, too.)

So, the religious right is apparently not happy with the international media coverage the campaign is getting -- and from Mississippi, which is supposed to be their wheelhouse, you know. They really didn't like it when Emily Pettus of the AP (the JFP's next-door neighbors) did a story about this that was picked up by many outlets.

In response, they went on a PR tear to take back the messaging. Greg Scott, who tweets at @adfmedia, led the way, tweeting this week in response to the AP story: "Sticker folks protest imaginary law .@AP bows false narrative, RFRA not "vaguely written," no threat to "=treatment" http://bit.ly/QEU2El

Curious, I did some research. Turns out, Scott is the VP for media communications for Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund), a nonprofit group founded in 1994 by extreme-right and vocally anti-gay leaders including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. (Interestingly, Mississippi's Judge Charles Pickering is also on the board.)

Not to be outdone, the American Family Association, an alliance co-founder, also blasted the sticker campaign on a Christian "news" site, which is part of the American Family News Network, which is part of the ... American Family Association. "It's not really a buying campaign, but it's a bully campaign," said Buddy Smith, executive vice president of Tupelo-based American Family Association, "and it's being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture."

The Southern Poverty Law Center includes the alliance (and AFA) on its list of a dozen groups that drive the "religious right's anti-gay crusade." On its website, it brags that its "attorneys have successfully defended marriage as the union between one man and one woman in over 40 cases nationwide."

SPLC indicates that the alliance was established in the early 1990s in response to gay-rights battles in the courts—which it clearly believes is the "principal" threat to religious freedom. ADF President Alan Sears and Vice President Craig Osten wrote " The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom," which ties homosexuality to pedophilia and other "disordered sexual behavior."

SPLC states: "The ADF has also mounted legal challenges to gay military service, marriage, adoption and foster-parenting, as well as to domestic partner benefits around the nation. It trains other attorneys 'to battle the radical homosexual …

During the last couple weeks of talking about the Confederacy (and the state flag that celebrates it), we've encountered any number of historic inaccuracies in the arguments of those who don't want to change our state flag.

One of them is that (a) not many white Mississippians even owned slaves and (b) that only 6 to 10 percent of Confederate soldiers owned slaves.

Here are the problems with that argument as the chart and link before bring into full relief. As you can see in this excellent MPB documentary, many Confederates soldiers were just 17 or 18 years old. But many of the soldiers' families owned at least one or two slaves.

Based on 1860 Census results, 49 percent of Mississippi households owned slaves at the start of the Civil War, and more than half the population of our state—55 percent—were slaves. Slavery was massive here and directed affected nearly half the white families in Mississippi, including some who weren't as wealthy as the planters who owned many slaves (and who were at first exempt from fighting in the Civil War when the Confederacy instituted a draft, but that's another subject).

The chart below shows the number of slaves in all of the states that existed at the start of the Civil War.

Also, read my column this week, "Driving Old Dixie Down," for many links to historic sources about Mississippi and other Confederate states at the start of the war, including extensive evidence of why the Confederacy formed: in order to have a strong central federal government to force slaves on any new states, and to ensure that it got its runaway slaves back.

http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2015/jul/02/21958/

Here's an interesting factoid for those of you discussing the Civil War and slavery about Hinds County, which contains Jackson, the capital, of course. It's from this link, where you can also link to a number of other Mississippi counties and see the numbers of slaves that some of the larger slave holders of the time owned. This was the scenario when "firewater" Gov. John Pettus led the secession of Mississippi from here in Jackson over slavery:

According to U.S. Census data, the 1860 Hinds County population included 8,940 whites, 36 "free colored" and 22,363 slaves. By the 1870 census, the white population had increased 10% to 9,829, and the "colored" population had dropped about 8% to 20,659. (As a side note, by 1960, 100 years later, the County was listed as having 112,205 whites, more than a twelve fold increase, but the 1960 total of 94,750 "Negroes"was only about four times what the colored population had been 100 years before.)

It's tough history, but important.

Here's a list of resources to help research who owned slaves, how many, etc.

The Republican nominee for president chose Mississippi's solidly Democratic and majority-black capital city tonight to call the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, a "bigot."

At a rally in the Mississippi Coliseum (with many empty seats) Donald Trump said Clinton is a "bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings. She's going to do nothing for African Americans and Hispanics."

Clinton has strong support among the nation's African American voters and, to date, Trump has very little. Polls routinely show black support for Trump in the single digits. And Trump has long offended many black voters, such as by pushing falsehoods and stereotypes against black Americans.

Trump is also struggling with Latino voters after calling for a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and rhetoric about Mexicans being rapists and murderers.

Trump also told the audience—which appeared to be at least 95 percent white— that "the Democratic Party has taken votes of African Americans for granted, and they've done nothing to deserve it."

Pastor Mark Burns, who is African American, spoke early in the rally both pushing the rumor that Clinton is in bad health—which her doctor adamantly denies—and saying that "all lives matter" when it comes to race, as the crowd chanted, "USA! USA!."

At the rally, Trump also continued his fiery rhetoric against undocumented immigrants.

At the end of the rally, Trump walked out with Gov. Phil Bryant to the song, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Bryant, who has endorsed Trump, is a staunch supporter of House Bill 1523, which many people consider anti-LGBT.

— Reporting at the Mississippi Coliseum by Arielle Dreher

The Clarion-Ledger posted a sensationalistic headline and story yesterday about a west Jackson rally against dangerous suburban police chases into the city, followed by intriguing edits of what a Jackson city councilman actually said. The Ledger's video was edited down for the most dramatic effect, and the following text in the story was even worse.

After the Capitol Street Coalition gathered to protest the death of Lonnie Blue Jr. Friday morning, The Clarion-Ledger posted the story on its website headlined "Stamps calls Clinton 'Ferguson waiting to happen". The story's lead image was edited video of Councilman De'Keither Stamps speaking out against the Clinton police chase of shoplifters that resulted in the death of an innocent bystander.

The video contained only a snippet of Stamps' remarks, essentially calling for a boycott of surrounding cities that do not rein in their dangerous police habits and referencing Ferguson, Mo. The video skipped over Stamps' initial remarks offering condolences to the family and "encouraging folks to speak a universal language" and went right to the juicier part:

Ledger video: "Every surrounding city who refuses to use common-sense policies must be economically challenged because it's not safe for you to shop there. Clinton is a Ferguson waiting to happen. Clinton is a city with a high minority population and oppressive police tactics. It's steps away, steps away from a Mike Brown. It's only a matter of time."

The story beneath the video was much worse, with only snippets of that quote included, and the vital part about Clinton having "a high minority population and oppressive police tactics"—which explains Stamps' Ferguson analogy—simply cut out:

Ledger story: Referencing the violent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Jackson Councilman De'Keither Stamps said Clinton is a "Ferguson waiting to happen" and is "steps away from a Mike Brown. It's only a matter of time if this culture does not change."

The Clarion-Ledger story followed that with edited additional comments that were not included in its video of Stamps:

Ledger story: "It seems to me that there are some elected officials and some police officials who want to maintain the culture," Stamps said. "What we must make them understand is that culture is not acceptable. Misdemeanor property crimes are not worth human life. ... We've got some great police officers in the metro area, but common sense must prevail in their actions." (bold emphasis added)

Stamps is now passing around the full video, which is below this post, to "#Tellthewholestory," which indicates information that the Ledger simply cut out of the middle of his quote. That part is a key response to those who say the police have no choice but to chase petty criminals.

The Ledger omitted these bolded parts of Stamps' complete quote: "Misdemeanor property crimes are not worth human life. You should not be going 120 miles per hour in Clinton or Jackson. Because we've got news copters, we've got radios. I've never seen anyone outrun a radio. No matter …