The University of Alabama must immediately expel Ryan Parish or it will lose standing in the fight for racial justice.
As an alumnus of the University, I can’t conscience sharing a degree with the likes of a person like Mr. Parish.
His remaining as a student at Alabama would cheapen all of us and would cheapen the efforts made in recent decades to fix the wrongs of hundreds of years of state sponsored white supremacy.
And our University should rise to the occasion and do the right thing.
For those that are just becoming aware of the situation, Mr. Parish is a pre law student at the University.
He got into a heated back and forth on a publicly viewable Facebook ticket exchange with some students over his disagreements with a student led protest of the nation anthem at last week’s football game.
He then called a fellow student a “nigger” and said that he would kill that person if they spoke to him “wrong.”
After his online comments were posted publicly, they spread wildly on social media.
The University promptly suspended him. And they were right to do so.
However, they have not gone far enough.
Mr. Parish must be expelled from the University of Alabama.
This is not a matter of free speech.
And it is not a matter of education.
It is about hate. Plain and simple.
Mr. Parish can’t be taught not to say those things to a fellow human being in a college setting.
Attending the University of Alabama is a privilege, not a right.
And Mr. Parish is not the type of person that we should want at our fair Capstone.
We already have so much to atone for and we have already graduated enough white supremacists in our history.
George Wallace was enough for all history.
Don Black is a living shame.
On matters of racial justice, Alabama cannot be mealy-mouthed.
It must have zero tolerance for racism and lead the nation in standing up for the rights of minorities and in being an example for how we want our society to be in the future.
Mr. Parish’s racist tirade on social media is not an isolated incident in recent UA history.
It took another national shame- and scores of national reporters to invade the Capstone to lead to the start of desegregation of sororities on campus. That was only three years ago.
Mr. Parish did apologize for his comments in a post on social media:
“I’m absolutely torn and saddened. I apologize so much for what I said. I know an apology isn’t enough but I’ll do what I can to make up for it. I love every student here. I made a TERRIBLE mistake and I can’t apologize enough. I’m sorry students of Alabama. I am not that type of person.”
What you can do Mr. Parish is commit your life to fighting to racial justice and work to change your heart.
But the University of Alabama should not be spending a dime trying to do it for you.
We have progress to make and we need all hands on deck.
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Miami Came Out In A Big Way To Support The National Science March
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Aside From Donald Trump’s Win, The GOP Is Still Dying
While the GOP holds a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, Senators and Representatives alike have failed to unite themselves.
In fact, the Republicans were an opposition party for the better part of the last seven years.
While there was some skeleton of a plan to replace Obamacare, it was never given too much thought or reviewed by committees effectively.
When Donald Trump won the White House, although the Republican party became the majority, it was still an opposition party.
For Republicans to rally behind Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan seemed to be too much.
While Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer organized and filibustered, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell failed to unite behind one bill.
President Trump spent hours and hours on the phone from the early hours of the morning until late at night converting one senator after the other to his vision and plan for healthcare.
Key senators like Rand Paul also failed to unite behind the American Healthcare Act.
While the plan was flawed, in my opinion, it still improved upon the healthcare system that many found to be failing.
The GOP needs to transition from an opposing body and become a legislative and policy oriented body.
The Republicans no longer have an excuse.
They are now the majority party and must capitalize on the situations that are in front of them.
The Republicans now have the option to improve the Tax Code from millions of words into perhaps just thousands, which details what people owe their Government.
In fact, the Government owes us a system that works for and by the people.
The Republicans have the responsibility to get behind some of the bills and plans that the Trump Administration proposes even if they are mildly flawed, as most bills are.
Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it should be completely rejected.
Obamacare had flaws and it was still introduced.
Many American’s could not keep their doctors.
For many, the premiums or deductibles were too high.
For example, some were covered, but the deductible was too high and thus, they weren’t effectively covered.
The problems with Obamacare were real, but so was the solution that was put forth.
Sure, it had problems, but it was still better than Obamacare.
While Rand Paul and Paul Ryan had different visions of healthcare than Trump, they both believe that Obamacare is a disaster and should be repealed and replaced.
The question was never about if it should be replaced, but rather what should replace it.
If this failure to unite behind our President continues, the Republican party has a long four years ahead and will likely have a difficult time in the midterm elections.
Pelosi and Schumer need to capitalize on this opportunity if they want their party to succeed.
The Democratic party forgot to nominate Bernie Sanders and underwent some serious divisiveness during the presidential campaign.
The victory of the Republicans will be short lived if they can’t unite behind the man who won it all, President Donald Trump.
There is some great news though.
The Republican party can use the nuclear option to nominate Neil Gorsuch, who was unanimously nominated to be a judge back in 2006.
The Republicans have the ball in their court, it is up to Speaker Ryan and Mitch McConnell to not drop it.
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in the world. You can write for us.
Cover Photo Credit: Patrick Feller/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
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Trump’s Constant Lying Is What Autocrats Do
By Christopher F. Arndt
First there was the birther theory, which Trump continued to champion in 2011 even after President Obama’s long-form birth certificate was shown to the world.
Then we heard statements like “Nobody really knows if climate change is real;” and, more recently, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
These are, of course, but a few of the countless lies Trump has uttered over the years, over the course of this past election cycle and since entering the White House.
To these we can now add the claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign – one that smacks all the more clearly of dishonesty now that House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes has stated that he will not disclose his sources.
Our President’s unprecedented lying has many utterly baffled, as does the fact that Trump supporters often accept these lies.
For example, 74% of Republican voters think it’s at least “somewhat likely” that Donald Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the campaign.
Both the dishonesty and the continued belief by Trump supporters in “alternative facts” can be understood in the context of changes within the conservative movement that have come to the fore over the past fifteen years.
A scene from the Las Vegas skyline. Photo Credit: João Martinho/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
Under normal conditions, a politician fibs to exaggerate the appeal of a program they support or to undermine an opponent’s position.
But they generally try to avoid obvious falsehoods.
Some of Trump’s lies follow this pattern, but most of his lies are different.
They are intentionally brazen.
In this way, they are a show of power, demonstrating the acquiescence of others to his will and the comparative impotence of those who stand by facts and against his word.
In short, Trump’s lies have an autocratic twist. Matt Steinglass, the current European editor for the Economist, captured this dynamic well in a 2009 piece on why Iran’s Ahmadinejad insisted on showing an implausibly large vote margin for his election victory.
This piece is dismayingly relevant now and worth quoting at length:
“[B]ullies often find it more effective to force people to acquiesce in an obvious lie than in a plausible fiction. Check out the ludicrous charges in the Stalin show trials: children’s book writers in Leningrad confessing to being Japanese spies, and so forth. When you make people accept a plausible fiction, you’re just winning that one issue. But when you make them accept a lie which everyone knows is a lie, you’re destroying their integrity, destroying their will to describe the world as they see it, rather than as you tell them it is. It’s the bully on the playground holding the weaker kid’s arm and slapping his cheek with it, saying “Why are you hitting yourself?” Like Vaclav Havel’s grocer hanging “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window, once a person has acquiesced to something they do not believe, and which everyone knows they do not believe, they become complicit in their own oppression.”
In essence, Trump is making Republican leaders – who know he is lying – complicit in their own oppression.
To be clear, we’ve seen some independence on the part of Republicans like John McCain.
But not a lot.
And, most recently, it appears that Devin Nunes is simply bending to Trump’s will.
This fealty to authority over facts runs directly against the beating heart of liberal democracy.
Why, then, does Trump get away with it?
The brief answer is that the American Right has been moving in this direction for more than a decade.
The movement has coalesced around an older, “monarchical” conservatism.
This movement is best understood as a temperament and a set of tendencies opposing change rather than a set of principles.
It runs counter to the enlightenment liberalism that forms the basis of our Constitution.
In my book, The Right’s Road to Serfdom: The Danger of Conservatism Unbound From Hayek to Trump, I map out characteristics of this “conservative temperament” including:
- Viewing a leader’s personality and its force above process, institutions and the rule of law.
- An ease with diminishing the value of facts to support the right leader.
- A preference for absolute certainty regarding both policy and a leader’s style. This requires black and white simplicity in the way both are presented.
Understanding conservatism as such explains the appeal of Trump on the Right and the embrace of blatant falsehoods.
So far, the firing of Michael Flynn was an exception.
On the Right, there have been no real consequences to Trump’s blatant – and disgraceful – lying or that of his inner circle.
Which brings us back to autocracy, defined by Merriam Webster as “government in which one person possesses unlimited power.”
Christopher Arndt is author of The Right’s Road to Serfdom: The Danger of Conservatism Unbound From Hayek to Trump.
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in the world. You can write for us.
Cover Photo Credit: Isabelle Blanchemain/ Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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