When Trump says the 2020 election was stolen, his Aryan armies know he means, stolen by blacks

 

    Yesterday from Joyce Vance, former US Attorney in Birmingham, Alabama

Civil Discourse

What if Trump Tries to Steal the Election…

The excitement around the Harris-Walz ticket has given Democrats renewed hope that they can win in November. With that growing hope has come concern, though. What if Trump and his party try to steal the election again? What if they’ve learned enough from their failed effort in 2020 to run a more sophisticated operation in 2024? This is Donald Trump, who consistently maintains in advance of any election that if he loses, it’s been stolen from him. History is full of failed coups that were preludes to successful ones.

Past experience teaches anyone who isn’t deliberately trying to ignore it that Trump will not go quietly into the night if he loses in 2024. He has too much at stake—like staying out of prison. 

In a sense, overturning this election is a more difficult task for Trump. He no longer has the power of the presidency to abuse, no corrupt attorney general to advance his narrative. But if he loses the election he's going to face accountability at the hands of judges and juries in at least four different courtrooms. That just about guarantees that he will do anything to try and avoid a loss. It means Americans who care about the future of our country need to do everything they can to ensure people turn out to vote against him in such overwhelming numbers that there won’t be any room for Trump to try and claim fraud. 

But there are clear signs Trump is preparing to do just that. For instance, in Georgia, where the stories emerging about the State Elections Board are outrageous. It started when the group, which is appointed, not elected, began putting antidemocratic measures in place for the upcoming election. It’s widely believed Georgia will be a key battleground state.

Click this link to read all of Joyce’s column:

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/what-if-trump-tries-to-steal-the

What if Trump Tries to Steal the Election Again?

What if Trump Tries to Steal the Election Again? Joyce Vance The excitement around the Harris-Walz ticket has given Democrats renewed hope that they can win in November.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Well said, Joyce. Alas, I think on election day, in close state races, there will be widespread rebellions in local election offices to throw the election to Trump and it will not be peaceful. I say that, because that is what Trump’s “nation” has been working on ever since he left the White House after the January 6 coup attempt. 

If you have not watched it, please watch Rachel Maddow eviscerate JD Vance doing a 180 on Trump, and then Maddow and it segues into the January 6 coup attempt, and Vance saying if he was VP then, he would have done that Trump asked Pence to do, and it was nothing illegal about the coup attempt, coup is my world for it; and then Maddow segues into a chilling report of how organized Trump and his gangs are to get local election officials to ignore the votes if Trump loses. Maddow did her homework, and I’m kinda surprised she has not experienced assassination attempts. I recommend watching all of Maddow’s video. 

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/-noxious-see-maddow-expose-jd-vance-s-past-statements-about-trump-jan-6-and-more-214914117592

And did you see this CNN report? 

In secretly recorded video, Project 2025 co-author says he’s drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-project-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html

Joyce, I’m a Birmingham, Alabama native, who grew up in Mountain Brook, aka The Tiny Kingdom, when it was 100 percent white with lots of black servants living in white homes or coming “over the mountain” daily into Mountain Brook in their cars or on Birmingham city transit buses, to work in white people’s homes. That has not changed. Homewood lying to the west of Birmingham, and Vestavia lying just south of Homewood were the same, and little has changed. 

I think the chances of Harris carrying Vestavia are remote. Ditto, Homewood. Ditto Hoover south of Vestavia. Zero odds in Mt. Brook. And zero odds of Harris carrying Alabama and getting its electoral college votes.

During the Civil War, the Confederacy moved its government from Richmond, Virginia to Montgomery, Alabama. Alabama still bills itself as “The Heart of Dixie” and Alabamians still can buy license tags with that and Confederate flags on them. 

Alabama once was the seat of the KKK. I read an article yesterday that in their private meetings, the KKK speak of a violent revolution. Remember how very slow Trump was in 2016 to say he didn’t want David Duke’s endorsement - former Klan Grand Dragon and Imperial Wizard and Louisiana state legislator. 

I clerked for US District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham, who was a close friend of your father-in-naw, Bob Vance. Judge Allgood ran Alabama’s National Democrat Party behind the scenes, and he and your father-in-law and other men stopped “Segregation now, segregation forever" Alabama Governor George Wallace from taking over the national Democratic Party in Alabama, like he took over the state Democratic Party. The Republican Party has replaced Wallace’s Democratic Party in Alabama. 

When Trump says the 2020 election was stolen, his Aryan armies know he means, stolen by blacks. 

 

    A lawyer friend, who lived across the street from me in The Tiny Kingdom, sent this to several people the other day, to which I responded.

When a politician switches into different dialects it’s not necessarily pandering

By John McWhorter McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.

Traditionally linguists have bemoaned the fact that the general public knows little of what we do because the subject isn’t taught in schools. But that has changed over the past 20 years or so, as the internet and especially social media have been so effective at getting the word out. I have rejoiced to see the public becoming ever more hip to the fact that language always changes, that you aren’t handicapping your child by raising them to be bilingual, that the way I just used “them” does not spell the fall of our Republic.

Twenty years ago I never thought I would hear the term “code-switching” used as widely as it now is beyond the halls of academe. Code-switching is perhaps best known in reference to alternating between different languages, such as English and Spanish. However, the same concept applies to different dialects of the same language, such as between a standard dialect and a colloquial one. But as glad as I am to see this, my heart sinks at the way people are mocking Vice President Kamala Harris for code-switching according to the audience she is speaking to. Barack Obama attracted criticism for doing the same thing back in the aughts; I hoped we had gotten past this.

Harris does this readily. In an address in Atlanta responding to “Lock him up” calls about Donald Trump, she said, “The courts are gonna handle that,” later working up the crowd by referring in pep-talk style to “Novem-buh.” In a speech in Michigan she mentioned that “We have fun doin’ hard work.” Some of her switching is simply to good old colloquial American — gonna, doin’ — but at other times, especially for heavily Black audiences like the one in Atlanta, she switches into Black English: “Novem-buh”; “foah” for “four.”

A lot of people think there is something wrong with her doing this. “Harris seems to put on an accent for Atlanta rally,” read one chyron on Fox News. One take on X, typical in its tone on the issue, displays familiarity with the term “code-switching” but frames it as a cynical act: “Code switching is a convenient way to describe blatant pandering.” Of course Trump has joined in asking “Did you hear a new accent?” with his running mate, JD Vance, right behind him claiming that Harris is using a “fake Southern accent.”

First of all, Harris is not doing a “Southern” accent. She is not summoning Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian Fortune Feimster or Rue McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux. What people are hearing as Southern is Black English with which white Southern English overlaps only partially. Black English has a great many traits alien to white Southern.

More to the point, language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly.

In a global sense, Harris’s code-switching is completely ordinary. Many people from other countries would be perplexed about anyone thinking her code-switching is remarkable, much less offensive. It is president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s sprinklingEgyptian Arabic, a colloquial variety, into his speeches that were mainly in the standard variety. It is a restaurant sign in Bavaria that starts out in standard German for “Eating is a need but enjoyment is an art,” but then glides as a “P.S.” into Bavarian dialect to say “Drum schaugst a bissl rei zu uns!” — “So take a little look-in at our place!”

Closer to home, Maya Angelou deftly explained how Black Americans code-switch when she wrote: “We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with, ‘That’s not unusual.’ But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, ‘It be’s like that sometimes.’”

It is in this light that we must evaluate an X post like “It’s pretty weird to change your accent on the fly depending on which audience you’re speaking to.” Wrong. This is like saying it’s pretty weird to dress according to what your plans for the day are.

Harris grew up among Black kids in Oakland, Calif., and went to Howard University, an HBCU, where she was a member of a sorority. I have never met Harris, but in my California days I spent a good deal of time in Oakland, and my sister went to an HBCU around the same time Harris was at Howard. I feel quite confident that Harris was richly immersed in code-switching between standard and Black English in her formative years. Today she is faking neither a “Southern” accent nor a Black one, but bringing to a national audience the sincere and effortless linguistic versatility that most Black Americans possess.

Other politicians in recent memory have ventured some code-switching, such as John Kerry saying “-in’” instead of “-ing” when speaking to some audiences and Hillary Clinton doing the same when addressing Southern and Black audiences. Many found their language as inorganic as Harris’s detractors today find her code-switching, but there was a difference. Kerry and Clinton did not grow up switching between standard and vernacular as ongoingly, nor was their shift connected to identity, as Harris’s is. Harris is expressing her true self.

Harris’s detractors may claim that her doing so in public addresses is somehow not presidential. However, it is unclear how it is incompatible with being presidential to try to connect with the public. Shaking hands and kissing babies is one thing, but a reigning theme of our public culture since the late 1960s has been informality. T-shirts, jamming on the dance floor, jeans. Language usage has inevitably come along for the ride. Harris’s code-switching may be partly deliberate; she may be using it as a tool. But this is not cynicism but modernity.

It is interesting that people find this more intuitive when her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, does it. In his debut speech as Harris’s V.P. pick, Walz mainly used standard dialect but often code-switched richly into colloquial ’Murrican. He referred to his “summers workin’ on the family farm” and how “Muh dad was a teacher, muh brothers and sisters and I followed in their footsteps.” And announced that as a nation “We aren’t goin’ back,” “We got 91 days” and “We just gotta fight.” Apparently, it’s OK to summon a bit of pickup truck, but to summon a bit of, say, “urbanity” makes one a vulgar poseur.

But there is all reason to suppose that she will continue to do this regularly over the next few months — Harris gonna code switch — and that the usual suspects will roast her for it. Whether knocking her for code-switching is racist, prim or politically desperate is up for debate. What is certain is that these critiques, from the perspective of how language and communication work worldwide, are naïve.

    Me

Thank you very much for forwarding John McWhorter’s code-switching article.

I was raised by the daughter of African slaves, and I traveled the Caribbean extensively (Jamaica, Tortola, Dominica, Bequi, Grenada) in 1995 and 1996.

I saw in my black mammy, Charlotte Washington (“Cha”), who was the daughter of south Alabama slaves, and in one of her sons, Tom Dew, and in black caddies at the Birmingham Country Club, and in blacks who worked at my father’s company Golden Flake, and In blacks who ran small grocery and convenience stores and restaurants in and around Birmingham and in middle Mississippi, where I started a Golden Flake sales route from scratch, that among themselves blacks speak a variation of English that is its own language, it is not idiom, it is not dialect, it is not written, it is their distinct spoken language, which I could follow pretty well, but not entirely, and some of it bled through when they spoke to me and to other white people. I figure Harris is like that, and when she speaks to blacks, she speaks their common language. 

I imagine, given her Jamaican heritage, Harris knows some or a lot of what in the Caribbean is called patois, which varies from island to island, and is a very different language from English. Every windward Island I was on, the blacks, who made up about 95 percent of each island’s population, spoke beautiful King’s English- British accent- and their local patois, which I could not understand. It was not written, but only was spoken. Most blacks on Tortola and Dominica, where I spent the most time, had high school educations and seemed to be as educated as American college graduates.  

Sloan

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com