Somebody’s got to have the guts to do this, and it might as well be me, well, us. Introducing Project Race-Lighting.

For more than a couple of years now, I have been intending to spend at least 72 hours watching commercial TV and to record the racial and ethnic categories of the actors in the ads. I watch a lot of television and always have, but although I have felt the need for someone to do a study of the phenomenon that I believe is taking place, I have also had substantially less time to do it since Grace died at the end of February. At one point she had agreed to start the project, stuck as my wife was in a chair in front of our TV while she was rehabbing her (mysteriously) painful knee. She also had the same impression I did. Trust me, that was not always the case in other matters.

I think I first became cognizant that something strange was in the air or “going on” (“What’s going on here?”—the starting point for every ethical analysis) when “Jake from State Farm” magically turned black in 2011: it was one of the more ham-handed examples of pandering to the Obama-led movement to make affirmative action, DEI’s predecessor, a cultural norm. A decades later came the Black Lives Matter, reparations, DEI, CRT, “Great Stupid” tsunami in the wake of the George Floyd Freak Out. The trend had been subtly underway before that, as Jake indicated, but Madison Avenue attacked the white actor job market with a vengeance. Now, the way TV commercials represent U.S. society appears (I don’t have the data yet, so it all could be in my imagination) to show a nation where whites are a small minority, somewhere close to the percentage of Asian Americans (about 7.3%), and two out of every three marriages are bi-racial, meaning that most children are mixed-race.

The real percentage of whites in the US population is almost 70%: yes, white people are still a majority in the population. But they are evil, as you know, and at fault for all the ills around us, so the society corporate America pretends we live in is very different. How different? That’s why I am launching “Project Race-Lighting.”

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Here, in part, is how CNN’s objective, “just-the-facts, ma’am” senior White House reporter for CNN Politics described Kamala Harris’s choice of uber-progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP in a story headlined, “Happy warriors Harris and Walz propose an antidote to Trump’s American carnage”:

It’s hardly new for a political party to sell hope and aspiration — it’s a staple of presidential election campaigns. But the fresh vibe in Philadelphia was striking because it emerged after one of the darkest chapters of modern US politics.

Americans have experienced a Trump presidency that threatened to tear the country apart, suffered through a pandemic that killed more than a million citizens and endured grinding years of economic insecurity caused by inflation and high grocery prices. For most of this year, the former president has promised a second presidency of retribution. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, had been delivering searing warnings that his rival was tarnishing the very soul of America, even as the haunting signs of the president’s advancing age became increasingly painful to watch.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the last GOP primary challenger standing against Trump, used to predict that the first party to ditch its old, White male presidential candidate in 2024 would get a massive boost. While Harris is yet to prove she can alter the fundamentals of a race against Trump, she’s proving Haley’s point, bringing some unexpected sunshine to an election year.

“We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down,” Harris said of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Walz. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it?” the vice president asked before adding, “We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

This message is a mirror image of Trump’s political method, which relies on tugging at the fault lines of US society for political gain.

Walz rammed home the point, as if anyone in the packed arena filled by roaring cheers had missed it. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” he told his new boss.

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Has Ethics Alarms ever commented about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the designated running mate of Democratic Presidential Candidate by Default Kamala Harris? As it happens, yes, Walz was featured here back when his state was inflicting the George Floyd Freakout on the nation. I posted this as part of the ethics warm-up on May 30, 2020:

“Bulletin for Gov. Walz: Derek Chauvin has civil rights too, you irresponsible fool. I have just watched Minnesota’s Governor repeatedly refer to George Floyd’s “murder.” An elected public official cannot and must not do that. If he wants to guarantee that a fair trial in the case becomes impossible, this is the way to do it. There has been no trial, and however horrible the video of Floyd’s death may be, Chauvin and the other officers have the right to the presumption of innocence. Now a St. Paul’s mayor is at the podium calling for Chauvin to be held “accountable.” Well, he’s under arrest and will face trial, and for now, that’s about it.  All of this outrage porn and virtue-signaling enables the rioters by pretending that there is anything productive to be done but to wait for the justice system to play out.”

As is often the case, I was right. Gov. Walz was wrong.

So now you know….

Here’s Rep. Raskin during a panel discussion in February talking about how Democrats can “protect democracy” by refusing to acknowledge Donald Trump’s victory should he win in November:

“What I would say is, you know, we’ve got to play defense and offense in 2024. The right to vote is under attack in very specific ways in lots of states, especially in some of the Deep South states, especially in Florida, which I just returned from. There’s just unbelievable stuff going on there — like, if you have to send a mail-in ballot or absentee ballot, you have to have a — you can only have it taken to the mailbox or the polls by a member of your nuclear family who lives with you. OK? So there’s just a million traps for the unwary that are being set across the country. But at the same time, we do have to get on offense for the articulation of a constitutional right to vote that’s meaningful for everybody in the country. The million of people who are left out, and disenfranchised, and for everybody whose right to vote is rendered vulnerable by this Supreme Court. And you know, I like very much the point that both Sherlyn [Ifill] and Rick have been making about the Supreme Court. I mean, we’ve got to remember that for the vast majority of American history, the Supreme Court has not been a friend to the people. It has been overwhelmingly in a reactionary or conservative mode, I mean, all the way up until the Civil War. What did the Supreme Court ever do for enslaved people in our country? Absolutely nothing, other than cement their status in the Dred Scott decision, saying that African-Americans had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. And then even after the Civil War, even after the Reconstruction amendments, in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, constitutionalizing Jim Crow. And then it’s not until the Warren Court for a couple of decades, with the white primary cases, and Brown v. Board, where you get a different kind of Supreme Court on the side of the freedoms and equality of the American people. But the court is not going to save us. And so that means the only thing that really works is people in motion amending the Constitution — but again, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because what can be put in the Constitution can slip away from you very quickly. And the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes is Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which they’re just disappearing with a magic wand, as if it doesn’t exist, even though it could not be clearer what it’s stating. And so they want to kick it to Congress, so it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified. And then we need bodyguards for everybody, and civil war conditions, all because the nine justices — not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection — simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great Fourteenth Amendment means.”

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The story was first broken by the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid:

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.

She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’

A close friend with direct knowledge of the affair and pregnancy told DailyMail.com that Naylor did not keep the child – though her social media shows a video of a mysterious baby girl named Brook in 2009, the year the baby would have been born.

Another  friend, Stacey Brooks, who mothered twin boys around the same time as Naylor was expecting, also did not deny any of the claims – but said she would not divulge further information without Naylor’s permission.

What’s going on here? Observations:

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What happens, in these situations, is that a non-profit, charity or activist organization becomes so impressed with its own virtue as it chooses to define it that its leaders decide self-enrichment is not only justifiable, but a right. Why should they sacrifice and suffer, when the for-profit executives and leaders whose companies inflict scars on the earth, the culture, society or the public, live in comfort and extravagance? It is so unfair!

And thus we get repeating stories like what the New York Times published yesterday about GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. [ I like GLAAD: it nominated one of my theater’s shows for a local award!] As you might imagine, the group is riding high these days, flushed with victories in legislatures and the courts, seeing the culture supine before it in fear of being branded discriminatory. Things are going particularly well with GLAAD’s efforts to encourage children to change their genders without input or interference from their parents. Hooray.

The Times reports in part:

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Not exactly ethics, but proto-ethics: our beliefs vastly affect, even control, how our ethics alarms are calibrated, what makes them sound, and what disables them. Beliefs can be biases (not all biases are bad), but they also constitute what our linear constant is for navigating the chaos of life—and we all need that. Beliefs define our values as well as how we interpret the world.

In the most famous scene from the cult baseball film “Bull Durham,” Crash Davis, the iconoclastic minor league catcher played by Kevin Costner, is asked what he believes. He answers (unrealistically rapidly, as if he had memorized the speech in advance, which has always bothered me from a directorial perspective, but I digress)

“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.” 

My list is better (and longer) than Crash’s, and I’ll probably post it later, but right now I’d like to see what the readers here believe.

I started to think about this when I realized that I have no idea what one of the Presidential candidates believes, and I am not entirely sure what the other one believes either. I think that Donald Trump, based on his family background and the culture he was raised in, believes in the capitalist system, individuality, entrepreneurial spirit, minimal government interference with personal liberties, traditional male and female roles, strong leadership, not being a weenie, America as a force for good in the world, American exceptionalism, that abortion is wrong, that he is almost always right and is the one person he can trust to fix what he sees as wrong with our government, and that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

I have no clue what Kamala Harris believes.

This is a problem.

What do you believe, if you are comfortable revealing it?

______________

[I thought everyone should be reminded that the great Frankie Laine sang songs other than “Rawhide.”]

Grilled by a CNN reporter over Donald Trump’s comments at the black journalists convention about Kamala Harris’s, uh, fluid ethnic identification, his running mate replied that they “don’t give me pause at all.” Vance continued, “Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon. She goes to Georgia two days ago, she was raised in Canada, she puts on a fake southern accent. She is everything to everybody and she pretends to be something different depending on which audience she’s in front of. I think it’s reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.”

Bingo.

Trump needs an effective interpreter to periodically decipher his stream-of-consciousness riffs, and since it is clear that attacking, spinning, and misrepresenting the GOP Presidential nominee’s words as proof that he is a lying madman, racist, sexist Hitler monster Marvel supervillain is going to be the primary approach the mainstream media will take to cover this campaign, it is very fortunate that Trump named an articulate and fearless interlocutor to share the ticket with him. Vance is an interpreter.

Among the myriad reasons that Presidential nominees have selected their VPs, almost none of them having anything to do with whether the selections have sufficient experience, ability and qualifications to lead the country, that’s a better reason than most.