In the killing of the black jogger by two white men Gregory McMichael and his son Travis that was captured on video, the role of he videographer William Bryan, Jr. was always suspicious. Clearly he was not a mere passerby who happened to have filmed it with a dashcam. He seemed to be following Arbery. He then said he had given the video to the police and local prosecutors who, despite the damning nature of the killing shown on it, did not charge the two men with the murder and indeed did nothing for two months, until the video was leaked to a local media outlet, apparently by Bryan. Bryan was reported to live in the same area and the McMichaels and they knew each other. It was all very murky but highly suspicious
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In an article titled The Pessimistic Style in American Politics appearing in the May 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription required), Thomas Frank looks at the origins of the word ‘populism’ and how it went from being used to describe a movement that embraced progressive and egalitarian goals to being deliberately distorted by the elites to make it represent the views of anarchic and reactionary views, and how that revised meaning of the term was used to stop the Bernie Sanders campaign and other reform movements, by arguing that populism unleashes the basest impulses of the mass of people. (The article is excerpted from a new book by Frank titled The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.)
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The car company is once again in trouble after the release of an ad widely condemned as racist.

Volkswagen has withdrawn a Golf car advertisement posted on its official Instagram page that the company admitted was racist and insulting, saying it would investigate how it came about.
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The advertisement features a woman’s large, pale-skinned hands seeming to push and then flick a black man away from a shiny new, yellow Golf parked on a street. The man is flicked into a cafe called “Petit Colon”, a name with colonial overtones. In the background, jaunty music plays, along with sound effects resembling a computer game.

German television noted that the hand could be interpreted as making a “white power” gesture, while letters that appear on the screen afterwards briefly spell out a racist slur in German.

Juergen Stackmann, the VW brand’s board member for sales and marketing, and Elke Heitmueller, head of diversity management, apologised. “We understand the public outrage at this. Because we’re horrified, too. This video is an insult to all achievements of the civil rights movement. It is an insult to every decent person,” they wrote.

Here’s the ad.

Even apart from the racial overtones, I am baffled by the ad. What exactly is the point that is trying to be made? And how do such things slip through the cracks in a huge company where presumably there are many layers of bureaucracy that must sign off on it before it is released?

It is one thing to know in a general way that slavery was cruel and that even after its formal ending following the end of the Civil War, black people continued to be oppressed, with the former slave states creating laws that systematically deprived their black citizens of the rights that they thought they now had. Historian Eric Foner has documented that process masterfully in his book Reconstruction. But it is still shocking to read about individual instances where there was such a flagrant disregard for basic constitutional processes in the effort of whites to shut blacks out of civil life altogether and drive them away.
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