++The viral fight valorized Black resistance — and punctured Jason Aldean’s racist “small town” narrative. +
++One of the key facets of extremism is the element of plausible deniability. As such, “dog whistles” — coded language used to mask a deeper extremist or discriminatory rhetoric — have become a pervasive part of the way we talk about politics and the culture wars. They’re also exhausting to unpack. +
++No matter how diplomatically or plainly you point out the underlying racism or bigotry of a specific image or turn of phrase, there’s always someone eager to take the code literally, to dismiss its context, its subtext, and clearly harmful impact. They’re happy to claim this is just what happens when you pucker your lips and blow, and any hateful dogs that come running are just a coincidence. +
++Then a song comes along like country singer Jason Aldean’s risible “Try That in a Small Town.” The lyrics and accompanying video are layered with references to Black Lives Matter protests, sundown towns (“see how far you make it down that road”), and white protectionism (“good ol’ boys … we take care of our own”). The video’s main location was no less than the site of historical lynchings, a particularly unsubtle jab. Inevitably, however, when you attempt to illuminate this racist imagery, a “Try That in a Small Town” defender will show up. They will assert that the whole thing is really just about, as Aldean himself tried to assert, “the feeling of community” and the desire for a return to “a sense of normalcy.” +
++Normal, to Aldean, seems to be a reality where Black protesters don’t disrupt the everyday lives of white citizens — even if those citizens are, as the song suggests, stockpiling guns and turning paranoid eyes on any and all outsiders. This attempt to reframe socially sanctioned racism as “just a community looking out for itself” has long been a part of the discriminatory tactics used against Black Americans, from lynch mobs to the racist, KKK-apologetic Birth of a Nation, to the legal defenses used by white men who murder unarmed Black ones. It’s a cultural tactic used to not only disenfranchise Black Americans, but to then gaslight them about their own reality and experience. It’s a tactic that turns aggression into “self-defense.” +
++It’s one big reason, out of an infinitude of reasons, that the world was transfixed earlier this week when video surfaced of a group of Black boat workers in Montgomery, Alabama, appearing to voraciously fight back after a group of white pontoon boaters began attacking a Black boat captain. +
++What happened at the Montgomery boat brawl +
++The white boaters, coming from nearby Selma, had allegedly repeatedly caused trouble at the dock by parking their pontoon illegally in the spot reserved for a large tourist riverboat, the Harriott II. On Sunday, August 5, the riverboat had been waiting for around 45 minutes, with passengers aboard, to dock. Damien Pickett, the riverboat’s first mate and co-captain, disembarked in order to move the pontoon boat himself. In response, according to reports, at least three of the boaters attacked Pickett, punching him in the face, beating and kicking him. +
++This sounds like an all-too-familiar tragedy in progress: white-on-black violence, motivated by a sense of racist entitlement. Speaking to the Daily Beast after the incident, the boat’s captain, Jim Kittrell, stressed that the only motive appeared to be racial: “It makes no sense to have six people try to beat the snot out of you just because you moved their boat up a few feet. In my opinion, the attack on Damien was racially motivated.” Kittrell’s assumption seems to be bolstered by eyewitness testimony: One bystander, a victim’s family member, said in a sworn statement that she heard one of the white men drop the n-word before the fighting began. +
++It’s important to consider this incident in the broader context of Montgomery’s history, as well. Montgomery, one of the major historical fronts of the civil rights movement, is no stranger to racialized violence. It was there, in 1954, that a young Martin Luther King Jr. took up pastorship at a local church, where he became a spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycotts alongside Rosa Parks. Through boycotts and years of sustained activism amid tense civil unrest, Montgomery protesters successfully challenged the rule of Jim Crow in the South and ultimately changed the nation. Montgomery also saw devastating segregationist violence throughout this period, including one of the most violent moments in the civil rights movement, “Bloody Sunday.” +
++In 2023, coming after a cultural period of intensifying racialized protests, a group of white people whaling on an unsuspecting and defenseless Black man could have led to tragic consequences or, at the least, traumatized victims and onlookers. +
++What the video shows happening next, however, flipped the script: Seeing one of their colleagues being attacked, other Black boat workers rushed in to defend him and fight back. Bystanders also joined in, with one teen now known as “Black Aquaman” famously jumping into the water and swimming across the dock in order to help. One man, a person known to the internet as “Folding Chair Guy,” gained instant fame when he went after the three attackers with, you guessed it, a folding chair. +
++The suddenness of the fight, combined with the enthusiasm of the brawlers, the glee of the onlookers, and the fact that everyone had phones out recording the incident, made the Montgomery brawl — dubbed the Alabama Sweet Tea Party — into an immediate viral sensation. It produced everything from evocative Twitter reactions to a live swimming pool reenactment to a remix of Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting of Black partiers, Sugar Shack. The folding chair was instantly memorialized. +
++Most extraordinarily of all, no one rushed to mete out punishment for the Black dock workers who fought back. Though multiple fighters were briefly detained, all were released. Folding Chair Guy, real name Reggie Gray, has been dodging police requests to speak with him, but no one seems to be pushing too hard for his arrest either, although the investigation into the brawl is ongoing. At a press conference, Montgomery Police Chief Darryl Albert notably didn’t attempt to distort the power dynamics, stating simply that “several members of the Harriott II came to Mr. Pickett’s defense.” The three white attackers turned themselves in to police custody after warrants were issued for their arrest. +
++The prevailing public mood around the Montgomery brawl has not been racist backlash or anxiety over such a backlash, but rather deep satisfaction at a battle in which justice seems to have prevailed: The perpetrators were rounded up and the victims received a rousing defense from the community. For once, the marginalized underdog — a Black man being ganged up on by a group of white bullies — came out no worse for wear; Pickett reportedly walked away from the fight with only a headache and some minor cuts and bruises. +
++What it means to try that in a (not entirely) small town +
++The collective sense of satisfaction might be exactly the kind of communal security Jason Aldean was attempting to portray in “Try That in a Small Town.” This was, in fact, almost the exact scenario Aldean says he was attempting to capture in his ode to small-town vigilante justice: a group of outsiders come into town, refuse to obey the local customs or follow the local laws, and then get their asses duly whooped by the town citizenry. +
++While Montgomery is not a “small” town, its history of banding together to rout out racists is deeply relevant here. Montgomery is precisely the type of heartland town that deserves to have songs written about the bravery and commitment of its citizens to protecting one another, to fighting back against injustice — to defending its people and its way of life at all costs. But there’s plenty of reason to suspect that Montgomery wasn’t the kind of town — and this wasn’t the kind of scenario — that Aldean had in mind. We know that celebrating moments of Black defiance is incredibly rare in American history. +
++The Montgomery brawl represents an extraordinary triumphant moment in which Black resistance has been seen as a just force rather than a threat to the white establishment. Black shows of defiance, even when used in clear self-defense, are all too often wielded against the victim. Historically, instances of rebellion such as that of slave revolt leader Nat Turner have been used to justify more violence against Black people. Today, in cases where Black victims of police violence attempt to seek justice, the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” — in which police have almost unlimited power to use force without fearing a lawsuit in response — is invoked. +
++The entire justice system, in other words, too frequently gets weaponized against Black Americans who assert themselves in the face of threats to their safety, property, and human dignity. Black citizens are rarely allowed to be “heroic through defiance,” to reclaim Black rebellion as an act of valor, or to wield reactive violence as a form of patriotism and idealism. That framing of violence is almost exclusively reserved for the kind of white supremacists Aldean’s song seems interested in protecting. +
++The Montgomery brawl was subversive, shocking, even refreshing in its memeability — not because violence is something to be enjoyed, but because the long arc of history, honed to oppress, simply could not withstand the glorious righteous fury of a bunch of boat workers who’d been forced to stand around for nearly an hour thanks to some entitled jerks who refused to follow the dock rules. +
++It’s worth asking whether the public’s reaction to the brawl would have been as laid back if the stakes hadn’t been so clear. These Black dockhands, after all, were working in the service of something undeniably anodyne, even arguably white-coded: a cruise on a 19th-century riverboat, with all the ties to antebellum history such a tour implies. Would this minor moment have been framed as heroic had the victims been trying instead to dock a summer cruise full of raucous Black partiers? If the dockhands had all turned out to be Black Lives Matter activists, would their rebellion have still been valiant? +
++It may seem silly to ask these kinds of questions about a heavily memed brawl involving a folding chair and a person known only as “Black Aquaman,” but this is exactly when we should be asking them. It’s the constant policing and challenging of ordinary Black existence by the white establishment — through microaggressions, or macro-aggressions, like writing an entire song about how badly you want to lynch outsiders — that leads to the fomentation of anger that spills over into protest. That then gets used to justify more policing and challenging of ordinary Black existence. +
++That’s why the Montgomery brawl was, on a level, a brilliant deconstruction of the lie behind “Try That in a Small Town”: It effortlessly destroyed the song’s flimsily veiled conceit that the “community” that needs protection is that of innocent white people being besieged by scary Black protesters. +
++Perhaps that’s also why Aldean’s song, though it had a brief stint atop the Billboard Hot 100 after all the controversy surrounding it broke, immediately plummeted a full 20 slots. This was reportedly one of the biggest drops in history, and the biggest ever for a song that didn’t debut at No. 1. +
++The deepest irony of all this is that Jason Aldean — who grew up in the big town of Macon, Georgia, and now resides in the bigger town of Nashville — tries to court “that small-town vibe” without ever delving into what the vibe actually is. Anyone who’s from a small Southern town understands exactly what he’s referencing. +
++Like anywhere, small towns are full of wonderful individual people and affirming communities. But also like anywhere — and perhaps even a little more often than anywhere, given their size and emphasis on the collective — they can be subject to toxic groupthink. When the idea of a small town is freighted with notions of an “us” and a “them,” notions that can distort a sense of self and what exactly needs to be defended, they can also be as alienating, dangerous, and violent as anywhere else on earth. +
++That’s why narratives of Black defiance are all the more crucial as representations of what real community can be. A sweet tea party, indeed. +
++The GOP’s only “climate policy” is actually bad for the environment. +
++When Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) questioned US climate envoy John Kerry at an oversight hearing in July — a month that became the hottest ever recorded — he sidestepped that the country was in the grip of repeated heat waves, fires, and a looming hurricane season. Over a six-minute interrogation, the House Freedom Caucus chair claimed Kerry wanted to charge taxpayers a “quadrillion dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist” and accused him, along with thousands of scientists and the 195 governments signed onto the Paris climate accord, of “grifting.” +
++Kerry shook his head when Perry concluded. “That’s a pretty shocking statement,” he said, “that you believe all the scientists of the world are grifters.” +
++The shock from the emotionally charged attack may have been the point. “There’s a longstanding history of climate deniers going after the messenger as well as the message,” Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies climate disinformation, told Vox. “The harder it is to dismantle the message, the easier it is to go after the individuals most prominently communicating it.” +
++Collective climate change denial in the Republican Party is not new. But the Perry-Kerry exchange illustrates how the GOP’s claims are becoming increasingly audacious — as signals from human-caused climate change become all the more apparent. +
++Record heat? “Normal”: “It’s hot, hot, hot all right,” said Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show. “After all, we’re in the middle of a season called ‘summer.’” (Fact check: More than 3,000 temperature records were shattered in the US for the month of July alone, something scientists say would be “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.) +
++Forest fires? “Nature naturally burns itself off every 11 years with natural disaster forest fires,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK). “This is a forest fire.” (Fact check: The severity of wildfires such as the historic blazes in Canada this year are fueled by complex conditions including forest management and drought primed by climate change.) +
++Stronger hurricanes? Just a part of life: “This is something that is a fact of life in the Sunshine State,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Fox News interview. “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.” (Fact check: Climate change drives the warming of ocean waters, which provide fuel for more devastating hurricanes and typhoons.) +
++More Americans are impacted by climate change; 62 percent of all voters recognize climate change is caused by human activity, according to a Gallup poll from this spring. Yet, climate change denial is not only alive and well in the GOP, it’s become “a lot more insidious and polarizing,” said John Cook, a University of Melbourne researcher who has tracked the path of climate disinformation online using artificial intelligence. +
++Here is what has made climate change denial worse. +
++Climate change denial is becoming more personal +
++Americans increasingly care about climate change, unless you’re asking the Republican voter base. The GOP’s obsession that liberal elites want to worsen the average person’s way of life through climate action has chipped away at their voters’ support for solutions and belief that the planet is warming. Party leaders and presidential candidates have insisted, wrongly, that Democrats’ climate solutions will mean bans on laundry machines, hamburgers, and gas stoves and that unabated “wokeism” has infiltrated the corporate world. +
++It’s a useful scare tactic, employed to delay action. Supran, who has conducted research on historical oil industry ads, found those in the 1990s “trotting out the same rhetoric, with different wording: ‘No more SUVs, no more driving around freely,’” to stave off new energy efficiency standards. +
++“It plays into this elitist narrative, that these are the elites and they aren’t like us and they’re trying to tell us all these cultural changes they’re trying to bring about,” explained Bob Inglis, a Republican and former South Carolina member of Congress who now runs the advocacy group RepublicEn to promote climate solutions among conservatives. Inglis said it’s helpful for the politicians who sell doubt on climate change to make it seem like people who support solutions “have their heads in the clouds trying to solve things the rest of us practical people don’t need.” +
++Inglis pointed out the problem with this narrative. “The thing about climate change is we’re all experiencing it right now,” he said. “We’re all in the midst of it.” +
++The party is making climate a culture war issue +
++Republicans have spent years hammering this message to the electorate and it has made a major difference to the average Republican voter. Research shows that the GOP politicians’ cues do impact how voters see the issue. +
++We can measure the effect of their rhetoric in the polling: A recent Gallup survey looked at partisan divides on a number of issues every 10 years from 2003 to 2023. One of the starkest shifts in the polling was around party views on global warming and environmental issues, ranking alongside gun laws and abortion as having the highest polarization. Republicans have become less concerned with global warming, even as the effects have grown more pronounced since 2013. And fewer Republicans think global warming is a result of human activity today than they did 20 years ago. +
++There are serious consequences to all this, and the far right plans to translate climate denial into official federal policy that encourages fossil fuels and blocks a clean energy transition, should Donald Trump win the next presidential election. +
++The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has drawn a 920-page blueprint called Project 2025 to unravel all of the US’s efforts so far to tackle climate change. It is a methodical, systematic undoing of the federal bureaucracy, Politico first reported, shuttering key programs from the Environmental Protection Agency, slashing climate and clean energy solutions, blocking the expansion of wind and solar on the grid, and turning over pollution oversight to the fossil fuel industry and handpicked Republican officials. +
++The GOP’s only “climate” policy is actually bad for the environment +
++Cook has found in his research that Republicans are increasingly concerned with spreading misinformation about solutions, grossly oversimplifying what needs to be done to avoid addressing fossil fuel emissions. One of those misleading ideas is a House Republican push for the Trillion Trees Act, which has not come up for a vote. +
++When Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) first proposed the Trillion Trees Act in 2020, environmentalists said the bill “would significantly increase logging across America’s federal forests, convert millions of acres into industrial tree plantations, increase carbon emissions, increase wildfire risk, and harm wildlife and watersheds.” The idea was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, effectively giving loggers more allowances as long as they planted seedlings which are decades away from delivering climate benefits. +
++But the GOP has come to champion the idea as their climate plan. “We need to manage our forests better so our environment can be stronger,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). McCarthy proposed planting trees so the US could focus on its natural gas industry, one of the world’s leading methane polluters. “Let’s replace Russian natural gas with American natural gas, and let’s not only have a cleaner world, let’s have a safer world,” he said. +
++Trump was in favor of a tree initiative while president, even while he was dismantling government action on climate change. And other leading climate deniers have focused on “forest management” or the timber industry as an easy fix for worsening wildfires. In a CNN town hall in June, presidential candidate Mike Pence said, “We’ve got to be able to tell some of the radical environmentalists that you’ve got to harvest some trees in the forest to keep the forest healthy.” +
++Planting a trillion trees to save us from climate change is not a serious proposal on its own. The authors of the 2019 study that has inspired the GOP’s talking point have themselves said that planting trees alone does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” +
++As Inglis put it, “trees can be part of the solution, but they’re not a solution on the scale of the problem. … What we’re looking for is a worldwide solution to the challenge of climate change.” Inglis’s group advocates for what he calls a conservative approach that does address the scale of the problem, a revenue-neutral carbon tax along with a border tax adjustment that works across the economy. +
++The GOP idea to plant more trees may seem innocuous compared to calling climate change a hoax, but the outcome is the same. They will try “anything that pushes the problem downstream,” said Supran, to shut down more immediate action. Invariably, inertia on climate change benefits the status quo — which just so happens to benefit fossil fuel industries, a major benefactor of the Republican Party. +
++“There’s so much talk but so little commitment to action both from the GOP and fossil fuel interests,” Supran said. “I feel like we’re in some kind of twilight zone, the talking points go round and round. The end result is just the same as it’s always been, which is lackluster action.” +
++Why the US is sending 3,000 Marines to secure the world’s oil. +
++This week, thousands of US sailors and Marines landed in the Persian Gulf to pursue a widening mission to protect the strategic waterway, where about a quarter of the world’s oil passes daily. +
++For decades, the US has in effect guaranteed the security of the Gulf. But Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent 3,000 Marines and sailors for a newly expanded role that, according to news reports, may include boarding US-flagged ships to escort them through the Strait of Hormuz in response to increased Iranian aggression. +
++“It would be a pretty pronounced change in the way the US polices the Gulf,” Gregory Brew, an oil historian and analyst at the Eurasia Group consulting firm, told Vox. +
++The deployment shows that, beyond securing the important energy route, the Biden administration wants to assert US power in the Middle East. With that comes risks, especially if the troops were to actually escort or even board commercial ships. The US did something similar during the Tanker War of 1987 to 1988, in which the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti vessels and escorted them through the strait as a deterrent measure during the Iran-Iraq war — leading to intensive US involvement in the Gulf. That has culminated in the US military enlarging its massive footprint, with tens of thousands of troops in a network of bases throughout the Gulf. Now, the new operation could lock in an even bigger and more ensnared US military presence. +
++President Joe Biden’s administration says the threat Iran poses to international trade is serious enough to warrant the significant new deployment. “Since 2021, Iran has harassed, attacked or seized nearly 20 internationally flagged merchant vessels, presenting a clear threat to regional maritime security and the global economy,” Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder said recently. While Iran denies that it has been harassing ships, some analysts suggested its aggression is in response to US sanctions on Iranian oil exports. +
+++More than 3,000 Sailors & Marines of the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group & 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in the Middle East, Aug. 6, as part of a pre-announced Department of Defense deployment.
+— U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet (@US5thFleet) August 7, 2023 +
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