Portside

• Energized White Supremacists Cheer Trump Convention Message – Steve Peoples (AP)
• Roger Ailes Built the Republican Party – Now Both Are Crumbling In Plain Sight – Richard Wolffe (The Guardian)
• Mike Pence's HIV Scandal Must Not Be Forgotten – Jenn Rose (Romper)
• The Coming War on ‘Black Nationalists’ – Yohuru Williams (The Nation)
• Political Art in a Fractious Election Year – Randy Kennedy (New York Times)
• Athletes Using Sports Platforms to Push for Social Change – Kareem Copeland (Salon)

Energized White Supremacists Cheer Trump Convention Message

By Steve Peoples
July 24, 2016
AP

The well-dressed men who gathered in Cleveland's Ritz-Carlton bar after Donald Trump's speech accepting the Republican nomination for president prefer the term "Europeanists," ''alt-right," or even "white nationalists." They are also die-hard Trump supporters.
"I don't think people have fully recognized the degree to which he's transformed the party," said Richard Spencer, a clean-cut 38-year-old from Arlington, Virginia, who sipped Manhattans as he matter-of-factly called for removing African-Americans, Hispanics and Jews from the United States.

Roger Ailes Built the Republican Party – Now Both Are Crumbling In Plain Sight

By Richard Wolffe
July 20, 2016
The Guardian

We are witnessing the Great Unravelling of the Republican party. Its ideological intellectuals openly disdain and plot against the party’s nominee. Its elected officials are too busy to show up to their own party’s convention.
And now the conservative echo chamber itself is collapsing across the mainstream media it surely dominates.
The rapid demise of Roger Ailes at Fox News Channel is as seismic an event as Trump’s nomination. For Ailes ruled over a conservative media and political empire that stretched far beyond cable television.

Mike Pence's HIV Scandal Must Not Be Forgotten

By Jenn Rose
July 14, 2016
Romper

On Thursday, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, announced that he'd chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for his running mate. The one who wants to force women to hold a funeral for medical waste after an abortion. The one who caused the gay pizza fervor of 2015. Those are two of the most notable bullet items on his resume, but there's another one, maybe not as well known, that needs to be discussed: the Indiana HIV epidemic that caused Mike Pence to declare a public health emergency, which some say he had a hand in causing.

The Coming War on ‘Black Nationalists’

By Yohuru Williams
July 20, 2016
The Nation

On Meet the Press following the Dallas killings, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani laid the blame squarely at the feet of Black Lives Matter. On CNN Tuesday morning, Wisconsin representative and former reality-TV star Sean Duffy went a step further and suggested greater scrutiny of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he argued is a prime instigator of violence against police.
All of this rhetoric is part of a rising chorus after the Texas and Louisiana killings, an effort to define a new category in the war on extremism—so-called black-nationalist terrorism.

Political Art in a Fractious Election Year

By Randy Kennedy
July 17, 2016
New York Times

In just eight years, the very idea of an everyday visual language has fractured in the ephemeral, fast-moving worlds of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And the idea that epic poetry remains possible in American political discourse has fared even worse, made almost farcical by entrenched congressional deadlock and two presidential candidates seen as dishonest and untrustworthy by large majorities of voters.
But the shift has not kept artists and visually minded activists from trying to say something meaningful during a fractious campaign season. In Cleveland and Philadelphia, art installations and performances — taking the form of neutral civic forums, partisan provocations and everything in between — will be cropping up all around the convention centers.
 

Athletes Using Sports Platforms to Push for Social Change

By Kareem Copeland
July 25, 2016
Salon

Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade gave an anti-violence speech at the ESPYS and expressed their support of the values behind the Black Lives Matter movement. University of Missouri football players threatened to boycott games last year in support of student groups protesting the school’s racial environment. School President Timothy Wolfe eventually retired. Serena Williams spoke out against the violence at Wimbledon. Members of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, New York Liberty and Phoenix Mercury recently wore black warm up shirts in the wake of recent shootings by and against police officers, and were fined by the league.
The league rescinded the fines after a public backlash.
It is nearly economically impossible to ignore today’s athletes as the power they wield reaches farther than their own bank accounts.