What does "Come Get Your People" mean?

I had to Google that question as I struggled to understand the NYT op-ed, "White Women, Come Get Your People," by Alexis Grenell. The phrase "come get your people" does not appear in the text of the column, only in the headline. There's a subheadline, "They will defend their privilege to the death." I guess "They" is the white women, not "your people." Is coming and getting your people another way to say defending your privilege?

We see photographs of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, so I guess they're in the set of white women Grenell is addressing. Is Grenell white? It feels creepy to Google to check someone's race, but she made race relevant. The headline makes it seem as though she is not white, because why would you address a group as if they were other than you if they were not?

I've read the column already, and I found it strange and off-putting, so I'm going to read it again to examine my reaction and I'll also see if the meaning of the headline pops into clarity and, if not, examine what turned up in my Google search of the phrase "Come Get Your People."

It begins with melodrama and careless imagery:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. 

I say careless because "rivers of blood" is a lot of blood to flow out of "women" — which women? how many? — and yet they only "all but slit their wrists"? So what did they do in this metaphor, to produce all that blood, if they didn't open wrist veins?

With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

So Murkowski counts as one of the good ones (despite the pairing with Daines). And Susan Collins, despite her beautifully brilliant speech, is deemed to have fought against the position she forthrightly took. Then, she "caved." She gave in to the men.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. 

That's awfully presumptuous. The vote on Kavanaugh wasn't — at least not necessarily — a vote for or against "the patriarchy." I think this kind of overstatement and hyperventilating is repellent to a lot of women and men. "Gender traitors" is very insulting and closed-minded about what different women might be thinking. Feminists should offer women freedom, not more limitation.

The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out....

Less revealing than T-shirts stating political messages, or did Grenell just flip into visualizing these women policing the display of sexuality in their offspring?

These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. 

But being falsely accused is horrible! We rarely get the choice which misfortune will befall us, but it's not right to brush aside some misfortunes because we think other misfortunes are worse. But anyway, compare the least bad rape to the worst false accusations, and you will surely see an overlap. I think there are some men — you? — who would rather be raped than to have his 2 young daughters believe, falsely, that he is a rapist. Again, life doesn't work like that. You don't get that choice. But I think just the one effect, your 2 daughters believe you are a rapist, might be as painful as an actual rape, and I'm not counting all the other potential effects that Kavanaugh was looking at: loss of the Supreme Court appointment, loss of his existing judgeship, loss of his ability to teach and to coach, loss of his wife, loss of his friends, and even loss of his liberty (as some were arguing that he should go to prison for perjury). These are not trifles! And it's counterproductive to pretend that they are for the purpose of convincing people that rape is a terrible crime.

The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

She's reduced herself and others to an internal organ. Uteri cry out to other uteri: Sisters! But every young man is here because a woman was a mother, and the solidarity within a family is the strongest solidarity of all. That scares you? It scares you that mothers love their sons? The love of mothers toward their sons makes us want to see them free from false accusations AND want them not to be rapists. It's not one or the other. The 2 desires are mutually reinforcing. And it really is, as you say, stupid to think otherwise.

Since when do people on the left think fairness to the accused should be sacrificed in the interest of fighting crime? That's traditionally what lefties call a right-wing idea.

We’re talking about white women. 

Because black men are not susceptible to false accusations?! That's a ludicrously convenient assertion.

The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades....

The effort to inject race into the Kavanaugh problem is embarrassing. We have enough racial problems without seeing them appropriated as a makeweight in an argument about women. And it's ridiculous and contemptuous toward women to say that when we vote we're just choosing whether to vote based on race or based on sex. Stop globbing us into big groups and ordering us what to do. It's not even effective persuasion, quite apart from its being plainly factually wrong and actively destructive.

I'm cutting a few sentences that lead up to this over-the-top statement:

So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies....

I think by "minimizing violence against their own bodies" she means acting as if the violence against them isn't as bad as it really is, but the language is carelessly ambiguous in a way that doesn't serve her propagandistic agenda. The phrase could also mean doing things that lessen the extent of the violence. A woman who knows self-defense and keeps alert and aware of her surroundings is "minimizing violence." Perhaps Grenell is so focused on how women feel about what other people do to them that she didn't notice the double meaning that had to do with what women can do for themselves in this world. What's important is that the Democratic Party can endlessly offer to help women with their desperate, crying needs. And if you're a woman and you don't agree, you're a gender traitor.

Look at this logic:

During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness....

A statistically significant relationship doesn't tell us what was in the voters' mind! White women voted for Trump to prop up their whiteness? How do you know they didn't vote because they hate abortion or because they wanted better trade deals or they don't trust the Clintons or, hell, maybe they still held out some insane hope of making America great again?

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

Grenell is insulting women again. Because they're not on her political side, she disparages them as having no mind at all. Hypocritically, she's saying about them what she's accusing Trump of saying about them, that they're conned and witless. But that isn't what Trump is saying. He might be thinking it, but Grenell is saying it.

But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore...

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense... 

Due process is nonsense. 

... due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache....

Grenell is presenting herself as a lunatic. She's doing that openly and intentionally. She's less aware, it seems, that she's also betraying the most treasured liberal values.

... as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?

I fear we already know the answer.

So it ends. Awful. She should fear that her histrionics and stark illiberalism will drive voters, female and male, into voting against Democrats. I don't like rivers-of-blood melodrama and race jammed in anywhere you can think of anything to say about it and contempt for the intelligence and independence of women. What an awful opinion piece! And I still don't know what "come get your people" means!

Okay, I'll look at the stuff Google found for me. First, there's "Picking Up the Trash of White Supremacy," by Abby Norman in something called SheLoves:

Recently my friend Danielle has been tagging me in posts on Facebook about white people making unfortunate missteps, whether blatantly or accidentally, in the realm of racial reconciliation.

“Abby Norman, you better come get your people.”

At first I laughed. What do you mean my people? I do not know these people. They do not speak for me. Why do you think every dumb white girl is my people, what are you trying to say?

What Danielle was trying to say was that as a white woman, with white privilege, it is my responsibility to educate other white people so everyone can live in a better world. Too often white women, and specifically I, have depended on black women to educate white communities about their lived experiences....

White Ladies, the white community is our space and our responsibility....

Second, there's a tweet from Brittney Cooper (AKA ProfessorCrunk) that says:

White feminists, when we say come get your people, we mean come get your girl, #PermitPatty, out here harassing little Black girls. This kind of thing makes me feel the opposite of non-violent.

So there's this specifically racial meaning, it seems, that comes from black people who are tired of getting stuck fighting racism on their own and want white people to see it and to take the lead disciplining other white people. But Grenell isn't black, and though she tries, she's not really talking about race. She's a white woman demanding that other white women discipline white women, and not about race but about getting tripped up in the nonsense of due process rather than just automatically and uncritically believing a woman's accusations.

If it's some specifically black slang, why not let black people have it? Speaking of white privilege. Do you think everything is yours?

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"The crowd in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is tiny, looks like about 200 people (& most are onlookers)..."

"... that wouldn’t even fill the first couple of rows of our Kansas Rally, or any of our Rallies for that matter! The Fake News Media tries to make it look sooo big, & it’s not!"

Trump tweets.

Also at Twitter, I'm seeing Jordan Peterson promoting (but not necessarily endorsing) the idea that Kavanaugh, confirmed, should step down. Responding to him is Scott Adams, who says, "This feels like a terrible idea to me, but because smart people are saying it, I’m open to hearing the argument."

Peterson replies: "I'm not certain that is the right move. It's very complex. But he would have his name cleared, and a figure who might be less divisive might be put forward."

And Adams says, "Quitting would clear his name? I'm not connecting any of these dots."

I agree with Adams and would add that a "less divisive" figure is a fantasy. If the Democrats dream of stopping Kavanaugh were to come true, they would be fired up to use any means necessary to stop the new nominee. I'm reminded of this passage in the Susan Collins speech:

The President nominated Brett Kavanaugh on July 9th. Within moments of that announcement, special interest groups raced to be the first to oppose him, including one organization that didn’t even bother to fill in the Judge’s name on its pre-written press release – they simply wrote that they opposed “Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A number of Senators joined the race to announce their opposition, but they were beaten to the punch by one of our colleagues who actually announced opposition before the nominee’s identity was even known.

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A new WaPo trend — giving Trump credit?

It takes 4 journalists to see it, but, apparently....



... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius?

Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:

Again and again, President Trump was instructed not to do it. A cadre of advisers, confidants and lawmakers all urged him — implored him, really — not to personally attack the women who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

So he did it anyway.

Addressing thousands at a boisterous rally in Mississippi, Trump relied on his own visceral sense of the moment and mocked Christine Blasey Ford for gaps in her memory, directly impugning the accuser’s credibility.

Establishment Republicans initially reacted with horror. But Trump’s 36-second off-script jeremiad proved a key turning point toward victory for the polarizing nominee, White House officials and Kavanaugh allies said, turbocharging momentum behind Kavanaugh just as his fate appeared most in doubt....

Trump had no particular personal affinity for Kavanaugh, although a dinner was arranged between the two men and their wives to cultivate a relationship. “I don’t even know him,” the president told the Mississippi crowd, “so it’s not like, ‘Oh, gee, I want to protect my friend.’ ”...

“Kavanaugh’s an establishment guy. He was a Bush guy,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referencing the nominee’s experience as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush. “There was a lot of pushback, you know — ‘Don’t go [down] that road,’ ‘That’s not why you won,’ and he said, ‘Wait a minute. I want to pick the best people to be on the court I can,’ and he said he was incredibly impressed by his background, just the whole package of Kavanaugh.”...

[Kavanaugh's Fox News interview] was widely criticized — “objectively a horrible idea,” in the words of one White House official. Kavanaugh appeared wooden and dispassionate, sticking only to a few talking points, and Trump, an avid consumer and critic of television news, thought he appeared weak and unconvincing....

[The Judiciary Committee hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh] left the president seesawing from fatalism to enthusiasm about Kavanaugh’s confirmation prospects.

When Ford had finally finished, [White House counsel Don] McGahn spoke privately to Kavanaugh, who had not watched, urging him to be passionate. “Speak from your heart,” McGahn advised the nominee, according to someone familiar with their discussion.

Kavanaugh roared into the committee room and shouted his opening statement, which he had personally written the night before with the help of one trusted clerk. The hotly defiant performance was so effective in the eyes of his advisers — and, perhaps most importantly, of the president — that a group gathered in Vice President Pence’s Capitol Hill office began to cheer and pump their fists. Some even had tears in their eyes.

The hearing galvanized activists on both sides and left jittery senators — including Flake, one of 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee — torn between competing accounts and party loyalties.... McConnell spoke with Trump and convinced him that the only option was to delay a vote and move forward with the FBI probe....

On the campaign trail... Trump ratcheted up the partisan warfare at his rallies. In Mississippi, the president — already fuming over a New York Times investigation into his family’s allegedly fraudulent tax schemes — felt the media was not properly scrutinizing Ford’s account and decided to engage.

“How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember,’ ” Trump said, reenacting Ford’s hearing. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”

The riff lasted less than a minute, but had lasting ramifications. The senators whose votes Kavanaugh was wooing said they were aghast at the president’s rally-stage behavior. But Kavanaugh allies saw a clear benefit: An argument by the president that bucked up Kavanaugh, discredited Ford and became a clarion call for conservatives.

More than two dozen Trump supporters interviewed at the president’s campaign rally Thursday in Minnesota said they wish he had not gone after Ford, fretting that doing so was not presidential. Yet many also acknowledged the president had simply spoken aloud what many of them thought privately.

The reporters don't tie it all up. In fact the headline at the article is toned down from the one on the front page which you see in my image at the top of this post. At the article, there's less credit to Trump. It's just: "‘Willing to go to the mat’: How Trump and Republicans carried Kavanaugh to the cusp of confirmation." But the facts are there in the article. Trump critiqued Ford's testimony in clear powerful terms — something everyone else was afraid to do. He recognized that Kavanaugh's presentation on Fox News wasn't compelling (even though it was what the pushers of the "judicial temperament" argument claimed they needed to see). And during the hearing, after Ford testified, Trump performed a public routine of "seesawing" about whether Kavanaugh could make it, lighting the fire on him to shed his establishment guy/Bush guy demeanor and talk more like Trump.

That's all in the article, but with no strongly stated bottom line, Trump haters can shrug it off and cling to their belief that Trump is an impetuous idiot.

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A retired law professor just unseriously hoped that Vox has hit rock bottom.

Here's what I'm looking at:



Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities. It's a choice to highlight similarities when there are also differences. For example I could say that there are similarities between Hitler's gesture in that screenshot and Melania's. There are also differences, and it would be a choice of mine to accuse Vox of juxtaposing those images as a way of saying Melania is like Hitler. I could just as well say those images were juxtaposed as a way to say Melania is different from Hitler. Or maybe there's no juxtaposing at all, and it's pure happenstance that Melania got tucked in over there, to the right of Hitler and underneath "Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good/It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years."

That's some hyperventilating by Matt Yglesias, and I don't know where he gets the authority to "wake up" America to what's really going on at the Supreme Court. You know, Vox touted that new essay about America and the Nazis precisely because it is written by "one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust." And now here comes Matt Yglesias, who is not an eminent and well-respected Supreme Court scholar, and he's eager to wake us up to the "reality" of the "radical right" that's been "run[ning]" the Supreme Court and to explain why it's good for the Supreme Court to be "delegitimized."

When the Supreme Court gives lefties outcomes lefties like, they want conservatives to stand down and accept that the Court is doing proper, even brilliant, legal work. It's analogous to what I call "civility bullshit." You propound belief in something when it serves your interests, but you violate it without a care when your interests go the other way.

I'm interested in this word "delegitimize." I wonder, is it "delegitimize" or "delegitimatize"? The OED doesn't contain the word "delegitimatize," but "delegitimize" is only a subentry, under the entry for the prefix "de-" and without a definition, just 2 historical examples, the oldest of which is from 1969. What a year, 1969! I can't link to the OED, but let me cut and paste this telling quote:

1969 C. Davidson in A. Cockburn & R. Blackburn Student Power 349 People will not move against institutions of power until the legitimizing authority has been stripped away... And we should be forewarned; it is a tricky job and often can backfire, de-legitimizing us.

It looks like we're seeing the word coined right there! It works because we already know "legitimize." But is it "legitimize" or "legitimatize"? Both "legitimize" and "legitimatize" have been around since the 1600s.

"Legitimatize" is defined as "To make legitimate; to serve as a justification for (something); spec. to make (a child) legitimate by legal enactment or otherwise." The OED tells us it's rare, but John Cheever used it in 1961:

1961 J. Cheever Jrnls. (1991) 152 The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage.

Harrumph! Sounds right wing. Let's check "legitimize." The OED refers us to "legitimatize" for the definition but does not warn us that it's rare. I guess people don't like too many syllables.

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Trump's word of the day yesterday: Loco.

I don't remember hearing it from him before, but I heard it twice yesterday.

1. Sparring with the press after announcing the U.S. Mexico Canada trade deal: "Oh, I think the press has treated me unbelievably unfairly. In fact, when I won I said, the good thing is now the press finally gets it. Now they’ll finally treat me fairly. They got worse! They’re worse now than ever. They’re loco, but that’s OK … I used that word because of the fact we made a deal with Mexico."

2. At a rally in Tennessee last night: "Democrats believe that they're entitled to power, and they have been... in a blind rage ever since — boy! — they lost the 2016. They've gone loco. They have gone loco. They have gone crazy."

"Loco" has been used colloquially in American English (of the western kind) since the mid-1800s, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me. The OED defines it as "Mad, insane, crazy" and says it's often used — as Trump uses it — in the phrase "to go loco." Here's the oldest example:

1852 V. S. Wortley Young Traveller's Jrnl. xx. 250 She said, she knew not what she did, but was ‘loco’ (mad) when we paid her a visit.

I looked in the 15-year archive of this blog to see if I'd ever used the word "loco" (even in a quote). I'd only said "in loco parentis" and referred to the song "The Loco-Motion" and an incident in which someone had the name "Bloody Loco." And in the context of arguing that the word "locavore" should be spelled "locovore," because the Latin root for place is "loco-" not "loca-," I speculated that the "locavores" wanted to avoid the association with the word "loco" (meaning crazy).

By the way, some people think it's wrong to make an insult out of "crazy" and words that mean crazy, because there's collateral damage to persons with mental illness. But it's so common. It would be insanely inhibiting to self-censor that one, but I did use to have many long conversations with a person who insisted on my refraining from deploying "crazy" as an insult. I know what you're thinking: He sounds crazy.

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Now, I am getting email from the Democratic Party soliciting donations based on Brett Kavanaugh.

Yesterday morning, I blogged about getting an email solicitation from the party, under the name of Cory Booker, that didn't mention Kavanaugh. I speculated about what that might mean. But yesterday evening, I got this email, from the party, with the subject line "Brett Kavanaugh" (signed by Seema Nanda, the CEO of the Democratic National Committee). Since I blogged about the Kavanaugh-free email. I've got to share the text of this:

After watching Republican senators' shameful performance in this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I'm more certain than ever that it is a moral imperative for Democrats to take back control of Congress this November and the White House in 2020.

Shameful? What was shameful?

Chuck Grassley shouldn't be chairing a congressional committee. People like Lindsey Graham shouldn't be Senators.

People like Lindsey Graham? What does that even mean?! There's a heavy moralistic tone here, but it's so conclusory that I see they're only trying to reach me if I happen to have already taken umbrage and am up for conclusory statements and slurs.

People like Donald Trump shouldn't be appointing anyone to a lifetime term on our nation's highest court., Lindsey Graham and their Republican colleagues...

That's how it looks in the original. Something got cut. I don't know why the DNC is centralizing Graham (other than that he made the most fiery statement during the hearing).

... have shown that they have no interest in seriously investigating the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh -- and Donald Trump has demonstrated time and again that he lacks the temperament and judgment to make an appointment to our highest court.

I thought Trump was making very sober choices, deferring to the experts on the conservative judiciary. I can't think of anything he's done wrong in picking Supreme Court nominees (other than that he's picking conservatives).

My promise to you as CEO of the Democratic National Committee is that I will do every last thing in my power in the next 39 days to fight back against these Republicans. Right now, I'd like to ask for your help.

"Every last thing"?

This Sunday is the final end-of-quarter deadline before Election Day, and every contribution made before Sunday at midnight will help Democrats take back Congress this November. If we do that, we can exert some real checks on this president and stop him from pushing through more extreme Supreme Court nominees.

And that's the problem, distinctly admitted. The Democrats oppose conservative Supreme Court nominees, and they need to win in the midterms to block them, and they're ready to do anything they can toward that goal.

ADDED:  I used the word "umbrage" and felt motivated to look it up in the OED. I'm using it correctly. It has meant "Displeasure, annoyance, offence, resentment" since the 1600s. One of the examples in the OED comes from George Washington:

1796 G. Washington Let. in Writings (1892) XIII. 263 Unless my pacific disposition was displeasing, nothing else could have given umbrage by the most rigid construction of the letter.

But the older meaning is shade or shadow, and it's still not obsolete to use it to mean, specifically, the shade created by a tree:

1849 C. Brontë Shirley II. ii. 34 She would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage.

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