Angry White People

Much of the political divide in this nation right now is focused between two distinct groups, angry white people, and everybody else. This subject has gotten a lot of attention lately after the recent departure of Tucker Carlson from FOX "News". In his role over there, Carlson as you probably know, cast himself in the role of chief defender, spokesperson and provocateur for tens of millions of angry white Americans.

On his show he typically addressed his devoted viewers as "YOU." That "you" was a means to distinguish his followers, or as Carlson put it, "Legacy Americans", from THEY, everyone who is not an angry white person.

Typical Tuckerisms include: 

• THEY'RE coming after YOU,
  
• THEY'RE taking your rights away from YOU, and most sinister of all: 
• THEY hate YOU.

Unfortunately Carlson is not alone in riling up white people,. The machines that drive both sides of the ideological divide in this country from politicians, members of the press, pundits and other public figures, to lowly bloggers such as myself, in our words and deeds, only exacerbate that anger, further dividing the country. 

So why are so many white people so angry? Google that question and you'll find all sorts of explanations, some logical, some let's just say, far reaching.

Here in Chicago and in several comparable American cities, there is a complicated historical force at work that contributes to white rage.

I've been thinking about it since I wrote this piece twelve years ago about a South Side Chicago Roman Catholic parish that closed its doors largely because of so called "white flight" from the neighborhood as black people moved in. That piece continues to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. It struck a nerve as it has received by far the greatest number of negative comments of anything I have ever written.

I tried to be balanced in my assessment of why white people have historically moved out of neighborhoods in Chicago as soon as black people moved in. In the piece I cited institutional policies and greedy individuals who took advantage of people's fear, all of which contributed to white flight. Then I said: 

It would be easy to make a blanket condemnation of white people picking up stakes and leaving their neighborhood based on the threat of change...

Yet, next to our children, the biggest investment most of us have is our home. As much as we all would like to be community minded, the bottom line is that most of us need to look out for ourselves and our families first. "Get out before it's too late and you lose your investment..." may not be the most altruistic or public-spirited advice, but one certainly cannot say that it is not prudent.

I went into more detail in my recent post on West Garfield Park about housing covenants, redlining, contract selling, and other

...pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

Despite taking the blame of white flight largely off the shoulders of most (but not all) average white homeowners, some folks reading the piece still took issue when I wrote that in addition to all those things I just mentioned, racism was also part of the mix.

I stand by that statement.

But here's the thing, there's racism, then there's racism. One type of racism leads people to dress up in white sheets, give Nazi salutes, and march with tiki torches while chanting "we will not be replaced." The other is nuanced and from my experience, to some extent lives in all of us. If someone tells you he "doesn't have a racist bone in his body", rest assured he either lacks the self-awareness to recognize it or is flat out lying to you.

For good reason, "Racist" in our society is one of the most devastating accusations that can be leveled against a person, as people by nature associate the word with the former, the unequivocal, un-nuanced, heil-Hitler form of racism.

But today, the word is thrown about with such reckless abandon, especially by the Left, that it has virtually lost its meaning, but not its offense. 

Another term that needs to be judiciously reconsidered is "white privilege."

There's privilege, then there's privilege. The former comes through access to money, higher education and personal connections, among other things.  The latter privilege is something that should be enjoyed by everyone who lives in a free society. Unfortunately, far too many of us, especially people of color, are often denied many of those privileges. Therefore, "white privilege" which for the record I believe is a real thing, is not something bestowed upon white people, but rather, something that is taken away from others.  

Yet like racism, the word privilege evokes a very specific image to most people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, heir to the TV Dinner fortune, is undisputedly a man of great privilege in every sense of the word. The vast majority of his audience which is mostly white, does not enjoy the kind of privilege Carlson and the proverbial one percent of Americans have, and never will. 

Since Carlson is nothing if not two-faced, it's difficult to know exactly who he is or what he really believes. Judging from his public words, and now his publicly distributed private words, Carlson is likely also a racist in every sense of the word.  I'll go out on a limb here and state that the same is probably not true of much of his audience, although I haven't a clue how much. 

I read two books in preparation for my recent post about the Chicago neighborhood of West Garfield Park. The first was: Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, by Linda Gartz. Gartz writes about growing up in the West Side neighborhood where both she and her father spent their formative years. Linda's formative years coincided with the drastic population shift of the community which went from virtually 100 percent white in 1950, to virtually 100 percent black in 1970.

In 1968, the neighborhood was hit particularly hard during the riots that took place after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the subsequent decades, between 1970 and 2020, West Garfield Park lost nearly two thirds of its population. Unlike the vast majority of their fellow white West Garfield Parkers, Gartz's family remained, at least as landlords, (they moved out in 1965). As the buildings around theirs crumbled due to vandalism and neglect, Gartz's parents dedicated themselves to the upkeep of their three properties and faithful service to their tenants for the rest of their lives. (They died in the nineties).

Linda Gartz pulls no punches when describing some of the shortcomings of her family, including her mother's initial response to a black family moving to her block. But she also describes her mom's change of heart as she got to know some of her new neighbors.

Simply put, the message of the book is that both black and white families in West Garfield Park and other similar communities around the city, were the victims of bad actors, both government and businesses who profited off anger and fear of the white people, and the limited options for black people. The other message is that if we only could get to know one another on a personal basis, maybe we could begin to learn to live together.

That last point is also one of the messages of Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. The book was written by Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage, two professors of sociology at Roosevelt University. The book is based upon Dalmage and Maly's interviews of white folks whose families moved away from the neighborhoods in which they grew up when they began to change racially, and the two sociologists' take on them.

In all the interviews, the subjects spoke with reverence for the neighborhoods their parents felt compelled to leave. These places are described, as the book's title implies, as virtual paradises, places where everyone knew, cared for and looked out for one another, where the only limitation placed upon kids was to be home as soon as the streetlights came on. 

This all hit home for me as I have similar idyllic memories of my life growing up in Humboldt Park, a couple miles from West Garfield Park. We left the community in 1968 when I was nine, not long after the West Side riots, for the suburb of Oak Park. 

Many of the negative comments to the post mentioned above, implied that as an outsider, I had no idea what I was talking about and had no right to criticize others who experienced something I had not. I pointed out that I did indeed have "skin in the game", bringing up my Humboldt Park experience. 

At one point in reading Vanishing Eden however, it dawned on me that I was being disingenuous. In describing the factors leading people to change neighborhoods, the authors distinguished between being pulled away or pushed away.  

A few weeks ago, I asked my mother what was the factor that made her and my father decide to leave the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly thirty years. She told me about an incident that took place while she was walking to the corner store, (a classic example of the bygone days). On her way, someone spit on her from a second-floor window. "That was it.." she said, "we were out of there." OK my mother doesn't talk like that, but you get the picture. 

Thinking about it however, that incident, unpleasant as it was, was not the reason we left Humboldt Park. We left because we were living in a small rental apartment in a residential hotel building in which my grandmother was the manager. Both my parents had good jobs, both had cars, and money to afford to buy a house in the suburbs. In other words, they were acting out the "American Dream" just like the vast majority of their peers at the time. Long story short, we would have moved regardless, the spitting incident only hastened the act. 

In contrast, the families of the people interviewed in Vanishing Eden for the most part had already realized the "American Dream" of owning a home. Many were working class folks who had to save and sacrifice for years to achieve that goal and once there, had no intention of giving it up. Had external forces not intervened pushing them out of their beloved homes, they or their descendants might still be there.

Naturally there was great bitterness once their neighborhood changed. As I pointed out in the West Garfield Park piece, most of these folks knew nothing about the bad actors Linda Gartz speaks of in her book. What they knew was what they saw with their own eyes: time and again, once a neighborhood in Chicago went from white to black, it deteriorated rapidly. Given that, it's not too hard to figure who they came to blame.

In her book, Linda Gartz mentions that growing up, she and her family knew no black people personally. While I didn't have a great deal of close contact with black people as a small child either, one of the most memorable persons from my life in Humboldt Park was the contracted painter in our building, a black man by the name of Rogers. As my grandma ran the hotel, I got to know all the people who had a stake in the building from the owners to the janitor. Honestly I liked them all, but Rogers was especially kind to me, and I'd say he and I were as close to being genuine friends as a grown man of thirty-something and an eight-year-old child possibly could be.

Further background in my development, I have no childhood memory of my parents ever making a disparaging remark about black people. In fact, as I pointed out in this space at least a couple times, after I reported to them some nasty racial comments made by the parents of my best friend at the time, my parents told me in no uncertain terms that my friend's parents were wrong. As my father would always say: "people are people." I will forever be grateful for that.

It wasn't until we moved to Oak Park that I experienced virulent racism.  It was tough entering a new school in fifth grade where virtually all the kids had known each other since kindergarten. I met a kid in my class who seemed nice enough. He was smart and would actually talk to me without condescension. It turns out that he too was a new kid at the school, also having recently moved from the West Side. One day in the playground much to my surprise, he told me he and his family were moving again. When I asked why he said "because nig--rs moved onto our block and there's no way in hell we're going to live with them." Even at my young age I understood that while they came out of this ten year old boy's mouth, those weren't his words. 

Perhaps he was one of the people interviewed by Professors Maly and Dalmage for their book. Some of the interviewees while not being that candid about their feelings, were quite brazen by today's standards about expressing their bitterness and distrust of black people. One particularly disgusting excerpt is a couple recounting something that took place after moving to a new, all-white neighborhood. They were having a garage sale and a couple of black teenagers from another neighborhood bought a bicycle from them. As they walked through the alley with their new bike, a couple of neighbors who were cops chased after the kids and jumped them, assuming they had stolen the bike. The most disturbing part is that in recounting the story years later, the couple telling it were laughing, finding the whole incident amusing. 

Vanishing Eden is a revealing book, not only in the attitudes of its subjects, but also the attitudes of the authors, whose own bias comes through clearly.

The first clue comes from the book's cover illustration which features a faded photograph appearing to have been made in the fifties of a smiling white boy, three or four years old, sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon in the midst of what appears to be a tidy neighborhood of modest post-war homes. With the exception of the social class depicted, this picture evokes "Leave it to Beaver" and other period pieces that represent to many, a time of lost innocence in this country, all made possible in their minds by white hegemony.

The subtitle of the book: "White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Radically Changing City" drives home the point that the book's creators don't hold that opinion, and the photograph gracing the cover is there for irony.

In the book they make the point that their subjects view their old neighborhoods through rose colored glasses. To them, before the change everything was perfect and after, everything went to hell. 

Had they interviewed me about my own childhood experience of Humboldt Park, I would have told them pretty much the same thing, except the going to hell part.

The truth is I spent my formative years in Oak Park. I made some of my most cherished friendships there including my oldest and dearest friend, also an emigre from the West Side. I have no such connection to Humboldt Park. In Oak Park I had a back yard and a basement where I had nearly full reign, in addition to my bedroom. Three doors away there was a lovely park where I learned to play tennis. In the winter I went skating and sledding. For all intents and purposes, the "quality" of my life improved exponentially after we moved there. I am who I am today, for better or worse, by virtue of my life in Oak Park. 

Yet moving away from Humboldt Park was traumatic for me as things I dearly loved, my friends and the only home I knew, were taken away. Today I have no bad memories of my life in Humboldt Park, even though bad things certainly happened there. For years I mourned losing it and went back every chance I could. Despite there being no rational explanation for it, to this day I still feel in some ways more connected to Humboldt Park than Oak Park. 

Memory is a funny thing.

It's not surprising to me that folks who left their childhood homes around the same time I did, would have similar memories. It's even less surprising that they would express bitterness had they felt pushed out of their old neighborhood, especially if that idea was constantly enforced by the people closest to them.

Not many of the subjects in Vanishing Eden come off looking as horrible as the ones I mentioned above. Most of them, forty and more years after the fact (the book was published in 2016), understand the dynamics of race in this country and realize that black people themselves aren't to blame for what happened to their communities. But the authors in no way let these folks off the hook as they all in one way or other, express understanding for their fellow white folks, usually family members, who feel more bitter than they do, thereby "excusing their racism" as the authors put it.  

Thumbing through the book it's difficult to find a page where either the word racism or the term white privilege is not found. The authors are correct in pointing out that many white people who experienced white flight to this day have no intention of living on the same block as a black person Somehow, they weren't able to come up with any white flight veterans who had no problem living with black people. 

I wonder why.

They could have asked Linda Gartz. Perhaps the most revealing part of her book is where she mentions how during the civil rights movement of the sixties, her parents sympathized with the plight of black people in American South. That feeling didn't extend to the blacks who were moving into their neighborhood. This NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitude is not unusual, it's one of the less flattering parts of human nature.

On the same token, it's completely understandable why white people who experienced making the difficult decision of moving out of a changing neighborhood, would feel put off being judged by other white people who had no such experience. I imagine it would be doubly irritating for working class folks to have people with more money, education and influence, people who could afford to live anywhere they pleased, including affluent predominantly white suburbs, accuse them of racism and exercising their "white privilege", just for wanting their families to be able to live in peace and safety.

I don't know the personal backgrounds of Professors Dalmage and Maly. From their profile photographs, they appear to both be white. I can't say if either had the experience of living in a racially changing neighborhood. Dalmage was born in the mid-sixties and Maly in the eighties making them both too young, especially Maly, to have experienced the height of the era of white flight.  

It's clear they have an agenda, not a misguided one, reminding us that we'd all be better off if we learned how to get to know one another. Where they err in my opinion, is they make the same mistake they accuse their subjects of, they lack a sense of empathy. 

In my piece on the baseball player Ty Cobb, I embedded a powerful interview with the great Negro League ballplayer, coach, manager, and historian John "Buck" O'Neil. In that interview, O'Neil refuses to condemn people for being racists. Everybody has their own mountain to climb he suggests. "Babies aren't born prejudiced", O'Neil said, someone had to teach them to be that way.

Had Rogers and other good people like him not entered my life, had I spent my first years in West Garfield Park rather than Humboldt Park, had we not moved to Oak Park allowing me to meet the amazing people who would become my lifelong friends... 

Had a slew of other things that happened by chance in my life making me who I am today not happened, and most of all, had I not had parents who set me straight and taught me that the most important lesson in life is that "people are people", my outlook on the world may have been very different.

Had things been different, I too may have ended up being an angry white guy, falling prey to bad actors like the neighborhood busters, Tucker Carlson and the rest, teaching me to fear and distrust anyone who is different from me.

"There but by the grace of God go I" they say.

I think everyone of good will needs to keep that in mind.

Compromise, What a Novel Idea

Last night President Biden delivered a passionate address to the nation on the issue of gun control in the wake of two highly publicized mass shootings and several other less publicized ones that have taken place over the last few weeks in our country. In the message he spelled out his plans to send before Congress: bills to raise the legal age for purchasing firearms, strengthening background checks, enacting safe storage and red flag laws, as well as repealing the immunity protecting gun manufacturers from liability for their deadly products, a privilege Biden pointed out, no other industry enjoys.

The president also expressed his desire that the assault weapon ban Republican members of Congress allowed to expire in 2004, be put back into effect, putting a cap on the number of bullets a single magazine can hold, as well as other measures he readily acknowledged were very unlikely to pass.

As predictable as flies on a pile of poop in summer, the ultra-MAGA troll Tucker Carlson weighed in on Biden's remarks as if they were a genuine affront to all good, God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic Americans.

Biden had the nerve to address the nation during Carlson's prime time slot, so FOX "News", the network that broadcasts Carlson's nightly bile to his adoring fans, took the unusual step of broadcasting the president's speech in its entirely, all the while showing an inset of Carlson's trademarked, dumbfounded facial reactions to Biden's remarks in real time. Didn't watch that.

But I did give him his due by reading his rebuttal to Biden on FOX's website. If you can stand it, you can read it here.

Carlson analysed Biden's address this way:

So, to summarize the president's remarks tonight, your constitutional rights are not absolute. But in taking them away, we're not actually taking away your rights, we're protecting children. To which you might ask, am I a threat to children? That question is never answered by the president.

It would seem from this statement, that Tucker Carlson believes that constitutional rights ARE absolute, that it's perfectly OK for example to yell fire (when there isn't one), in a crowded theater or that there is no limit to the kind of weapons an individual can have at his disposal, machine guns, bazookas, nukes, you name it.

That's interesting because the president seemed to anticipate that response. He quoted the most revered of all Supreme Court Justices by members of the far right, Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in the District of Columbia v. Heller case which overturned Washington DC's ban on handguns. In that opinion Scalia wrote this:

Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

 In other words, again Scalia's:

...like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. (emphasis mine)

And it is...

not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

Of course our boy Tucker didn't mention any of that because it doesn't fit into his narrative.

Also not fitting into his narrative is that gun control should not be a political issue, but a common sense issue of public safety. The gun-nut crowd (as distinguished from reasonable and responsible gun owners), loves to complain that people who want to see the manufacture and sale of guns controlled in this country use mass shootings as an excuse to further their "political agenda" at a time when they should be mourning the victims.  

At the top of Carlson's piece he says this:

(Biden) decided to leverage the murder of 19 children in Texas last week for political advantage. 

That is moronic. A few days after I was born, there was a horrific fire in a school not far from where we lived. Many of the victims of that fire were brought to the hospital where my mother and I were still admitted. 92 children and 3 nuns died in that fire. Yes there was terrific grief in the days, months, and years that followed and even to this day. But there was also tremendous anger. People in the community and in fact all over the world said: "how the hell could something like this happen?"

That anger was put to good service as fire codes and design standards were completely overhauled to prevent another such disaster. Even though this involved expenditures of a good deal of tax money and proved a great inconvenience to many, to my knowledge, for the sake of saving the lives of children, no one whined about having to sacrifice or that their rights were being taken away.

Obviously I have no direct memory of the event but have a hard time believing those angry people were castigated for leveraging those deaths to advance a political agenda.

If it ended there, Tucker Carlson's response could be considered merely self-serving and idiotic. But as usual, he goes beyond that. Carlson is famous for distinguishing between his audience, whom he refers to in the collective, "you, the American people", and "them", the so-called political elite, presumably the Democrats, and by extension anybody who supports them.

Here are some chunks of Carlson's comments found in his piece:

The point of this, of course, is to disarm people who did not vote for Joe Biden.

Democrats in the House of Representatives spent the day debating ways to disarm you, Americans, who've committed no crime at all and want only to protect themselves and their families.

Anyone who tries to disarm you, by definition, considers you an enemy. That's what you do to your enemies, you disarm them. Your friends, your allies, your children, people you love. why would you want to prevent them from defending themselves? You never would. You certainly wouldn't scream at them from the podium about how they're killing children if they want to protect their own families. That's what you do to your enemies. 

If you think these quotes are not to be trusted because I've taken them out of context, please feel free to read the whole piece that I linked to above. 

First of all, it's ludicrous to say that Biden is proposing these new measures to effect only people who did not vote for him. Where is the evidence of that?* Law abiding Democrats as well as law abiding Republicans own guns. 

Secondly, "disarm" is a term bandied about quite liberally in this piece. Biden made it abundantly clear that he is not against guns and is not interested in disarming Americans, he simply proposes going back to a ban that already existed on very particular weapons, namely AR-15 style assault rifles which have been used in nearly all the mass shootings we've witnessed recently. 

Third, protecting oneself and one's family is a valid concern, and it is also thrown about quite haphazardly in all the rhetoric of the gun-nut crowd. But is that what these people really and truly care about? Does anybody really need an AR-15 style gun to protect himself? Read on.

The gist of Carlson's rhetoric can be found in the next line that says "anyone who tries to disarm you considers you an enemy." Clearly Tucker Carlson is saying here that Joe Biden by "disarming" the American people, considers the American people his enemy. Therefore it follows that Joe Biden the president of the United States, and those who support him, are the enemy of the true American people.

So the American people, according to the gun-nut crowd, need weapons such as the AR-15 not to protect themselves from the miscreants, prowlers, burglars, and other run-of-the-mill criminals, but from a hostile government who wants to enslave its people. And as we all know, the very first thing that dictators have done from time immemorial, is disarm the people, or so they say.

This is the narrative that Tucker Carlson wants to convey to his audience: the Democrats, and the people who support them, are not your fellow Americans who happen to have a different point of view, but your enemy who wants to take from you everything you value. First it's your guns, next your religion, then what? A particularly nutty legislator from the great state of Georgia who shall remain nameless, recently suggested that the way things are going, straight people will soon be extinct. And when that happens, there's the end of the species. 

I've said before in this space that Tucker Carlson is not an idiot, he just plays one on TV. Frankly I don't think he believes half of the rubbish he tells his viewers. In a defamation case against Carlson and FOX, the network's defense (which was successful) was that no one in their right mind should take anything Tucker Carlson says seriously. 

We can laugh all we want at the nonsense, but a lot of his viewers believe him and what he tells them. Carlson is the most public advocate of "white replacement theory", the idea that the Democrats are purposefully increasing the number of illegal immigrants of color crossing our borders for the sole purpose of gaining votes at the ballot box. In a rambling creed written before his racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, the killer of ten, while not naming Carlson directly, attributed WRT  as the inspiration for his crime.

I've also heard Tucker Carlson say that if the Democrats try to take away our guns, there will be a Civil War. Is that pure hyperbole? Well maybe for him, if there is a war, rest assured that Carlson would stay as far away from the front lines as possible. But rumblings of a Civil War in our future are not too infrequent in the world of social media, a former president, can you guess which one, reposted one.

With this attitude, it's not surprising that the Republicans are so intransigent in trying to cooperate with the Democrats, after all, why cooperate with your enemy? As far as gun control goes, despite efforts on the table that no reasonable person should object to, it seems that the attitude of the gun-nut crowd is "give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile." 

A democratic government doesn't work that way. You compromise.

I suppose if I were king of the United States, I'd get rid of the Second Amendment as I feel it has become obsolete in an era when we have a standing army and local and state police departments whose job it is to protect us. 

But here's the thing, I'm not king (thank God) and furthermore, I don't believe in kings. I believe in the rule of law and I believe in our constitution, imperfect as it is. Given that, as a citizen, I would not advocate for the repeal of the Second Amendment because I feel it would create a slippery slope which would weaken the constitution to the point where every one of our rights as American citizens could be in jeopardy of being revoked. 

As the president pointed out in his address, there are things he wants to accomplish that have a chance of succeeding, and others that won't. That's how negotiations work, each side brings to the table more than they know will be accepted, issues that can be given up in the interest of getting concessions from the other side. There's no way in hell that the assault weapon ban will be reinstated at this time, everybody knows that. But if it is brought to the table and the Democrats are hesitantly willing to give that up, perhaps, so the theory goes, the other side may be willing to accept other restrictions that could possibly save a few lives. 

Or maybe not; given the way things have been going, I'd give the Republicans making any concessions a less than a 50/50 chance. 

Fortunately there are reasonable people who believe in the Second Amendment with all their hearts.

By chance, yesterday morning I found an article by a Mississippi writer named Sid Salter. From all indications he is a conservative Republican who may (or may not) have voted for Donald Trump. The article is titled "Justice Scalia’s words on Second Amendment absolutism are true and prophetic" and it was published on a site called "Y'all Politics." Given all that, I opened up the article fully assuming the writer's opinions would be diametrically opposed to mine. 

It turned out that Salter focused on the words of Scalia that Joe Biden quoted later that day.

Here is a link to Sid Salter's piece. 

Much to my surprise, the article is spot on.

Sid Salter and I might have plenty to argue about, which is just fine, because at the root of it, we are both Americans who love our country and want to see it succeed. Because of that we both despise the division sewn by certain politicians and pundits like Carlson, who have plenty to gain for themselves and their pocketbooks as our country is torn apart limb by limb. 

As for the rest of us, the real American people, Republican, Democrat and Independent, we have nothing to gain but plenty to lose.

And right now, we're losing big time. 

* Carlson's "evidence" is that the proposed measures to limit the amount of bullets a magazine is capable of holding, would not apply to the bodyguards of politicians, therefore the politicians would have proper protection, but regular citizens would not. He seems to be implying this only applies to Democratic politicians not Republicans, which is of course, pure nonsense.