This is (ironically) exactly what was done to HRC with her “
super predators” comment. She was specifically referring to gang members—not “black youth” in general—but the GOP turned it against her and then the lie stuck, even to the point of Obama and BLM repeating it.
Was it the GOP?
Yes. Note what I said: "the GOP turned it against her and then the lie stuck, even to the point of Obama and the BLM repeating it."
Can you show me any GOPers making hay out of the "superpredator" comment?
You mean beside
Donald Trump and Reince Priebus? Is your google broken?
Let's start with the person who came up with the term (and the theory behind it) in the first place. That would be
John J. DiIulio Jr., President W. Bush's Director of the then newly created White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Although described as a Democrat, he first came up with the theory while at Princeton and it fueled debate among both parties, but
more so on the right:
No one in the mid-1990s promoted this theory with greater zeal, or with broader acceptance, than John J. DiIulio Jr., then a political scientist at Princeton. Chaos was upon us, Mr. DiIulio proclaimed back then in scholarly articles and television interviews. The demographics, he said, were inexorable. Politicians from both major parties, though more so on the right, picked up the cry. Many news organizations pounced on these sensational predictions and ran with them like a punt returner finding daylight.
Here's a piece he wrote in 1995 that essentially started the firestorm:
The Coming of the Superpredators (a theory that was proved wrong and he subsequently recanted, but only after HRC made that speech btw).
This highly critical piece in
Jacobin gives you additional context:
Confirming DiIulio’s analysis was James Q. Wilson, the conservative political scientist who had devised the theory of “broken windows” policing. The broken windows theory posited that minor crimes in a neighborhood (such as the breaking of windows) tended to lead to major ones, so police should harshly focus on rounding up petty criminals if they wanted to prevent major violent crimes.
Put into practice, this amounted to the endless apprehension of fare-jumpers and homeless squeegee people. It also created the intellectual justification for totalitarian “stop and frisk” policies that introduced an exasperating and often terrifying ordeal into nearly every young black New Yorker’s life.
“Broken windows” had very little academic support (it hadn’t been introduced in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a short article for the Atlantic), but Wilson still felt confident in pronouncing on the “superpredator” phenomenon. He predicted that by the year 2000, “there will be a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are now” and “six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders — thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now.”
DiIulio and Wilson said that it was past time to panic. “Get ready,” warned Wilson. Not only were the superpredators here, but a lethal tsunami of them was rising in the distance, preparing to engulf civilization.
As James C. Howell documents, just a year later, as crime rates continued to decrease, DiIulio “pushed the horizon back ten years and raised the ante.” This time DiIulio projected that “by the year 2010, there will be approximately 270,000 more juvenile super-predators on the streets than there were in 1990.” Like a Baptist apocalypse forecaster, the moment the sky didn’t fall according to prophecy, a new doomsday was announced, with just as much confidence as the last.
So despite all evidence to the contrary, segments of the Right continued to anticipate “a bloodbath of teenager-perpetrated violence,” perpetrated by “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “have absolutely no respect for human life.”
The notion gained political cache, and was spoken of in Congress and on the national media. It was even propagated, and given a major credibility boost, by one or two prominent liberals, perhaps the most prominent of whom was Hillary Rodham Clinton.
...
The political conservatism of the theory was hardly smuggled in under cover of night. DiIulio’s “Coming of the Super Predators” first appeared in William Kristol’s conservative Weekly Standard, and the handful of scholars who peddled the theory had strong, open ties to right-wing politics, so it was plainly partisan rather than scholastic.
Even the language used by the professors, of “Godless” and “brutal” juveniles without “fixed values,” was plainly the talk of Republican Party moralists, rather than dispassionate social scientists. Nobody in the professional circles of a “children’s rights” liberal like Hillary Clinton would have given the “superpredator” concept a lick of intellectual credence, even when it was at the peak of its infamy.
It was therefore deeply wrong to spread the lie even when it was most popular.
Now, beside the fact that the right wing capitalized on the theory more so than the left, it was the left (Bill Clinton and Hillary in particular) that got the most slack for it.
Now jump to 2014, when no less an austere right wing publication as Breitbart News introduces the
Black Conservatives Fund. If that combination of Breitbart and "Black Conservatives Fund" doesn't tell you all you need to know, here's my favorite part of the piece in light of the deliberately misleading ad it created that we'll get to in a minute:
BCF will be providing “direct contributions in addition to running TV and radio ads, conducting get-out-the vote drives, and funding any other activities our endorsed candidates need.”
...
Their goals are to...Present an accurate portrayal of the Republican party and our history with the black community.
By presenting an inaccurate portrayal of Hillary Clinton with the black community. Jump to November 2nd of 2016:
Black Conservatives Fund recalls Clinton’s “super-predators” and “firewall” comments (emphasis mine):
The ad, “Hillary Hates,” features the candidate’s 1996 comments where she was caught using racially divisive undertones to champion a bill that ultimately locked up a generation of black men. The ad also uses 2016 footage of her run-ins with Black Lives Matter protestors.
“We’re not just the only conservative group going after black voters on television—we’re the only group, period,” Black Conservatives Fund Senior Adviser Ali Akbar said.
With a television buy in Ohio and North Carolina, the ad is supplemented by a sizeable digital buy that spans across Facebook, Instagram and smaller, highly-targeted web publications. The cable time has been reserved across BET, CNN, ESPN, HGTV and USA networks in these states.
The digital buy stretches into at least three other states not being targeted on television. In total, the group has planned a six-figure commitment to their advertising campaign for the remainder of the 2016 general election.
So the ad was not only run extensively, it deliberately targeted the Black Lives Matter movement. I've embedded the ad at the end. Back to the timelines.
Just eight days after the ad saturated black demographic markets came this incendiary piece in The Nation on November 10:
Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote, by Michelle Alexander (emphasis mine):
In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
Then just ten days later, we get Alexander
doubling down (and the Bernie Sanders camp taking up the charge as well) and saying the following defacto
endorsement of Sanders:
This is not an endorsement for Bernie Sanders, who after all voted for the 1994 crime bill. I also tend to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the way the Sanders campaign handled the question of reparations is one of many signs that Bernie doesn’t quite get what’s at stake in serious dialogues about racial justice. He was wrong to dismiss reparations as “divisive,” as though centuries of slavery, segregation, discrimination, ghettoization, and stigmatization aren’t worthy of any specific acknowledgement or remedy.
But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.
Note how she likewise misconstrued Hillary's vote in regard to Iraq (as many have) a well as her stance on bank deregulation (as everyone has).
What happens next just eight days after
that? A young graduate student by the name of
Ashley Williiams steps forward (emphasis mine):
Ashley Williams, a black queer organizer living in Charlotte, North Carolina, interrupted a private Hillary Clinton fundraiser. Williams, elbowing to the front of the audience, unfurled a sign that read “We have to bring them to heel,” a line from Clinton’s now-infamous 1996 “super-predators” speech, recently cited in Michelle Alexander’s article on the Clinton legacy for The Nation.
And full circle. So, what began as a predominantly right-wing embraced mythology in the nineties
referenced briefly by HRC in a speech in 1996 where she specified gangs (not "black youth") gets weaponized by the GOP through the "Black Conservatives Fund," who were the ones to dig up the speech and then revise it (though one must wonder how they even knew about it, considering its length and age), take it out of context and combine it with the Black Lives Matter movement, thus ensuring any BLM activists would see it.
Days after the ad floods targeted black markets--most notably in North Carolina--the same out of context snippet is picked up on by Michelle Alexander (indirect Sanders supporter) and Shaun King (HUGE Sanders supporter)--the former of which writes an incendiary piece referencing the clip--and then a few days later a North Carolinian graduate student and BLM activist, apparently, repeats the same lie, only directly to HRC's face and at a fundraiser (iow, not the appropriate forum to address any such thing).
By the way, the original speech can be found
here. It is over thirty-five minutes long and the short snippet we're talking about comes around the 22 minute mark. What do you think the chances are that either Ms. Alexander or Ms. Williams (or Shaun King for that matter), both just happened to be searching C-Span archives within a few days of each other and both of them just happened to watch the entire speech (or at least the first 22 minutes) for them to have seen the actual footage and not based everything they subsequently said/wrote entirely on the BCF's version?
Because if they had both done their primary source research and not merely regurgitated a GOP lie, this is what they would have heard her say (from the transcript based on the closed captioning C-Span offered at the time):
But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people and they are often connected to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often. The kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel and the president has asked the F.B.I.. To launch a very concerted effort. Against gangs. Everywhere. In addition to that. He has appointed a new drug czar. You probably saw him Tuesday night he's one of the most distinguished.
Gangs. No mention at all of black youth anywhere in the context of the quote nor for that matter in the entire speech. Note in particular the phrases "No conscience. No empathy." Back to
DiIulio:
On a recent visit to a New Jersey maximum-security prison, I spoke to a group of life-term inmates, many of them black males from inner-city Newark and Camden. In a typical remark, one prisoner fretted, "I was a bad-ass street gladiator, but these kids are stone-cold predators."
...
While it remains true that most violent youth crime is committed by juveniles against juveniles, of late young offenders have been committing more homicides, robberies, and other crimes against adults. There is even some evidence that juveniles are doing homicidal violence in "wolf packs." Indeed, a 1993 study found that juveniles committed about a third of all homicides against strangers, often murdering their victim in groups of two or more.
...
On the horizon, therefore, are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators. They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being in their path). They fear neither the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They live by the meanest code of the meanest streets, a code that reinforces rather than restrains their violent, hair-trigger mentality. In prison or out, the things that super-predators get by their criminal behavior -- sex, drugs, money -- are their own immediate rewards. Nothing else matters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes "naturally": murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.
No conscience. No empathy. The point being, that Clinton didn't make up the term or the theory; she was merely referencing something that was
already a dominant if misguided theory.
Of further note regarding the father of the "superpredators" theory:
Earlier this year, I was among a dozen guests invited to a working White House dinner on juvenile crime. Over gourmet Szechwan wonton and lamb, the meeting dragged on for three-and-a-half hours. President Clinton took copious notes and asked lots of questions, but nothing was accomplished. One guest pleaded with him to declare a National Ceasefire Day. Wisely, he let that one pass. But another guest recommended that he form (you guessed it) a commission. In mid-July, the president named six members to a National Commission on Crime Control and Prevention. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Meanwhile, Republicans have made some real improvements on the 1994 crime bill. But it is hard to imagine that block-granting anti-crime dollars will work (it never has before). And it is easy to see how the passion for devolution is driving conservatives to contradict themselves. For years they've stressed that drugs, crime, and welfare dependency are cultural and moral problems. Now, however, they talk as if perverse monetary incentives explained everything.
True, government policies helped wreck the two-parent family and disrupted other aspects of civil society. But how does the sudden withdrawal of government lead automatically to a rebirth of civil society, an end to moral poverty, and a check on youth crime? It doesn't, not any more than pulling a knife from the chest of a dead man brings him dancing back to life. Liberal social engineering was bad; conservative social re-engineering will prove worse.
My one big idea is borrowed from three well-known child-development experts -- Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. It's called religion. If we are to have a prayer of stopping any significant fraction of the super-predators short of the prison gates, then we had better say "Amen," and fast.
Any wonder why Bush tapped him shortly thereafter?
And
finally, it's worth noting that Sanders himself repeated the lie in April of 2016 (a month after he should have dropped out of the primary, no less) saying perhaps the most egregious thing imaginable:
‘We All Knew’ What Hillary Clinton Meant By ‘Super-Predators’:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized former President Bill Clinton for recently defending his wife Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “super-predators“ while discussing a controversial 1994 crime bill.
“I think we all knew back then what that language meant,” Sanders told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “That was referring to young blacks. And I don’t think in this country, elected officials or leaders should be using that type of terminology.”
It's worth it to watch the GOP's ad, in particular the part where they cut away from HRC in order to have the activist say "She called young
black kids like me super predators" at the 15 second mark. No, she most definitely did not. But it's uncanny how Ms. Alexander repeated what the supposed activist (again from the Black Conservatives Fund ad) said and not what Hillary Clinton actually said, in spite of the fact that, as a journalist, she
should have quoted the actual speech and not GOP lies, don't you think?
And then the BLM and then even
Obama. Thus, the GOP turned it against her and then the lie stuck, even to the point of Obama and the BLM repeating it
