#????????????????and i looked at his twitter and he’s anti-immigrant as fuck

[lynnbutlertron]

^^ might be getting a job at a cute little ice cream shop on the beach in my town GRAGGHHH. i have a trial shift tomorrow i hope i dont cock it up

[forthoseinterested]

The Nazi salute

Did Elon Musk do a Nazi salute, or did it just look like one? It’s an insultingly stupid question, but one that Mr. Musk himself is betting on us asking. No, I’d say it was obviously intended to be a Nazi salute. The question is, why? Some people are saying that Elon just outed himself as a Nazi on the world stage—but wasn’t the controversy, like, a month ago, that he was fighting against all the anti-Indian racist hard-liners over that immigration program thing?

I don’t think Elon Musk is a Nazi in the normal sense, but he’s obviously gone down numerous far-right online rabbit-holes and liked a lot of what he found. He’s probably some kind of social Darwinist at least, or believes in some kind of authoritarianism justified by meritocratic rhetoric. People who are highly competent in some areas but not well-rounded thinkers often love the sound of competent people like them taking over society and just doing whatever they want and not having to listen to anyone. There’s no joke when Elon posts things about how maybe democracy should be limited to high-testosterone males. He spends a disgusting amount of time in a conspiracy-brained horseshit echo chamber of his own making on Twitter. He went from an avid Twitter user to an X power-user, posting every waking hour, and constantly endorsing extremist views from random accounts. And lying. He fucking lies a lot.

But I don’t think dictator Elon Musk would try to make America whites-only, even if he could. It’s more complicated than racism, even though they’re more than happy to exploit racism among their supporters. Then again, does it matter whether Mosley was really anti-semitic or if he just turned that way because he realized his followers were? The pogroms probably aren’t any less violent if the people at the top are also liars.

Here’s my interpretation: Elon Musk did a Nazi salute as an exercise of power. It’s a way of saying “Look at me—I can do a Nazi salute while on stage with the US president, all eyes on me. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Trump was engaging in a similar thing when he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. In that case, he was also affirming that his supporters are loyal to him, even if he does terrible things, which is a goddamn confession of an acknowledgement, but in a strange way is also ‘rewarding’ the people for that loyalty. But Trump and Elon are both in the business of bragging about how much they can get away with. It’s supposed to frustrate and demoralize you. It’s supposed to make you feel like they’ve won. And it probably fascinates them. They feel like they’re on top of the world. Like they can do anything. And to a large degree they’re right, because they’ve ended up in situations where nobody can hold them accountable, and they’re surrounded by enablers and grifters and cocksuckers. And the crowd of idiots outside who supported them last week will keep supporting them next week, since nothing they do matters anymore.

This feels related to the way in which new-age dictators lie. They don’t need to actually deceive you anymore. It’s not about being tricky and sophisticated. They can just lie to your face in a way you’re obviously not going to believe, and then smile because they know there’s nothing you can do. They know you know they’re lying, and to them that’s funny. You can imagine them saying “Yeah, I’m lying. What are you gonna do about it?” And then meanwhile, because they lie every day and control a bunch of newspapers and TV stations and internet bloggers who all repeat their lies every day, people who aren’t as plugged in to the system, like your elderly relatives, will probably end up believing them, and then going out and voting for them. Then when you, the person who sees through their bullshit, confronts them, all they have to do is smile.

As various reporters noticed, far-right groups and media figures are obviously happy. And make no mistake, Elon Musk knew they would be. Do you know what I’d do if I accidentally did a gesture that anybody thought was a Nazi salute? I’d say it wasn’t. I’d take the opportunity to denounce Nazism and racism and talk about how much I detest anybody who would think I’m on their side if they thought they saw me doing a Nazi salute. Elon Musk was online hours later, and constantly since then, but he’s not going to do anything like that, because that would go against the point of doing the salute in the first place.

I’m not a great oracle of predictions, but I worry more people will end up doing Nazi salutes at Trump events in the future, because Elon Musk has legitimized it as an action. What happens if Trump does it? I don’t think he would. It’s not his style. But anything could happen. The question is, could crowds of Americans just randomly decide they’ve reclaimed the Nazi salute and that it’s no longer a bad thing? Perhaps if dear leader tells them to believe as much. A Trump endorsement, or him saying there’s nothing wrong with it, or the crowd at his rallies doing it and him not reacting negatively. Sky’s the limit.

And now the internet is awash in even more lies in response to this whole debacle: people across the internet are pretending that all politicians Nazi salute sometimes, but that we only care when Elon does it. They’re spamming pictures of any random time a Democratic Party politician stretched their hand out, and pretending that’s the same. They know it’s not. It’s another “yeah, we’re lying, what are you gonna do about it?” moment. It’s all a game to them.

And you have those people who just want to sound like they’re the middle ground of every news story, saying “come on, let’s be reasonable and not jump to conclusions”, as though interpreting the Nazi salute as a Nazi salute is some kind of unreasonable extreme. I already saw people referring to the reaction as “the Nazi salute hoax”, trying to rewrite history before the ink is even dry. Ugh.

[no-goodbyes-no-regrets]

*antisemitism is all of it. Not part of it. All of it.

Ok I've been holding back on here too because of this exactly. I knew I'd get Anons™ about it.

Anti semitism does absolutely play a part in this. But do you know how often shit hits the fan around football matches here? They cancelled one a while back because the police was on strike and they didn't want to risk it. These are people who will take ANY excuse to start a fight.

israeli fans ripping down palestinian flags, lighting fireworks, singing anti arab songs, and destroying a taxi? More than enough. Especially since our fascist government treats pro palestine protests/protesters as thugs looking for a fight and anything and everything israel does as fair game, and the israeli fans starting shit like innocent little schoolboys who just wanted to watch the football.

I saw an article from the jeruzalem post last night (that's still saved in my drafts because it pissed me off but I was not in the mood for *gestures* this) where they PRAISED and fucking WOOBEFIED Geert Wilders. Poor little Geert who won the election but then was BLOCKED from becoming PRIME MINISTER by the EVILS who HATE him!! SO UNFAIR!! *stomps feet and pouts*

I'm guessing you're not Dutch and have no idea who this guy is, so let me break it down.

He is a trump-fan. He posted a selfie wearing a fucking MAGA hat to celebrate trump's win. He is bffs with Viktor Orbán He admires/supports basically every right wing racist here in Europe (like Giorgia Meloni, Marine le Pen, Filip Dewinter). He has been openly racist/Islamophobic in Dutch politics for the past 20 years. He has openly and on purpose offended Muslims by posting images of the prophet Mohammed He made a film on the "dangers" of Islam - again, just to offend and attack Muslims Has referred to hijabs as "kopvodden" - headrags. His party won the local elections in The Hague in 2014 and he was there to address the crowd gathered in some cafe or something where they had waited for the results (even though he didn't even RUN in The Hague himself) and asked them if they wanted more or less Moroccans in The Hague, the crowd started chanting "minder, minder" - "less, less" and then he promised he would take care of that. He has referred to Islam as "achterlijk geloof" "retarted belief" He has been convicted for hate speech (though sadly it didn't even come with so much as a fine and he doesn't give a fuck) His party sadly did get the most seats in parliament after the election last year, but the three other parties his party has now formed a government with blocked him from becoming prime minister. WHICH SUITS HIM JUST FINE. He HANDPICKED a prime minister, who is basically his minion, but he still gets to pick fights with other parties on twitter and insult the (HANDPICKED BY HIM!!) prime minister and act like he's still in the opposition instead of the actual government. Now onto the fun part you might care about. So he supports israel yeah? Nice little photo op with him attending a shabbat in a synagogue, once again speaking out against people protesting the fact that the israeli president would attend the opening of the new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, all that good stuff. Geert Wilders is leader of the PVV, right? largest party in dutch parliament right now. So his party got to appoint some ministers. We've got Fleur Agema, the current minister of public health, who had/has an account on a stormfront (white power /neo nazi) message board. Marjolein Faber, current minister of immigration, big fan of the omvolkingstheorie - a theory that states all white people in the world are being replaced by non white people and that it's this big conspiracy lead by Jewish people. Reinette Klever, current minister of developmental aid, former board memeber of "Ongehoord Nederland" - a tv broadcaster for the "unheard" (aka an excuse to be racist on main) also a big fan of that theory, refused to distance herself from it when she took office, called it a factual progression of evolution. Wore a prinsenvlag pin and claimed it was to honour her ancestors who had fought the Spanish with Willem van Oranje - in 1568. Funny little detail about the prinsenvlag is that it's a the Dutch flag, but with the red band replaced by an orange one and was used by the NSB. Nationaal Socialistische Beweging. Those first two words might look familiar? It's the Dutch version of the Nazi party in WW2. And the flag is STILL used by neo nazis. Martin Bosma, current speaker of the house, also a big fan of the omvolkingstheorie, also has been seen in public wearing a prinsenvlag pin (supposedly to honour the Dutch VOC history - which was big in the slave trade... so you know, not sure if that's any better) Several other members of this party have worn this flag, it was displayed in the window of their headquarters until shit got too real and they took it down (and played the victim). None of these people have distanced themselves from all of this in ANY WAY since they took office. Geert hasn't told them to either. And they've been using the anti semitic violence in Amsterdam to push their anti- islam/anti Moroccans agenda - with success. Are these really the people you want to fight in your corner?

and also this.

Following the attack, the city announced a three-day ban on all demonstrations to maintain public order. Furthermore, the government had announced it would hold stricter border control until December 9. Hundreds of people defied the ban, which had been upheld by a local court earlier in the day.  They chanted "Free Palestine" and "Shame on you" and called for an end to the war in Gaza.

The demonstration ban the city of Amsterdam has issued has been extended to tomorrow/Thursday, people have fought it in court because the right to demonstrate is in the constitution and taking that away as a form of punishment is certainly A Choice...

And the border controls are STARTING on December 9th (and will last six months), as a way for our fascist government to "stop mass illegal immigration" (which is not a thing) and stop the "immigration crisis" (which doesn't exist) but it has NOTHING to do with the violence around the football match.

And that last line of the article? Imagine considering people calling for an end of a war a bad thing...

[newagesispage]

                                                                           SEPTEMBER    2023 

THE RIB PAGE 

Riley Keough had a daughter last year that was named Tupelo Storm Smith-Peterson.  

***** 

To celebrate 40 Licks, the Stones gave out ice cream. ** The new album, Hackney Diamonds is finally hitting us in October!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hackney: Lacks originality, old, boring, broken glass. Diamond signifies 60 years. Oh, I can’t fucking wait!!!** Dartford, Kent has revealed, ‘The Glimmer Twins’. The bronze sculptures of Mick and Keith were done by Amy Goodman. 

***** 

Jon Stewart, John Mulaney and Pete Davidson are doing a sort of mini stand- up tour. 

***** 

There is another Kavin out there!!? 

***** 

Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way. -Kafka 

***** 

The latest sexual harassment news: Bill Cosby was charged with a new lawsuit y singer Morganne Picard. 

***** 

The Kate McKinnon Barbie can be bought. ** Greta Gerwig is the first woman to be sole director of a billion -dollar film. ** Bill Maher, continuing his role as the grumpy old neighborhood guy, got his boxers in a twist about the Barbie movie.  Hey, Bill: It’s only a movie! 

***** 

Ohio voters rejected a ballot measure that would have raised the threshold for amending the state constitution. 

***** 

Twitter was held in contempt of court when Musk wouldn’t release Trump’s twitter account to the DOJ. He was fined $350 thousand and forced to release it. 

***** 

David Weiss will investigate Hunter Biden. 

***** 

The new film, Liquor Store Dreams looks great!! 

 ***** 

Days alert: More than 25 Days cast members signed a petition to remove co- executive producer Albert Alarr. He has been reportedly harassing the set for some time. After an investigation because of offensive remarks, bullying, intimidation and inappropriate groping, he is OUT!! Janet Drucker is taking over.  Now, perhaps former cast members will be happy to come back for cameos. ** Word is that Dick Van Dyke will come to Salem on the first day of September!!** Tate and Theresa back for the funeral? Oh, C’mon .. Let's get these this fam back together!! 

***** 

Carlos Santana praised Dave Chappelle and then went on his own anti-trans rant. A woman is a woman and a man is a man. - Santana** Vampyre cosmetics has ended their deal with Alice Cooper. Cooper was asked about a statement he said in the 70’s that, “everyone in the future will be bisexual.” In part of his answer, he talked about the trans community saying kids should “at least become sexually aware” before considering their gender. He also called cases of transgender, “a fad.” The Alice Cooper makeup collection was only introduced 10 days before it was discontinued. 

***** 

Freddie Mercury’s belongings will be auctioned. 

***** 

AOH1996 is a new pill that looks very promising for cancer. 

***** 

Can’t wait to see Jules starring Jane Curtin and Ben Kingsley!! 

***** 

Bad news for Alexei Navalny: 19 more years.** It seems that Prigozhin and others from the Wagner group were killed in a plane crash. 

***** 

50 Cent was fed up with bad microphones at a show and threw one into the crowd. The mike gave Power 106 host, Bryhana Monegain a nasty looking head injury. 

***** 

2 bodies were found in the Rio Grande. One victim was found in the orange buoys that Texas is using as immigrant deterrents. 

***** 

It seems like more men than not are bald these days. 

***** 

There are yet more indictments for Trump. Why haven’t we seen one for inciting an insurrection? There are 18 co -conspirators in the Georgia indictment. Trump supporters are giving out names and addresses of jurors. If the cultists think that a president can do anything he wants, why were they so upset about the Lewinsky scandal? ** It seems to make no difference if the judges tell him to keep quiet, he just keeps talking. ** A memo found by the NY Times shows the planning of the fake elector plot. ** The FBI killed a man in Utah who threatened Biden and Alvin Bragg on Truth Social. A woman in Texas has threatened a judge. How many people will Scary Clown 45 take down as a direct result of listening to him? It is like they are on autopilot. Just waiting for the next way they can agitate this country. ** Both sides are getting mileage out of tis recent mug shot. It will probably be one of the best known pics in history. Green Day is selling shirts with the mug shot that read, ‘ultimate nimrod’. The $ will go to victims of the Maui wildfires.** One of Scary Clown’s cohorts at Mar A Lago has changed lawyers and testimony. 

***** 

Is Trump ineligible to run for President? There is a provision in the constitution that is part of the 14th amendment. Could this let the states decide if he can be on the ballot?? 

***** 

The first Republican debate was held on Aug. 24. 6 of the 8 present vowed to support Trump no matter what, if he is the nominee. Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie did not raise their hands. Vivek Ramaswamy seemed very paranoid. He belittled the others for their prepared answers. Christie called him the Chat GPT candidate which was pretty funny. They talked abortion. Tim Scott and Mike Pence want this solved on a Federal level. Nikki Haley says they won’t have the votes. She is right. She seems to be the only one that claims climate change is real. Haley and Ramaswamy have already promised to pardon Trump. I won’t be surprised when they all come to blows. The crowd seemed poised not to listen to anything they had to think about. Trump supporters don’t seem to care how outrageous he is (whether he is there or not) and he does not care how outrageous they are. Reporters say they are finding that while interviewing many republicans, they no longer apologize for their racism. **Nikki Haley and Mike Pence seemed to get a bit of a bump from the debate. 

***** 

It seems some abortion- ban states are putting big $ into pregnancy centers that give minimal medical care. 

***** 

Streaming has started to be bundled just like cable. Isn’t this what we were trying to get away from?? 

***** 

Will the UAW strike? 

***** 

Tyler Massengill was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay Planned Parenthood $45 mil. 

***** 

What the Hell is happening over at Washington Week?? The best political show on television has been revamped. Now they are pairing with The Atlantic and have added Jeffrey Goldberg as sometime host. I was routing for Laura Barron-Lopez as permanent host. 

***** 

Hey Mitch McConnell, there is no shame in being old and retiring. Why do these Senators think that they should be able to handle the Nations business when they appear to be senile? A lot of us get old and don’t get to continue in jobs we can no longer do. Enough is enough!! Give others a chance to lead!! 

***** 

White boys don’t eat pussy.- Elvis Presley 

***** 

Boo! To Jersey Mike’s for taking out the Miss Vick’s chips. Trying to keep it bland?? 

***** 

A street was renamed in NY to Black Benji way. 

***** 

State Farm and Aaron Rodgers have officially ended their relationship. 

***** 

Results of how the Dobbs decision has affected the job market are coming to light. Much had to shift in the medical community because of the Supreme Court. 

***** 

Extreme heat kills more people than all the other climate disasters. 

***** 

We are keeping an eye on international waters. Russia and China approached Alaska so we have sent naval patrol. 

***** 

Republican Senators have been bragging how wonderful all this infrastructure is. Most voted against it. Good for the current administration to remind us all of that. Bipartisan infrastructure is important to remember at election time. ** Word is that DeSantis gave $95 thousand to a Christian Conservative. 

***** 

Noah Gragson was suspended from Nascar for ‘liking’ a sick meme about George Floyd. Social media is often showing us what people are really like. ** There was a brawl at a white sox game. People are angry! 

**** 

John Cusack is touring with his movies. Please actors: More of this!! 

***** 

In the first pre -season game, the Browns won over the Jets, 21-16. 

***** 

R.I.P. Mark Margolis, Sharon Farrell, Bill Cunningham, William Friedkin, Jerry Moss, Bryan Randall, Hawaiian wildfire victims, Linda Haynes, Robert Swan, Rodriguez, Ashlea Albertson, Bob Barker, Arleen Sorkin and Robbie Robertson. 

[whitehotharlots]

The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc. 

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism. 

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable. 

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself. 

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing. 

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want  students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse. 

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back. 

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure. 

[96thdayofrage]

The clashes in Charlottesville catalyzed the American public’s reckoning with the budding white nationalist movement, which had accelerated after Donald Trump’s election. Afterward, the wave of public shaming of the violence in Charlottesville led at least one “Unite the Right” marcher to insist his participation in the rally was misinterpreted as racist. Others who attended quickly lost their jobs after online campaigns exposed them.

But the eventual identification of the man in the white tank top and red hat shook many: He was revealed to be a 33-year-old Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, originally from the Bronx. “I’m the only brown Klans member I ever met,” Alex Michael Ramos joked in a Facebook Live video before he turned himself into police Aug. 28. The Facebook post has since been taken down.

But Ramos wasn’t the only “Unite the Right” marcher with a Hispanic background.

Christopher Rey Monzon, a 22-year-old Cuban-American, is associated with the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a neo-Confederate hate group. Monzon was arrested weeks after Charlottesville for charging at protesters in a separate Florida demonstration. And Nick Fuentes, a 19-year-old student who hosts an alt-right podcast called America First, said he had to leave Boston University in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests after receiving death threats over his participation.

The presence of these Latino men at the largest white nationalist event in recent memory underscores the complicated racial position of Latinos in the United States. Latino white supremacy, it turns out, might not be a contradiction in terms.

Increasingly, Latinos are identifying racially as white. In fact, more than half did so in the 2010 U.S. Census. A March 2016 report from Pew Research Center found that 39% of Afro-Latinos also identified “as white alone or white in combination with another race.” With a current population of around 58 million, Latinos make up the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., just behind whites.

Another Pew Research Center study from December found that 59% of U.S. adults with Latino heritage who identify as white believe others see them as white, too. Over time, the study found, descendants of Latino immigrants stop identifying with their countries of origin and consider themselves more and more American.

Fuentes — who says he’s about 25% Mexican — identifies as white, not Latino. In an interview with Mic, Fuentes also said he believes multiculturalism threatens white national identity. Monzon, meanwhile, has called for South Florida to secede from the U.S. His ties to the League of the South are generational, as his parents have also protested with the white supremacist fringe group, according to the SPLC. In a Facebook profile the SPLC has attributed to him, Monzon goes by “Ambrosio Gonzalez,” the name of a Cuban general who fought as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War.

Ramos, however, rejects any notion that he’s racist, insisting he went to Charlottesville in defense of free speech and as a show of force against left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

During the nearly hourlong video Ramos posted to Facebook, he became agitated at users who challenged him for marching with the KKK and jumping a black man.

“Yeah, I stood side-by-side with racist people, but they weren’t racist to me,” Ramos said. “They did not call me a ‘spic,’ they did not call me a ‘fucking wetback,’ they didn’t say nothing as such. We stood for the same common goal.”

Alex Michael Ramos has been charged in connection with the beating of a black man during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the “Unite the Right” rally Aug. 12.

Uncredited/AP

Despite his stated goals, the brutal violence in the video from that day was enough for judges in Charlottesville to twice deny Ramos bond.

“The victim was defenseless,” Judge Richard Moore of the Charlottesville General District Court said at Ramos’ bail hearing in November. “Mr. Ramos rushes into something where people are pummeling Mr. Harris. He is an unreasonable risk to others.”

Ramos is facing a malicious wounding charge and could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted, according to local station WVIR-TV. Through his attorney, Ramos declined to be interviewed.

Other alleged perpetrators include Daniel Patrick Borden of Ohio, who was identified online and arrested in connection to Harris’ attack. Like Ramos, he was also denied bond. Authorities arrested another suspect, Arkansas man Jacob Scott Goodwin, in October and extradited him to Charlottesville the following month.

Harris himself was later forced to turn himself in when Harold Ray Crews, an attorney and resident of Walkertown, North Carolina — and the state’s chairman for League of the South — claimed Harris injured him in the same scuffle. Though Harris’ felony charge for unlawful wounding was dropped in December, “there are still misdemeanor charges pending,” according to the Root.

Fuentes is, in many ways, representative of the ideas of the so-called alt-right, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as a “loose network of racists and anti-Semites.” His Twitter feed shows equal disdain for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the South Side of Chicago, which has seen a sharp increase in gang-related murders in recent years. Though he decried Heyer’s murder at the “Unite the Right” rally during his interview with Mic, he also equated it with antifa violence.

Fuentes did acknowledge there isn’t much reconciliation between his stance on multiculturalism — simply put, it’s bad and should be avoided — and his own cultural background: His Mexican ancestors immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Intermarriage has created a “beige, rootless mass,” he said, and he rejects any notion that Latino immigrants can assimilate.

“I don’t buy the idea that if you come to a country and your kids learned the language, you’re from that country,” Fuentes said. “You have to understand that America is an exceptional nation; it’s the proposition nation. That’s why the identity question is so big here. America was obviously settled only very recently. If I moved to China and I filled out the paperwork, would that make me Chinese? Of course not. I would maybe be a part of the People’s Republic.”

“They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

Fuentes’s own standard — that learning English and settling in the U.S. does not make you American — disenfranchises himself and his parents, a fact he acknowledged. From the perspective of someone who sees the U.S. as a foundationally European nation, as Fuentes does, being anything less than white is the same as being a nonentity.

“You rob children of something very fundamental when you take away a common and coherent identity,” he said. “I look at my Eastern European people from high school and they have their food and their special clothing from their home country. But when you have race mixing, you rob them. I do pause at that. This is not an experience I wish to replicate. I don’t know if I wish I could turn back the clock and change things, but ideally there wouldn’t be mixing.”

Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher and director of special projects for the ADL, sees growing anti-immigrant views from the descendants of Latino immigrants as a unique conundrum.

“It’s this idea that, ‘we did it right, we did it legally,’” Mendelson said in an interview with Mic. “They’re not just addressing illegal immigration — which would be one thing — but they’re against refugees and Muslims and legal immigration. They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

On Aug. 20, days after the Charlottesville protests, Juan Cadavid, a Colombian-born Californian who now goes by the name Johnny Benitez, led an “America First!” rally in Southern California he described as a vigil for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Dozens of supporters were drowned out by nearly 2,500 counterprotesters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In an interview with NPR in December, Benitez shared how he went from Occupy Wall Street protester and Bernie Sanders supporter to alt-right nationalist, claiming he was exiled from Occupy and called a bigot after he questioned the need for the group to support transgender people. He insisted he was not a white supremacist, but an advocate for what he called “white identity politics” — which includes embracing the 14 Words slogan used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Benitez also told NPR he pushes for a United States that is “Italo-Spanish” white, to make room for the descendants of southern Europeans (which he considers himself to be). White nationalists such as Richard Spencer have said white Latinos could theoretically be part of a white ethno-nationalist state, but they still have mixed feelings about assimilation.

“In some instances you are rejected from the host culture, made to feel not American,” Benitez said of being an immigrant in the U.S. “And if I go back, I’m definitely not Colombian. You know, I didn’t live there, you can hear that I have an American accent, things like that, when I speak Spanish.”

Benitez’s girlfriend, Irma Hinojosa, cohosts The Right View, a YouTube talk show hosted with four other women who call themselves the “Deplorable Latinas.” The show features conservative Latinas commenting on the news from a point of view that conversation about Latinos and immigration focuses on the undocumented versus those who entered the country legally. Hinojosa also has her own YouTube channel where she livestreams protests and alt-right events. She was the only woman to speak at a June “Freedom of Speech” rally featuring Spencer and other alt-right figures.

[greekedtext]

if you live in America and are not on Twitter, you probably have a distorted view of what’s going on here right now

The situation is chaotic, so it’s hard to get an accurate picture. I’ve been sifting through... A LOT of different sources, checking who’s saying what, reviewing footage to see if it shows what I’m being told it shows.

Most protesters are peaceful. Most protesters are peaceful.

They turned out last week to protest racist violence and the fact that police engage in violence with impunity. The police are not out there for crowd control, public safety, or even protecting storefronts. They are counterprotesters demonstrating their perceived right to engage in violence with impunity.

Over the past days, I have watched so many videos from across the country showing over and over that the police are using unnecessary, indiscriminate violence to turn peaceful situations tense and tense situations violent. Their actions range from mild (shoving people with riot control shields) to concerning (spraying tear gas, an agent that causes coughing, in the midst of a pandemic that affects the respiratory system) to wanton (accelerating their SUVs into crowds) to gratuitously cruel (yanking down a teen’s face mask in order to pepper spray him right in the eyes even though he was simply standing there with his hands up).

Police have maced and tear gassed children at protests, like the nine year-old girl in Seattle. They’ve done the same to uninvolved bystanders who were just trying to walk home. In Salt Lake City, an old man at a bus stop couldn’t hobble away fast enough, so they knocked him down. In Minneapolis after curfew, troops fired rubber bullets / teargas at people who were on their own porches and balconies, because curfew. In another city, they stopped a civilian car, tased the people of color inside, and dragged them out for arrest on live news camera. Oh, also on live camera in Minneapolis they arrested a CNN correspondent and his crew, and many other journalists have been targeted with rubber bullets.

Rubber bullets sound kind of cute and cartoony, don’t they?

There’s no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, just less-lethal weapons. Rubber bullets are big hunks of metal jacketed in rubber. They’re supposed to be fired at the ground so that most of a bullet’s momentum can be harmlessly absorbed before it ricochets up and hits you in the legs. Used this way, they still bruise. They’re meant to hurt you enough to get you moving in the direction police want you to go. And you’d think that police are only supposed to use them when a crowd is already out of control or refusing to move, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Remember that CNN correspondent? His name is Omar Jimenez, and you can Google this: The police surrounded him and his crew. He very politely and deferentially asked them where they would like his crew to go. They didn’t respond despite Jimenez asking several times. Then they arrested them and led them away; all the while, Jimenez and the crew cooperated and calmly asked why they were being arrested, to which they initially received no answer. The police informed CNN that the arrest was made because Jimenez and his crew “refused to move.”

Surround. Give no directions, or make it impossible to follow directions. Arrest for failure to follow directions.

This is the same tactic that they’re using against crowds. They raise bridges or bring in barriers (”kettling”) to ensure protesters can’t leave. Then they arrest people for refusing to leave. Sometimes they fire teargas and/or rubber bullets at a crowd to drive them into a kettling situation. Sometimes they do it after the crowd is already kettled. The curfews? An excuse to arrest everybody on the street. Pay attention to when they’re announcing a curfew with little or no lead time. My city keeps claiming that essential workers are allowed to go to and from work even when a curfew is on, but would you bet cash money that no workers are getting swept up and arrested?

Journalists then report this as “protests turned violent” or “protesters clash with police.” Local authorities claim that the protesters are all or almost all outside agitators, from out of state, and journalists repeat this without (it seems) even asking themselves if that sounds plausible.

This is why Americans don’t know what’s going on.

(We should be skeptical of claims about outside agitators because it has a racist history. It is used to deny African-Americans of their agency in their own efforts to liberate themselves from white supremacy. On the other hand, to some unknown degree the protests are actually getting infiltrated by a) plainclothes LEOs possibly acting as agents provocateurs, b) white "allies” who mainly want to vandalize shit or start fights and don’t listen to the Black protesters who try to stop that crap, c) looters*, and d) white supremacists and other political opportunists**.)

All of the above is only a spoon-sized sample of what’s going on. You want more instances of police violence, you can find it. And all of these things have been happening for years, decades, generations. It’s not just Trump, though he certainly does bring out the worst in people, and his administration does like to loosen standards to enable the worst in people.

Yesterday morning (June 1, 2020), Trump called Putin. Then he called the governors of the states and basically told them to go to war against the American people. In the afternoon, he made a tough guy speech, calling himself the “law and order president,” promising he could fix it, promising to send the U.S. military into the states to establish order if the governors didn’t do it. While he was talking, you could hear people being teargassed and fired at with rubber bullets in the background. These were peaceful protesters in and near Lafayette Square. There was a water and medical station set up on the porch of St. John’s Episcopal church. The protesters and medics were driven away (again: with teargas, which causes coughing, in the middle of a pandemic) so that Trump could be seen posing in front of the church, holding up a Bible.

That church had no idea Trump was going to do that. Some of their clergy were at the medical station and got teargassed.

Please, please go read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s summary of yesterday, because there was more fuckery than I can summarize here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2020

Law and order. “One law, one beautiful law.” I alone can fix it. We’ll use the military if the governors refuse to take action, “to protect the rights of law abiding Americans, including your second amendment rights.” Bible-waving. He fucking teargassed people for a photo-op.

In the middle of the night, the police herded hundreds of Washington, D.C. protesters into a residential neighborhood. The residents opened their doors for the protesters to take shelter. The police camped outside for hours, arresting anyone who came out. You may see accusations that protesters invaded people’s homes, but they didn’t -- they were invited. Some people are claiming police invaded people’s homes to get the protesters out, but I’m still looking for more information to substantiate that.

There are reliable reports that in addition to the National Guard and the regular military, ICE and CBP are being mobilized to “help.”

What they’ve done to D.C., they’re going to try to do in every city that has protests. What they’ve done to suspected undocumented immigrants, they’re going to try to do to all “rioters, looters, and antifa” -- which means anyone who opposes them.

-----------

WHAT CAN WE DO?

1. Support #BlackLivesMatter. The bail funds have actually received a lot of money lately, which is great; if you can give, and if you know of a bail fund close to you that needs money for protesters, go ahead and give, but the next thing we need is money for mutual aid organizations, because in the next 5-21 days, a lot of people are going to get sick.

2. Look to experienced organizers for guidance. Follow African-American anti-racist activists, and if you’re white make sure you stay humble, don’t talk over them, listen to their ideas and directions, and do what they fucking say. If you’re white and you go out to protest, your job is to stay calm and be a human shield. Your whiteness can actually reduce police violence [note: it’s a risk -- you might be beaten or otherwise hurt and you could be arrested too]. If you start violence or vandalism, African-Americans are more likely to suffer for it.

3. There’s a lot to do if you can’t go out. Again, there’s a lot of organizing going on. For example, the Indivisibles are still organizing people to contact their elected representatives, and this is good and important work even though it may feel less direct than hitting the streets.

4. Make common cause with organizations that have beliefs different from yours. 

This takes a bit of discernment. Maybe you’re ready to swear you’ll never call the police again; maybe you want to end incarceration (we do have the largest imprisoned population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.) Or maybe you’re concerned about police brutality and racism in our justice system but you can’t imagine a world without policing and prisons. If you’re in the latter group, make sure that the policing reforms you support are in alignment with the general goal of reducing budgets for police departments and shrinking our prison system.

We need a big movement. That means you can’t refuse to work with other organizations just because they aren’t in complete lockstep with you.

3. Reblog posts like these with your own ideas / information / good sources of trustworthy information.

When you’re deciding which suggestions to follow and which posts to reblog, make sure the information is coming from someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’m not a veteran of many protests, so I can’t give you good advice about how to stay safe out there. I could probably (in an abundance of confidence) fake up something that sounds plausible based on what I’ve read. That kind of thing is dangerous. Don’t write shit that doesn’t either come from your experience or that you can’t back up with links to folks who really know.

-----------

* "Looters.” Yeah, remember when Congress promised to help with the economic crisis and then decided all we need is a one-time $1200 check and mmmmaybe some extra unemployment insurance? And remember when the House passed some more bills to help, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said they weren’t going to be doing any more of that and the important thing for the Senate to do right now was confirm more of Trump’s nominees for federal judicial appointments? You say “looters,” I say, “desperate angry people.”

** We all need to learn how to recognize Boogaloos, Neo-Nazis, and other far-right extremists on sight, because journalists are not always aware of who they’re talking to.

Boogaloos: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/far-right-hawaiian-print-shirts-why-protesters-boogaloo-racist-a9539776.html

Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database: https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Your post on Bernie has me a little confused. Do you consider yourself a strict democrat, leftist, socialist or anything else? To me at least, it seems odd that you dislike Bernie for not being an “actual democrate” when Clinton is pretty right wing.

So I dislike boxes. They’re restrictive. I vote for who I like in terms of policy and who I think will perform best once in office. I’m a democrat, sure. I have leftist ideals but a realistic/pragmatic approach to things. I understand that we all wish to burn things down but that’s not how things work sadly. So let’s be realistic about getting shit done. Guillotine memes don’t feed the starving and they don’t end white supremacy. I’m a uh, let’s call it a north american socialist (no one running is an actual, by the books, definition of socialist, but that’s neither here nor there). 

Since people on this site apparently need to dissect my political beliefs, here you go: 

I believe we should have free healthcare; I believe that university education should be heavily subsidized (free would be great, but let’s start with at least making it subsidized and work from there); I think we should have universal basic income; I believe we should spend more on public infrastructure because our roads and bridges are falling apart; I believe we should have accessible, reliable public transit and an improved public transit network that works at municipal, state and national levels; I believe election days should be national holidays so everyone can vote; I believe gerrymandering is a curse upon our democratic system; I believe that we should spend more on public education at a K-12 level; I believe in subsidized and/or free after school care especially for the economically struggling; I believe we should have stronger anti-hate crime laws; I believe dental and mental health care should be covered anytime we talk about health care coverage; I believe in reparations; I believe we should start our own Truth and Reconciliation process for both slavery and the genocide against the Native Americans; I believe that we should try and address class and wealth disparity but that won’t solve racism, sexism, homophobia etc.; I believe we need electoral reform; I believe we need to do more for climate change but that the Green New Deal is empty in terms of actual things to implement in terms of policy - anyway those who wrote it admitted it was more of an economic plan than a climate one; I believe we need to tax the wealthy including all those pesky millionaires with three houses and wives who were investigated for tax fraud as well as the billionaires — 

I can go on. 

Of those running I currently like Castro, Harris, Warren. I really wish Stacy Abrams was running but she’s not. I think she’d be the best. I’m not a fan of Biden, Sanders, Gabbard (I mean, can we really call her a democrat?), Steyer, Yang. I’m neutral on Mayor Pete, Klobuchar, and Booker. I don’t know if that clarifies anything for you. Also, this is liable to change as we move forward through the primaries. 

And Clinton isn’t right wing. Calling her that continues the lie that she and the GOP are two sides/same coin which isn’t true. It’s a harmful position to perpetuate. There’s been a ton of stuff written on that so I’m not going to put it all in here. But I recommend starting with an analysis of her voting record - it’s on point with Sanders, if that’s your bar, on almost everything with some differences, the notable ones being Iraq (she was for, he was against) and gun control (she is for, he is generally against - his record is really dodgy on that).

I believe all politicians are up for grabs when it comes to legitimate critiques. But there’s a difference in saying “I disagree with her arguments for why she voted for Iraq” and calling her right wing. One is a legitimate critique, the other is hyperbolic and untrue. I also believe in understanding the context of the time in which many policy decisions were made. She, and Sanders, have been in politics for over 20 years. There are going to be decisions made in 1992 that we can look back on and go: Oh boy that was Yikes. But at the time, that wouldn’t have been so clear cut. No one has all the answers. No one is perfect. Purity politics isn’t the solution to our social ills. 

Anyway, some things HRC has supported, or accomplished, includes but is not limited to: 

The ACA - which was huge at the time. I cannot emphasize this enough. It was Ground Breaking. I think younger folk either don’t remember, or aren’t aware, of what a game changer this was. Indeed, it’s because of the ACA that the many Americans are even open to the conversation around medicare for all/any sort of more socialist health coverage. 

On a personal note, as a child of a single, poor working mom in the 90s this is the reason I had any sort of healthcare. Without it, we’d have been fucked. 

This is also one of the things that sent the GOP into a fucking TIZZY about HRC and why they started their 30 year long smear campaign against her which has influenced a lot of the more recent leftist rhetoric on her. 

Indeed, she was an early leader in expanding healthcare coverage in the early 90s and continued to be throughout her career. 

Leadership with SCHIP which which expanded health coverage to millions of lower-income children. 

I know we all wish we could have Instant Health Care For All but small steps is how you get these things. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult to set up health care systems and programs. They’re large, they become unwieldly, they’re expensive to fund, and they’re difficult to pass through congress. It’s useful to be able to point to precedents. 

She founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families

Supported and championed the Violence Against Women Act

Adoption and Safe Families Act (she was a supporter of it and helped champion it through) 

One of the leaders of the development of the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Act 

Supported the Pediatric Research Equity Act - improving health and pharmaceutical access for children 

START treaty - an attempt to begin regulating the amount of nukes Russia and the US have which, even if one wishes we could snap fingers and get rid of them all, one must admit isn’t a bad thing. 

Negotiated ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in 2012 - again, regardless of views on Israel, Hamas and Palestine - having people stop fighting for a time isn’t a bad thing. The hope was it would lead to more productive, long term peace talks etc. but that sadly didn’t pan out. 

Copenhagen Climate Change Accord - one of the chief negotiators 

Etc. etc. she has 25 years of things to list but none of these things are right wing. One can disagree with her foreign policy approach, or think she didn’t push hard enough on health care, or that she came late to the table on LGBTQ issues, but that doesn’t make her right wing. I have right winger-s in the family and they’d all love to see Clinton dead. I know what the right wing looks like and it’s not her. 

Things she supports that make actual, real right wing people (like my great grandfather and my uncle’s sister) hate her: 

She supports and advocates for two weeks of paid family and medical leave at a minimum of 2/3s wage replacement rate 

She supports expanding social security 

You know, she believes in climate change and has worked to reduce carbon emissions, pushed for climate change accords, encouraged renewable energy, and ending tax subsidies for oil companies

clearly things a right wing person would do /sorry sarcasm I just can’t take it too seriously when people call her right wing

She supports immigration reform with full path to citizenship 

She supports the naturalization of around 9 million lawful permanent residents in the United States who are eligible to become U.S. citizens

She’s pro-choice and believes abortion is basic health care

Sorry how do people think she’s right wing again? 

She supports making it illegal for pharmacists to refuse to provide access to emergency contraception

When she was Sec. of State she wanted the US to join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

She supports the Disability Integration Act, which requires states and insurance companies to provide people with disabilities who need long term care the choice to receive care at home instead of solely in institutions and nursing facilities

She’s obviously pro-gun control and was the first candidate in 2016 to produce an extensive position paper on guns and gun violence

She supports voting rights and advocates for changes in national voter access laws, including automatically registering American citizens to vote at age 18 and mandating 20 days of early voting in all states

She has criticized laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures that do not permit student IDs at polling places, place limits on early voting, and eliminate same-day voter registration

She had one of the most thorough mental health care plans that I have ever seen in a presidential nominee. 

It goes on. I again - I don’t get how people can look at this and think her right wing. I sure don’t agree with everything she’s done and every position she’s taken, but she’s not right wing. Good lord my people. 

There’s a lot many people have to thank her for and they’re unaware of it. Tumblr and twitter aren’t ideal places to form and consume political points. 

As a note, I work in the civil service in Canada (am a dual citizen), I’m very familiar with how large socialized programs work and how difficult it is to implement them. There are never any quick and clean solutions. 

And on that note - I’m done for the time being. I hope this answers your question. 

Required civic duty reminder: Everyone vote in the primaries and vote in 2020. Also - no politician is perfect, no politician is going to align 100% with your views and nor should they because you know, we live in a democracy. Do your homework, get off of tumblr and twitter, and make sure you vote! 

[rjzimmerman]

My head is short-circuiting....El Paso and Dayton and Gilroy and all of the above and the others

I haven’t posted anything about the recent mass murders in El Paso and Dayton and Gilroy. I don’t know anymore how to express myself. I’ve run out of things to think and say. I’m bored with my own thoughts. I’m bored with the Op-Eds. I’m bored with the refusal of the New York Times to use the work, “racial,” preferring “racially tinged” and similar nonsense. I’m bored with myself and other activists yelling for gun control, because the more and louder we yell, the more the politicians dig in and refuse to listen. Particularly in the Dayton situation, I’m bored with reading more praise for the first responders than concern and sadness for the victims. (Don’t get me wrong or start yelling at me. The first responders do a terrific job, and were they not so excellent at what they do, I’m sure the outcome for each attack would have been much worse. But, it’s their job, and we should always remember that, for our own peace of mind.) I zone out whenever I see a quote from a politician, particularly from a republican politician with the thoughts-and-prayers vomit, followed by blaming video games and failure to salute the flag as causes. I can’t bear to look at photos of the scenes of carnage. My heart breaks when I learn about each individual victim, but pretty soon the broken heart is too broken to absorb anymore. I look at images or video clips of trump and my head automatically shakes in the no-no-no sideways move, and then explodes.

Beto O’Rourke had the best reaction so far, as he was responding to a reporter asking an inane question. I’ve seen the video, but I can’t find a version in a tumblr-friendly format. But I have a You Tube audio version, here. You see him speaking on a platform. That’s just a pretty photo you see. In the real exchange, he was standing in a parking lot. A little context might be helpful. Beto and his wife were leaving a memorial service, and noticed that their car was boxed in between other vehicles, immobilized. So he was frustrated, as any of us would be in that situation, inviting the temperamental response and the use of some street profanity. Yet, it was the most honest response and statement.

I’m also getting tired of the national (and local) media hiding from us the “manifesto” (as they call it) of the young man who murdered 21 people (one of the injured victims just died in the hospital, raising the number of dead to 21) in El Paso. I get it: the lawyers are telling the publishers that until law enforcement have confirmed, without doubt, the link between the document posted on line with the arrested man, don’t publish it. Then why the fuck are the media extracting bits and pieces from it? Why are the politicians allowed to read it, and then tell us what they read? Let us form our own conclusions. Here’s the best analysis I’ve been able to find about the manifesto, which has some interesting (???) tidbits about this guy’s rantings, including stuff about the environment and the climate that echoes environmental and climate concerns expressed by many progressives, including me. From the National Review, under the caption, “We Should Fear Free-Speech Curbs More Than Exposure to Racist Manifestos.”

The document gets specific in its hate. It denounces the “invasion of Texas” by Hispanics, the “cultural and ethical replacement” of whites, and “race mixing��� as “selfish.”

Former Fox News reporter Adam Housley, who lost a niece in a mass shooting in California last year, tweeted: “Would the racist diatribe of this slimeball have been published if he hadn’t murdered anyone? Nope. So we publish now and wonder why others then copy.”

In another tweet, Housley added that the manifesto “needs to be public….it does not need to be published and promoted.” But if something isn’t published, how public is it?

You want to read it and can’t find it? Here’s the link to a site with the manifesto, the contents of which are consistent with what the media and politicians are telling us is in it. If and as you read it, always keep in mind this guy was explaining to us why he was aiming his weapon against Hispanics, and pulling the trigger killing people.

Then Dayton. Who was this guy? Why did he do this? One of his victims was his sister. Was he another right-winger? Based on what I’ve read, no. In fact, here’s the link to an article in the Washington Examiner, under the caption, “Ohio gunman described himself as pro-Satan 'leftist' who supported Elizabeth Warren.” One extract from this article:

The Twitter account painted a picture of a left-wing anarchist and discontent, very far from the anti-immigration manifesto posted by Saturday’s El Paso gunman.

Based on what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to characterize this guy, other than a head spinning ideas as coherent and consistent as minestrone soup. Here’s an analysis from heavy.com of his Twitter posts, if you want to learn why I’m using the minestrone soup analogy. The caption is, “Connor Betts: Twitter Posts on Being a Leftist, Guns.”

[thebonesofhoudini]

At 35 years of age now, I can proudly say that Trump is the worst fucking President who's administration I have ever lived through and I lived through the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama years. Absolute garbage Presideng who takes credit for the accomplishments others have made like Obama's economy after dealing with the effects of the 2008 recession and ASAP Rocky's release from a Swedish prison. He is the most unpresidential person I've ever seen. And his supporters are the human embodiments of vomit and bile, and that's just the ones that are college educated and NOT radicalized domestic terrorists that take his anti-immigrant screeds to heart towards stochastic violence. Donald Trump is a racist, sexist insecure narcisstic bully who has to make everything about him! What good has he done as President? Lowest Black unemployment? That was apart of Obama's economy? Getting North Korea to stop producing missles? Well they started making them again. He has made America look ten times worse than ever with him in the White House. He needs to go. America literally cannot handle four more years of this shit. Having Trump as President is just like watching a building collapse in slow motion. There's rarely any good news with this motherfucker in office. Except news of stocks tanking, the dow jones in free fall, another mass shooting/domestic terrorist attack on a walmart, synagogue, mosque, or a public place getting shot up by some white supremacist incel loser radicalized by 4chan, and the world seconds away from WW3 because of Trump's twitter fingers.

Trump gotta go.

[phroyd]

These Fucking Irresponsible Conservative Whack-Jobs! - Phroyd

The sending of package bombs to prominent Democrats and other high-profile figures this week was accompanied by a disturbing phenomenon. Baseless conspiracy theories, once confined to the fringes in the wake of violent acts, leaped with shocking speed into the mainstream discussion of the attacks.

A surprisingly large number of figures from the conservative establishment — commentators, radio hosts, a Trump family member, and other pro-Trump figures — shared, liked, hinted at, raised questions about or otherwise endorsed an evidenceless theory that this was a “false-flag” attack — one that was staged to advance the political goals of the very people it seemed intended to hurt (in this case, Democrats).

But the FBI’s arrest of a suspect Friday pointed to the hollowness of these claims, raising questions about why they were voiced on such a fraught issue in the absence of evidence. The bombs were not “hoax devices,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said Friday. The suspect, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc, “appears to be a partisan,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. And images circulating of the suspect’s van, which was plastered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat imagery, and what wasbelieved to be his social media feed, painted a portrait of a distinctly right-wing ideology.

The devices were addressed to former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), former attorney general Eric. H Holder Jr., and liberal philanthropist George Soros. Most of the packages had the office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) as the return address.

In the fever swamps of misinformation and hoaxes on the Internet, the evidence presented on Friday did little to quell the conspiracy mongering. But would the more-established conservative figures who had spread these conspiracy theories admit they made mistakes?

Actually, most continued to dig in.

Ann Coulter, conservative author and commentator

Conspiracy theorizing: “From the Haymarket riot to the Unibomber, bombs are a liberal tactic,” she tweeted on Wednesday after CNN offices in Manhattan were evacuated when one of the bombs was found there.

Friday: Coulter did not back down from her statement, appearing to pivot instead to what appeared to be racially charged barbs about her belief that people of “immigrant stock” are more likely to engage in political violence. “I don’t make predictions, I cite history,” Coulter wrote in an email Friday to The Washington Post. “Sorry, not all immigrants are going to be Democrats.”

Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio host

Conspiracy theorizing: On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh suggested that a “Democratic operative” was more likely to have sent the devices than a Republican. “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing,” Limbaugh said. “You’ve got people trying to harm CNN and Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and [Florida Rep.] Debbie ‘Blabbermouth’ Schultz and, you know, just, it might serve a purpose here.”

Friday: Limbaugh, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to his radio station, appeared to continue this line on Friday. “Two weeks out, a bunch of bombs start showing up in places that the media can then say that they are being received by ‘Trump targets?’ ” he said on his show. “I’m sorry. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck ever, and certainly not yesterday, and the world of October Surprises coupled with all the other realities I just exposed, and I think it only makes sense to be suspicious and demanding of proof for whatever we’re gonna be told.”

Michael Savage, conservative radio host

Conspiracy theorizing: Savage had said of the bombs Wednesday that there was a “high probability that the whole thing had been set up as a false flag to gain sympathy for the Democrats,” and as a way to distract from the migrant situation in southern Mexico, according to the Guardian.

Friday: Savage, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to the administrators of his website, continued to sow doubt about the line of information coming from the authorities about the bombs.

“Michael, your description yesterday of the guy they’d pin (maga hat, confed flag,etc) sounds right on the money💰 Only thing you didn’t envision was a van slathered in pro-Trump images. Once again you were correct!,” he retweeted.

And a follow up: “MAN AND VAN LOOK LIKE CREATED BY HOLLYWOOD,” he wrote.

Lou Dobbs, Fox Business television host

Conspiracy theorizing: On Thursday, Dobbs wrote: “Fake News — Fake Bombs. Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?” Dobbs later deleted the tweet.

Friday: Requests for comment sent to Fox News and Fox Business representatives were not immediately answered.

John Cardillo, right-wing media personality

Conspiracy theorizing: “Investigators need to take a serious look at far left groups like #Antifa when investigating the bombs sent to [liberal philanthropist George] Soros, Obama, and the Clintons,” Cardillo wrote on Twitter this week. “These smell like the false flag tactics of unhinged leftists who know they’re losing.” He later deleted the tweet.

Friday: Cardillo continued Friday to find ways to blame Democrats and absolve conservatives of responsibility for the package bombs. He tweeted that “far left” officials in Broward County, Fla., were to blame for Sayoc’s actions, given his prior criminal record. He said that Sayoc registered as a Republican only in 2016. And he said the “MSM” — mainstream media — ignored the story of how Donald Trump Jr.'s wife, Vanessa, was taken to the hospital after opening an envelope full of suspicious white powder.

[Trump Jr. says his wife is ‘safe and unharmed’ after opening letter containing unknown substance]

Geraldo Rivera, Fox News correspondent

Conspiracy theorizing: Rivera said Thursday that he believed “that this whole thing was an elaborate hoax.”

“I believe that those bombs were never intended to explode. I think those bombs were intended to further divide the American people,” he said. “Maybe it was a wretchedly incompetent bomber who didn’t know how to make a bomb, that never studied the Internet . . . someone who wanted to embarrass President Trump, somebody who wanted to affect American political life. It could have been a Russian invention."

Friday: Rivera is notable for being the only conservative out of this group to admit he was wrong. He said that the reason he had previously conjured up the theory that the bombs were a false-flag operation was that he “outsmarted” himself.

“Actual alleged perp 56-year old #CesarSayoc,” he wrote, “a middle-aged, rabid, extreme right winger w a troubled past & long criminal record.”

Bill Mitchell, conservative radio host

Conspiracy theorizing: “These ‘explosive packages’ being sent to the #Media and high profile Democrats has Soros astro-turfing written all over it so the media can paint the #GOP as ‘the dangerous mob,' Mitchell wrote on Wednesday. “Pure BS.”

Friday: Mitchell, who did not respond to a request for comment sent via Twitter, continued to sow doubt about Sayoc’s political motivations, hinting about a conspiracy afoot but providing no evidence.

“So many things about this Cesar guy do not add up,” he wrote on Twitter. “If he is #MAGA, why would he send these fake ‘bombs’ to Democrat Congressional Leaders 2 weeks before the midterms and disrupt our winning momentum? It makes no sense. That means there is something else here.”

Candace Owens, right-wing activist

Conspiracy theorizing: “I’m going to go ahead and state that there is a 0% chance that these ‘suspicious packages,’ were sent out by conservatives,” she wrote on Wednesday. “The only thing ‘suspicious’ about these packages, is their timing. Caravans, fake bomb threats — these leftists are going ALL OUT for midterms.” The tweet has since been deleted, but was screengrabbed by other users.

Friday: Owens did not respond to a request for comment sent to the conservative advocacy group for which she works, but she did not appear to have tweeted further about the issue.

Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s eldest son

Conspiracy theorizing: On Thursday, Trump Jr. reportedly liked a blatantly erroneous all-caps tweet that claimed that the bombs were fake and “MADE TO SCARE AND PICK UP BLUE SYMPATHY VOTE.”Friday: Trump Jr. continued engaging with partisan tweets. He retweeted Rivera, who had noted that Sayoc’s criminal history predated Trump’s political career and liked a post that railed about the “Left’s violence, intimidation, & mob tactics.”

Abby Ohlheiser and Avi Selk contributed to this report.

Phroyd

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A few months ago a friend wrote me an email with the subject line, “What is Sean McElwee.”

This is the kind of question that occurs to a person who spends a lot of time on Twitter. In 2018, McElwee’s tweets seemed to abound in liberal cyberspace. He was best known for his jeremiads about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — for much of the past year, McElwee’s handle read as “we’re going to abolish ICE.” The online racket attracted attention. MSNBC host Chris Hayes interviewed him, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand showed up to the weekly happy hour he throws, and he was named to the Politico 50 along with the likes of Mick Mulvaney, Alan Dershowitz and one Donald J. Trump. Quite a lot for a 26-year-old whose main gig is at a fledgling think tank he co-founded, Data For Progress.

But still, what is he? McElwee calls himself a “jackass of all trades” but admits that trying to explain his value to those not enmeshed in the online world of politics — potential donors to his think tank, say — is difficult.

Sean McElwee is one of many young activists articulating a far-left vision of the Democratic Party.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

“I’m like Radiohead for donors — you can’t really explain why I’m good but everyone knows that I’m good at it,” McElwee shouted over the din of bar talk at one of his happy hours on a recent evening in New York City. “The thing I try to say is, ‘Look, I don’t know what to tell you, I wrote a report on the Green New Deal three months before the Green New Deal was a thing. I tweeted about abolish ICE before abolish ICE was a thing. I fucking raised $850,000 for down-ballot candidates from small dollar contributions.’ I’m not sitting around telling you how the fuck I do it, I don’t have time to do that.” (McElwee, it should be noted, says “fuck” an awful lot.)

McElwee is one of a cadre of young left activists whose voices have grown louder in the years following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. Many came of political age in the decade following the financial crash of 2008, and many are disillusioned by a Democratic Party they think has been ideologically hollowed out. They’ve organized outside the traditional party apparatus — the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats — and worked to get representation in Congress, pushing figures like newly minted congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Now they find themselves holding greater purchase than ever before in the formal Washington political process.

For a few years now, Democratic voters have shown they’re primed for a leftward shift, and this rising group of activists and politicians wants to push them even further. At the heart of the young left’s project is a discomfort with the free market capitalist system under which we live. It’s a system deeply ingrained in many Americans’ identities, though increasingly less so: 2016 was the first year since Gallup started tracking the question that it found Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism.

This new group of activists wants to capitalize on that shift. And they’re doing it by tweeting incessantly and acting impertinently toward their fellow Democrats. Unlike bright young political things of years gone by, their purpose is to confound the party’s leadership, not earn their praise.

To this end, McElwee calls himself an “Overton Window Mover.” It’s a high-minded allusion to how activists can influence the national conversation to make fringey ideas seem less radical. He and the others have already opened the Democrats’ window, and the winds of change that blow through it might be more F5 tornado than gentle summer breeze.

McElwee’s weekly happy hour is a water cooler for young progressives in New York City.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

My stop at McElwee’s weekly happy hour for left- wing activists and writers came just before Christmas. Twinkly lights brightened the bar’s dinge, and I grabbed a beer that was astonishingly cheap for New York City — one attendee told me that the “accessible” price of the drinks was in keeping with the progressive ethos of the group. Because he’s worried that right wing trolls might crash the weekly gathering, McElwee asked me not to reveal the happy hour’s location, but plenty of the city’s left-leaning activists and journalists know about it. “A pretty high percentage of people got invited to the happy hour via Twitter DM,” Eric Levitz of New York Magazine told me.

McElwee’s attendees — over a dozen — were scattered in pockets around the bar, some seated at a corner table, others hanging out closer to the kegs. Apparently the New Republic and The Nation both had parties that evening, McElwee told me later, so the turnout was pretty decent, all things considered. The conversation spun from rifts in the leadership of the Women’s March to the war in Yemen to how one woman at the bar had to take the day off after Ocasio-Cortez was elected because she had been overcome with emotion. (Many refer to Ocasio-Cortez simply as “AOC,” putting the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman alongside LBJ and FDR in the ranks of the politically monogrammed.)

“These are really left people, not party hacks,” Rachel Stein, an activist who works on local New York City issues, told me. The young left is a loose confederation of like-minded activists organized in like-minded groups rather than a monolithic movement with explicit goals. Organizers work for both established and emerging left-wing groups, but all share an ethos of pushing mainstream Democratic politics in a more explicitly progressive direction. Women’s marches, environmental protests at Standing Rock, and anti-racism demonstrations might draw a similar set of figures from this young left world.

Since the 2016 election, the left’s political and cultural influence has ballooned. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew exponentially during the first years of the Trump administration, thanks in part to the invaluable PR that was the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. At the same time, the “dirtbag-left” comedy and politics of Chapo Traphouse, a popular podcast, helped shape a certain shared sensibility among a socialist millennial set. (An excerpt from the Chapo hosts’ new book reads, “Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under 30 who is not a sociopath.”)

Many young left activists think the time has never been more right, the culture never more ready, to move left-wing politics into the mainstream. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized radicals,” Maurice Mitchell, the 38-year-old new director of the Working Families Party, a New York-based progressive-left organization with close ties to the labor movement, told me.

A few days before the happy hour, I’d hopped a bus to mid-Brooklyn to meet with Waleed Shahid, communications director of the Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni recruiting progressive candidates to Congress. (New York City’s five boroughs are home to a number of the young leftists.) Shahid is even-keeled, if intense, and a card-carrying member (literally) of the Democratic Socialists of America. “My joke is that unlike Barack Obama, I am a Muslim socialist,” he said. He graduated from college in 2013 and worked for the Sanders campaign in 2016, followed by stints with Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon.

Protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Climate March have spent years trying to push Democrats — and the U.S. at large — further to the left.

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images, Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images, Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

“I come from this loose network of basically millennials who were a part of all the different social movements that erupted under Obama,” Shahid told me. It was a group that had voted for the Democratic president but found themselves disappointed by many of his policies. “The people I learned organizing from were people from Occupy Wall Street, the Dreamer movement, People’s Climate March, 350.org, Black Lives Matter — that whole world which was all 22-32 [years old], mostly.”

That so many young Democratic agitators have come to their politics through movements tied to America’s racial strife has distinctly flavored their approach to the country’s economic system. “I recognized that the best way to respond to the white nationalist populism was to develop a multiracial left populism,” Mitchell told me as we sat in his Brooklyn office. In a rich turn of irony, the progressive party is housed in JPMorgan Chase’s Brooklyn outpost, the bank’s name emblazoned above the threshold. While the lobby was festooned with Liberace-inspired reindeer decorations for Christmas, Mitchell’s office was stacked to the ceiling with file boxes, one of which was labeled “crap.”

Maurice Mitchell, is the leader of the Working Families Party, a progressive organization founded by a coalition of left-leaning voices.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Mitchell, 38, is the first person of color to head the Working Families Party. “The aging Jewish radical can take you only so far,” outgoing director Dan Cantor told The New York Times when Mitchell’s appointment was announced in April 2018. Mitchell spent years as a community organizer on Long Island and most recently worked at Blackbird, a communications firm he co-founded that is closely allied with the Movement for Black Lives. By Mitchell’s telling, he’s spent most of his career at the outskirts of Democratic politics, sometimes in opposition to its elected officials, living “somewhere in that place apart.”

Trump’s election, though, had made the Democratic mainstream more receptive to ideas once thought to be liberal pipe dreams. “We’re in a moment of political realignment and it’s disorienting,” Mitchell said. “People are looking for solutions, and people instinctively understand — even people working in centrist think tanks — that the solutions of the past will not take us out of this moment of realignment and will not take us into the future.”

What’s difficult, Mitchell said, is that while the culture is primed for a shift, the details still have to be ironed out.

“It starts off by recognizing that this economy is insufficient for all of our needs, for all of our people having dignity — and then we have to transition, we have to figure out how to transition while we still live under neoliberal capitalism,” he said. “That’s the work that we’re doing.”

Alexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni working to recruit more diverse working class candidates to run for Congress.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Alexandra Rojas, Justice Democrats’ 23-year-old executive director, was 13 years old when the financial crisis of 2008 hit. She recalls nothing of Washington’s deliberations over bank bailouts, only difficult conversations with her parents about scaling back. McElwee’s memories of the historic moment are similarly fuzzy. “I thought it was weird there was an organization called ‘Bear Stearns,’” he said. That childhood naivete was shed over the next decade, and the events of those years left an indelible impression; Rojas, McElwee and so many of their activist agemates were shaped by an early exposure to the potential dangers of the free market.

Much of the Democratic Party’s present identity crisis has its roots in the worldwide crash of financial markets late in George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term of office. Complicated financial products crumpled the U.S. housing market, and widespread unemployment, foreclosures and homelessness followed. While banks and investment firms failed, none of their heads were jailed for wrongdoing.

At the time, Democrats were divided over how to deal with the crisis. Elizabeth Warren — then a Harvard professor — made her first full step into Washington politics as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Warren devotes a large portion of her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” to her memories of the crisis — namely, that the government was far too credulous of the banks’ requests. “Now Treasury was giving $20 billion in additional TARP bailout funds to Citibank, plus a $306 billion taxpayer guarantee.”

There was a fundamental divide in how Democrats approached solving the crisis. Dodd-Frank, the legislation that would eventually pass in response to the crash, took an incremental approach to industry reform. But there was a faction that favored broader, more systemic structural reforms of the system. The more incrementalist reform won out under Obama, thanks in no small part, some thought, to lobbying by the heads of investment banks.

“Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical,” Krugman said.

“The financial industry has so much clout and so much influence, not just because of the money but because they’re smart people, they’re persuasive, they have great tailors,” Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics told me over coffee on a recent afternoon in Manhattan while wearing a tidy, if not tailored, outfit featuring a scarf and zip-up sweater. “I had a little bit of experience trying to persuade Obama and associates of taking a harder line on the bailouts,” he said. But Krugman didn’t prevail. “Jamie Dimon [chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase] cuts a really impressive figure, even though in fact he’s dead wrong about many of the crucial issues.”

Krugman called the emerging clutch of young activists’ skepticism about capitalism useful, and a necessary counterbalance to the lobbying and financial strength of Wall Street. Though in some aspects, he said, the far-left movement hasn’t reached intellectual maturity. “The truth is there aren’t a lot of technically adept people from that [far-left] position, which is not because there couldn’t be, but because they haven’t been a factor — it’s all new.” He continued, name checking his fellow Nobel laureate, “If you’re having meetings in which Joe Stiglitz and I are the farthest left voices, that’s a limiting spectrum and it would be helpful if there were people beyond.”

In part, that’s because before the financial crisis, American policy makers, including Democrats, didn’t do much about income inequality or widespread financial system reform. Mike Konczal, an economic fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, characterized past Democratic attitudes toward financial reform as mostly centered on workers increasing their skills and education. Democrats in the Bill Clinton era were still near-uniformly bullish on capitalism. “The system more or less worked fine, it was just a matter of getting people access to the system,” he said. “There wasn’t a big problem with the economy itself, it was just that some people were excluded from it.”

Many of the young leftists were emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Democratic primary campaign in 2016.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

In the last decade, the far left has found the problems too great to ignore. The Occupy Wall Street movement kicked things off a few years after the financial crisis but was plagued by a perception that its demands to end income inequality were too vague and the organization too decentralized. But in recent years, progressive politics have found more precise policies and voices in figures like Warren and Sanders. Rojas, the director of Justice Democrats, dropped out of community college in 2015 to work for the Sanders campaign. “I’ve had to experience what it’s like to have four or five jobs, each at $7.50, to make rent. I saw my dad suffer during the financial crisis,” she said. “I’m someone who comes from a family that really loves work and is hard working but has also experienced a capitalist system that’s run amok.”

The rising far-left Democratic activists are necessary counterpoints, Krugman told me, pushing new ideas to the masses. “Banking is on the one hand a deeply technical issue, but on the other hand it’s too important to be left solely to the technocrats,” he said. “Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical.”

The Democrats’ freshmen class in the House is filled with young progressives like Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. //

JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP / Getty Images, Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call, Stephen Maturen / Getty Images, Cheriss May / NurPhoto via Getty Images

With its incessant tweets and Instagrams, the young left has in essence begun a long session of political exposure therapy with the Democratic mainstream, popularizing ideas that many people have never heard of before or ones that would have been laughed down at first mention not so long ago.

It hasn’t gone over well with some factions of the party. In an exit interview following her November 2018 loss, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said she wished Ocasio-Cortez well, but called her “a bright and shiny new object who came out of nowhere.” She advised her to “stick to issues we can actually accomplish something on,” saying, “the rhetoric is cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been more measured, but in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, she tamped down suggestions that the surprise election was indicative of a radical shift in the party. “Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district,” Pelosi said. “It should not be viewed as something that stands for everything else.”

That hasn’t stopped Ocasio-Cortez from using her ever-growing national platform to push for new candidates like herself all over the country. In November she announced that she would support Justice Democrats’ effort to primary Democratic members in the 2020 election, a move that’s seen as highly unusual, if not uncollegial. Maneuvers like that haven’t universally endeared her, even to sympathetic members of the party. In the weeks following the November election, one anonymous staffer from the Progressive Caucus told the Atlantic, “She’s so focused on truly Instagramming every single thing that, aside from the obvious suspects in her friendship circle, she’s not taking the time to capitalize on building relationships with members as much as she should.” (Recently, Ocasio-Cortez helped lead a Twitter class for members of the Democratic caucus.) In a recent Politico piece, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said, “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people, we just don’t need sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman, told FiveThirtyEight that the freshman would stay the rhetorical course and continue to support efforts to primary Democrats. “Most of her time is spent sniping Republicans and white supremacists — very little time is spent in intraparty conflict. It’s a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias,” Mitchell said.

Perhaps the policy activists care most about promoting in the next year is the Green New Deal. It’s a plan that’s been pushed by a group of high-profile new Democratic legislators, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed creating a new congressional committee to develop a detailed plan. As of now, the policy specifics are vague, but the plan’s broad goals are to fund a “massive investment in the drawdown in greenhouse gases,” explore renewable energy sources, and train Americans in new, more sustainable jobs. Recently, Elizabeth Warren endorsed the idea of a Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez was quick to point out on Twitter. (Cory Booker and Sanders have also voiced support.)

Krugman is also bullish on the young left’s centerpiece policy. “If the Green New Deal means that we’re going to try to rely on public investment in technologies and renewables and things that will make it easier for people to use less fossil fuel, that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

The policy that has him more worried is single-payer health care, a centerpiece of Sanders’s campaign that many likely 2020 candidates have already come out to support. “That’s a huge amount of money — you can’t just do that by running up the deficit. You’d have to be collecting a bunch of new taxes, which is a reason for concern,” he said.

Krugman has been thinking about other ways to fiddle with the market system, though.

“I’ve been trying to do a little exercise with myself. I think with the fall of communism, we’d say central planning, government control of production doesn’t really work. But actually that’s not totally true,” he said. “What I try to put together is what could plausibly actually not be capitalist, actually not be markets — maybe 20-25 percent of the economy.” Things like health care, education, and utilities are all in the mix.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee said. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

McElwee and I had dinner at a midtown Chinese restaurant on the same day that Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted one of his Data For Progress visualizations showing the rise in the number of tweets mentioning the “Green New Deal” since the summer of 2017. “Never underestimate the power of public imagination,” she wrote. It had been retweeted nearly 3,000 times and garnered 17,000 likes. Was the virality of the tweet and the promotion of a once-obscure policy idea some kind of success in and of itself, I asked.

“What is success? It’s power, it’s having a vision of the world that’s different from the status quo and enacting that vision,” McElwee said in between bites of scallion pancakes. At well over 6 feet tall with a uniform of puffy jackets and baseball hats, McElwee gives the impression of an overgrown teenage boy, fervent but with flashes of seeming self-awareness for his big talk. “And if three years from now Data for Progress has not enacted its vision, has not exercised itself upon the world and its ideas on the world, then we will have failed and we should stop doing this.”

Wasn’t that self-imposed timeline a little quick for broad political change to happen, I asked.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee shot back. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

A trademark of the young left movement is its urgency of mission. This, coupled with a deep disdain for establishment politics, has made the dissemination of their gospel of change — particularly online — sharp-elbowed and disdainful of naysayers. “You don’t win over these people, you crush them,” McElwee told me of Republicans the first time we met. “I don’t make friends with Republican operatives. I don’t try to reach across the aisle. I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to be associated with them and you’ll never find a picture of me shaking hands with David Frum or something,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s former speechwriter who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Now that some of the left’s candidates have found themselves in office, agitation from inside the party is a tactic that will be put to greater use. After her election, Ocasio-Cortez attended a sit-in at Pelosi’s office over climate change. Tlaib unsuccessfully asked the Democratic leader to put her on the powerful House Appropriations Committee — an assignment that typically goes to seasoned members. (Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez have both been placed on the Financial Services Committee.) And on the first day of the 2019 House session, Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna of California said they would vote against Democrats’ rules for the new Congress because they included a measure that necessitated any spending be offset by spending cuts or revenue increases. For progressive politicians pushing massive government-funded programs like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal, the rules are not seen as bureaucratic minutiae, but as sabotage.

When I asked Shahid if the new left movement was going to be the Democrats’ version of the House Freedom Caucus, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it is.”

He had another historical example in mind, too: Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, a group of abolitionists who stridently pushed for Lincoln’s Republican Party to abolish slavery. “Politics is still the art of compromise, you still have to pass legislation,” Shahid said. “But the idea is on whose terms is the compromise?” Every transformative president, he said, had found himself pushed into radical new policies by movements. (Ocasio-Cortez said something similar in a 60 Minutes interview that aired a few weeks after Shahid and I talked.) Abraham Lincoln had the abolitionists at his throat, Franklin Roosevelt had labor unions pushing for the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson had civil rights leaders prodding him toward reforms of racist laws.

“Maybe we can make Joe Biden into a Lincoln,” he said.

So whom do young leftists want as their 2020 candidate? And what role will their movement have throughout the campaign?

“I want the left to really think seriously about the fact that the core of our strategy right now is if we endorse the right person, they will owe us,” McElwee told me. The left, he said, should take a page out of big businesses’ book and not care what candidate is ultimately chosen. “Knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, having the right contacts with the right staffers who you need to call to make sure the right amendment is passed at the right time — we’re much worse at that. We don’t actually have that capacity built up.” For an idealist, McElwee has a tendency toward Machiavellian realism.

McElwee said he could live with a Biden or a Beto O’Rourke as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, which is heresy in some progressive circles. Shahid voiced a more common progressive view of O’Rourke, comparing him to Emmanuel Macron, the young centrist president of France. “He says beautiful things, but what does he believe in?”

Mitchell, for one, was put off by the rumblings of support for O’Rourke coming from Obama World. “It’s outrageous. What O’Rourke did was pretty amazing, but he lost by more than 200,000, and Stacey [Abrams] and Andrew [Gillum] lost by a hair. So how is his loss a signal that he’s a rising star and Stacey and Andrew’s losses are definitive losses — they need to regroup and figure things out? Somebody needs to explain that to me.”

A recent poll of Democrats in Iowa, a largely white state that holds the nation’s first primaries, put Biden, Sanders and O’Rourke in the lead. Mitchell thinks that figures of the Democratic establishment are too eager to cede the party to centrist figures who appeal to a particular slice of the electorate.

“Basically what they’re saying is the Democrats need a white man that can talk to other white men and not scare this imagined centrist voter away with too much radical talk about totally restructuring our economy,” Mitchell said. “Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias.”

Regardless of who the party nominee turns out to be, it seems inarguable that the young left’s ideas will filter their way into the race. Shahid told me he thought that one strategy is for his ideological cohort to staff presidential campaigns. Justice Democrats, however, will focus on the next batch of congressional campaigns. “The biggest achievement we’ve gotten outside Ocasio was building a pipeline for candidate recruitment that actually reaches working class people,” Rojas said.

McElwee said his plans are mostly to stick to the issues. Right around the new year, his Twitter name changed to read “we’re going to pass AVR” — automatic voter registration — and a new website popped up promoting a new project to pass AVR in New York state. The Daily News had a piece on it, and McElwee’s feed was a litany of retweets of progressives cooing over the initiative. McElwee had told me that if he ever stopped seeing what the next new thing was, he’d get out of politics, lose 40 pounds, and try to sell his method as the next big fad diet. As he downed the last of his sake and finished my soup dumplings, it seemed clear he wasn’t in that headspace just yet.

“I’ll clearly support whoever the nominee is,” McElwee told me. “I think all of these people can be moved. They’re pieces on a chess board that’s so much larger than them. And I want to be helping move those chess pieces.”

[luludoesyoga]

Off the Grid: An Internal Narrative

As I write this, I am off the grid with three close friends who are all certified yoga teachers. I am the only one in need of having to pay fees to tell everyone I am certified. As a destitute person, its not a priority.

We are all creatives. We are also all in recovery from what has been a slow burn of endless diversions from not poor choices in life—but the open roads led us back together on a retreat along with my father’s genuine support for my adventures. It required a lot of comfort food ranging from quiches to tamales with rice & beans to grilled fish.

The eats are good as we spend these days teaching each other & sharing openly our traumas. The tears shed from the grief is actually helping. I do not feel so lonely. Whenever my Borderline Personality Disorder has me on a high meaning I can both climb & move mountains— I now try not to cling or brag about my euphoric emotions. Why? Because I am learning no one likes boasting.

Being a yoga practitioner for seven years, I learned energy knows energy. What repels repels. What attracts attracts. What aligns aligns for a reason. You do become your habits & thoughts.

For an Anti-Capitalist what does that mean? Its not about success, the grind or even plumb fellowships from elitist institutions. Its doing what feels good, genuinely at home with self & cozy.

How does one cultivate that during chaotic times when one has hit rock bottom one time too many from mental illness?

One breath at a time by replacing one thought. This is only possible because I practiced for years. The problem is because I am very active on social media with my writing, those who drain me of my energy can always sense when I am doing better & drain me of my sense of self & basic dignity.

In other words, I need a break from feeling less than.

I am currently on locked Twitter & Instagram not to keep updating but to pause & give myself some space as I become with each passing day a slowly regenerated version of myself that is not being given a choice but to really love myself. I have to be able to fully feel & express & receive love. I have to put it into practice with how I treat & talk to myself.

Always cultivate what you want & need. Never what you do not want. I know exactly what I want & need from my love interest, a quiet but breath takingly handsome widower who has held many roles & titles but he says his best & most fulfilling are to be a Dad & Life Partner & fully committed advocate & defender of immigrant & refugee rights, the Rome Statute for human rights & remaining out of electoral politics. Very attractive. He is all those roles minus life partner at the moment.

Our early encounters were very tense. He never wants to give too much advice in business or politics. The rare times he had to intervene were because of me. Which made me feel like a pretty shitty friend. He ranted about Kamala Harris being total corporate sludge & purveyor of tacky oligarch luxury. A man who loves his Burberry from the 1990s without giving two fucks.

He told me that yes, France like the US seems to get worse with each presidential election. He begged me to not vote for Biden. It caused major damage between him & I. He wanted me for my own well-being to abstain from voting for president. That night of the win, I cried full of ideation. As he looked at social media & said the Democrats like Republicans continue to be insane & inflict their utter ignorance on us.

None of this is really off the grid. As I shut out the world & he does the same from Paris, we are both giving each other space with no phone calls for a week but morning & nightly emails that we treat as confessional. We have an open agreement if either of us feel ideation, we can call each other at any time.

We do this to help each other heal. There is something so soothing & incredibly seductive to write those emails knowing no one but him & I are reading them. Its in that space as he looks at my Twitter & Instagram & even retweets for me to help, that we build trust with each other. We all need private spaces & places.

It pains him to no end what I have seen in my life. He has had plenty of mishaps in dating & romantic love but, his life was private elite college prep education and surrounded by opulence beyond anything I have ever seen.

It created obstacles. He does not know poverty as I do. Even with his endless travels, he never says he was in a poor or rich neighborhood doing such & such. His attitude we are all fucked under the steady slow burn of Capitalism.

But, he is mindful that in communities with less, he tips large amounts, mutual aids baby formula & food or gives the street vendors the fruit carts with no contract other than paying it forward & to not alert the news. He cannot stand charity & hopes to see a day where justice makes it obsolete to crush the egos of heartless Capitalists who killed so many.

I know I am falling in love because my need to be private is creeping in. Thankfully, he is not a social media person. He says he does not need it. If he needs to be seen he will be seen. Its been tempting to want to post pictures together to prove something. We also are still very much learning about each other.

If this piece feels deeply internal its because it is. I write this as I get ready for an evening of yin yoga to candle light & quiet meditation among friends. That helps to pull energy inwards to repair. We have a few days to not search for clarity but, to be grateful when those moments arrive.

Per my friend’s tarot reading for me today: I am going to be more than okay. That this time if used wisely will open new doors as I slowly closed a few. I have to admit, distancing myself from electoral politics, television & social media celebrity status chasers has been a good remap for well-being.

As I manifest & prepare for my match’s return from France, all I can pray for is neither of us ends up with heartbreak.

We owe that to each other for this story. Believe it or not it was not really constructed much online due to his absence on platform. It feels like home that he cares so little for fame or even success. He tells me always “I found a lot of home in your Medium essays. I showed up & found you. Beyond that, its on you & I.”

Note: Expressing political opinions are vital to a robust democracy. Those who threatened by writers & journalists have something to hide. Critiquing the press is one thing, but rather extreme to have congress members trying to squash political criticism, which this piece can also be read as.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

What do you think would be the best way any of the 1D boys could comment on or engage with feminism?

That’s a big question anon - and one I am going to really enjoy answering.

My starting point, is that at the moment no member of 1D has commented on or engaged with feminism.

Feminism is not the belief that women are great (either individually or as a whole).  Feminism is the belief that women are oppressed and that we can challenge and change that oppression by working together.  There is a tendancy to try and make feminism friendly and welcoming (or broad and meaningless depending on your point of view), by defining it as the belief that men and women should be equal.  I disagree with this approach - recognising that women and men are currently unequal is absolutely central to feminism.

I spent all of yesterday uneasy at what I was seeing.  I remember when International Women’s Day was something only recognised by left-wing feminists (who also knew the day’s origins and called it International Working Women’s Day).  I have very mixed feelings bland praising of women in general anyway (idealising women has been a very effective way of controlling us).  Having so many people, including people and organisations who hate and hurt women, making these bland noise of praise crowds out people who are trying to resist oppression and make women’s  lives better.

Back to One Direction - vague praise of women and girls, without any acknowledgement of the oppression they face, has always been part of their branding. As long as you don’t say what you think it means, ‘respect women’ is a message that can appeal to a wide range of women and girls (and their parents).  Any ‘aren’t women great’ praise for them now very much continues that trend. 

(The only time One Direction members have come near acknowledging the oppression women face is when talking about the way their fans get dismissed and misrepresented.  None of them have fully articulated that their fans are dismissed and misrepresented because of a misogynist society, but Harry in the Rolling Stone interview and Louis and Zayn talking about ‘Crazy about One Direction’s are part of the way there).

So for me the question isn’t, what would be the best way for them to acknowledge and engage with feminism, but what might it look like if they did.

I think for men and feminism the starting point has to be: Stop Doing Harm. Stop promoting fucked up ideas about women’s sexuality. Stop discriminating against women in hiring processes they have influence over.  (Plus, I’m sure, a lot of other things that aren’t public).

To engage with feminism means fighting against women’s oppression. I’m a huge believer in listening and learning and not speaking until you know where you stand (even more so when your voice is disproportionately amplified and about an oppression you don’t face).  There’s a story on twitter about Danny DeVito and anti-racist organisation - and I think it’s a useful example for thinking about what actual political solidarity from celebrities looks like. What that story shows is that he knows his stuff and that he’s always trying to learn more. I want to be very clear that I don’t think the only way a 1D member could meaningfully engage with feminism is by making public statements - in fact I think large parts of that would have to take place outside of fans’ view.  Maybe they’re doing it now - who knows.

If a 1D member wanted to engage with current feminist activism, there’s no shortage of places to start  There’s about to be a referendum in Ireland that would be the first step to repealing Ireland’s horrific abortion laws. Women in Yarl’s Wood, where immigrants are detained under the threat of deportation, are currently on hunger strike to protest both their detention and their treatment in the detention centre.  There are women organising within the entertainment industry against their sexual harassment and exclusion.  Women in unions are fighting really important battles against the systematic devaluation of women’s work and for pay equity. 

But here’s the most important thing - if you’re going to engage with feminism in a meaningful way and try and fight the oppression women and girls face - you’re going to piss people off. That’s how oppression works, there are people and power structures who are invested in keeping the status quo. The statements that One Direction members made on International Women’s Day (and other similar statements through the years) are designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and to be fully compatible with the status quo. Therefore they’re the opposite of engaging with feminism.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

speaking of how anger can be as necessary as any other feeling, can be an appropriate and healthy emotional response, and can be entirely positive, and yet some people will say that anger is always wrong / to be avoided

i shouldve bookmarked it because of course i forget where i found it or who posted it, but yesterday on twitter someone had started a thread talking about how they for years tried to suppress their own anger and avoid conflict whenever they could because they had it pushed on them so strongly from a religious (christian) angle that anger was just like straight up a sin. and then they were asking about other people’s experiences with considering a broad emotional area being off-limits or inexpressible because other ppl were telling them it wasn’t an option. / having an emotional reaction of theirs just being ignored or condemned because frustration or whatever is a sign of not being good enough in whatever way

anyways it reminded me abt the whole christian approach to never expressing anger in the whole misinterpreted “turn the other cheek” thing....its kind of wild the way really christian concepts and ideas can be embedded in these nonreligious aspects of society, and considered to be a “common sense” type of perspective rather than a christian-informed one, and often involves societal/historical factors that altered US christianity which turned around to contribute right back into social/historical spheres...

like, how some kind of puritan-adjacent Moral Living agenda thought up by some dude back in the day and obsessed with asceticism & lack of self-indulgent comforts & definitely-no-masturbation as part of a Health Initiative that was sort of like this US-wheat centric cult. and today we have the breakfast cereal aisle largely in thanks to this one guy and his take on religion

or how the concept of Hard Work has been taken on by industrialized capitalism (especially post-wwii and its never-since-dropped Moral Necessity of time-efficiency above all else) to justify poverty (they deserve it) and worker exploitation (they also deserve it or they’re just lazy and thus deserve even worse poverty) and racism (they deserve it! or should just Hard Work their way out of it!) and sexism (women are paid less because they dont do men’s Hard Work! stay at home moms dont do real Hard Work! working moms arent Working Hard enough if their family work cuts back on the time and attention and energy they can give their paid job) and classism (if you cant Work Hard enough to escape poverty then you deserve the poverty) and ableism (if you cant do the same Hard Work of any other abled person then why are you alive tbh :/) and racist & anti muslim anti immigration (uhhh they both Work Too Hard and keep white people from getting in their Hard Work and also don’t don’t Work Hard Enough & steal from white people’s Hard Work) and you see how it goes........everything

and this whole concept comes from the protestant values of early colonizers......they believed very much in the necessity of the religious value of labor and suffering and self-denial and sort of grim survival and all. harken back to the wheat-worshipping cold-baths don’t-spank-it Cereal Dude.

and then there’s how US christianity was deliberately altered to not only accommodate the idea of a morally acceptable institution of chattel slavery, but to also actually promote it as morally necessary. it censored bible readings of pro-abolitionist passages & censored anyone who would preach against slavery. i think the whole still-existent branch of “southern baptist” churches was created post-abolition as a white refusal to drop the pro-slavery religious stance? and then there’s the ways that white christianity still had to justify segregation to itself, and all the other forms and practices of racism, up to today, and which i should be aware of more concrete examples of how this manifested historically. but like it sure does like continue man

anyways tldr protestant values and perspectives are often conflated with universal/“common sense” ones or outright pushed as core/necessary “american” values, and that’s an important factor to take into consideration when thinking about like, anything, because it’s so far reaching in influence that it’s probably a part of anything you look far enough into. like, again, the cereal guy. no wheaties if not for puritans. would we have chex mix in a universe where the vvitch couldnt be made because what are pilgrims? you crucify one guy and suddenly cheerios are possible because of one weirdo two millenia down the line.

anyways. there’s a lot of factors stemming from christianity that can go beyond technical religious beliefs/practices. seeing as i just complained about how anyone imposing a requirement to completely suppress any feeling or expression of anger is at best, unhealthy, and at worst, unhealthy AND abusive, it seems relevant to take into account people invoking arguments (especially to kids or anyone else over whom they have authority) about anger being an actual Sin. jesus was getting p.o’d all the time, not only about that classic temple shit but also when people interrupted his nap or when he was denied snackage. and that “turn the other cheek” bit was about NOT letting people hit/exploit you. theres no argument for needing to not express anger in order to be properly christian. and the suppression of necessary, justified anger can be used to sustain and support a ton of fucked up and violent and unethical practices then and now so fuck that in all its forms tbh

[bredlederblog]

Capitol Hill 2021: A Response to a Commenter

Normally, I make a rule not to engage because I’ve had to deal with furious pro-police brutality and anti-immigration peeps before, and frankly I’m too old and tired to try to debate all the time. 

But I saw that someone had posted a very long response (and one other prior person) to my Capital Hill post and I need to make a few things clear: 

No, what happened to Ashli Babbit was/is inexcusable. There is literally no justification for her death--and there are too many various eye-witnesses for any of us to pretend that what the Capitol police and security had done was justifiable. 

We have one Thomas Barani confirming that she was shot by a plains-clothed police officer (so Ashli couldn’t have known if the cop was...a cop. Because he wasn’t wearing his uniform). 

Police also confirmed that there were no warning shots before Babbit was killed. 

““They shot her and then they turned around and screamed ‘Do you want to be next?'” one of the alleged eyewitnesses says on the tape. “That’s when the rest of the Capitol Police came storming in and pushed us all out.”“When she got hit, she was gushing blood out of her mouth,” another eyewitness added.“One shot and they got her,” the first man then stated.“ 

I have no clue why the commenter believed Babbit received prior warnings (and warning shots? Which granted, the four video recordings only shows during and after the incident--but where the fuck are the warning shots if none of the eyewitnesses and the police admitted it)?

I find it amazing that said commenter is claiming that I’m ‘blowing shit out of proportion’ while claiming that a woman had ‘warning shots’ which were never reported or in all four videos of the incident.

(also the commenter went on a long-as-hell post ranting about Biden, the news, and gun laws. Despite that my post was about police brutality and how clearly the people were misled and used by a politician who told people to march to Capitol Hill, because “something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can't have happened and we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore.” 

This man claimed for MONTHS that the election was stolen (and I say for a fact that he did nothing to prevent it from happening. Remember that the 2016 primaries drew widespread criticism because 868 voting offices were removed, prompting calls for voter suppression investigation from both Republican and Democratic parties. Trump’s administration (after Mr. President told American citizens not to use mail-in votes, which my own father did anyway)  then went on to remove 1,688 on-site voting locations for the 2020 elections. 

So. Let’s pretend that I’m a politician who wants to limit any potential fraud. 

If I discover that mail-in ballots are a risk--you’d think that’d be the moment where you open up more voting locations, correct? So that none of the ballot-counters get slammed by thousands-more votes than last time, and to limit any possibility of ‘losing actual’ count (and hell, if a recount had to be made--it’s handier to separate them by town (like in the UK) than a whole county). I wouldn’t do something so stupid as to remove voting locations for places like Florence, Texas--forcing Americans to travel 10 miles to vote in person. 

So yeah--I’d appreciate it if you guys would: a) not insult a dead person, b) victim-blame a dead person, and c) claim that I was ‘blowing shit out of water’. 

And also--maybe the reason why we didn’t like Trump for saying shit like ‘grabbing pussy’ was because we historically didn’t like presidents for f*cking around like Bill Clinton. Who himself was impeached for using his position to pressure and have sex with his intern and several other women. In addition: If you have a problem with Trump being blamed because ‘he didn’t tell these people to riot” note that the US judiciary system has stated that you are still guilty of inciting people even if you didn’t specifically tell them to cause damage/murder. 

Because otherwise, why the fuck did American authorities convict Charles Manson when he himself said: 

“I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed. I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am. “

That's why Trump is being criticised. Because in America,  even if you didn’t say X,  but were there near a scene of crime  and didn’t do enough to stop the situation from escalating--then you’re at fault. 

Trump had so many chances to fix last week’s situation. He could’ve stepped out to personally speak out to the crowd, but he hid behind his Twitter. He wouldn’t even go on camera, neither did he send for the National Guard (which is controlled federally) to get Pence out of Capitol Hill. 

But he didn’t. He also had the opportunity to address what happened, to go over the seriousness about last week’s incident and the people who were killed (the ones that died going into Capitol Hill, and the ones who ‘defended’ it). But instead he focused heavily on how ‘people’ thought his speech was ‘totally appropriate’. He instead just distanced himself from those people. 

The News didn’t ‘make’ him look bad. He did all that to himself.