#|| ON THE DAY I MAKE AN ANTI REED RICHARDS POST......

[neonwebs]

[smokeybrand]

The Cape and The Cowl

A friend of mine posted a meme questioning who would win a fight between Doctor Doom and Batman. My gut reaction is to say it’s real bad for Bruce but, as i thought about it more and more, i kind of feel like its not so cut-and-dry. There is a lot of nuance that needs to be considered between the two characters rather than just a “smash the action figured together” scenario. Of course, there is the surface stuff like how would they interact generally? What would the catalyst be in order to incite said conflict? Why would Doom even see Bruce as a threat? If you think about it objectively, an all things are even, to Vic, Batman is just a crazy person losing his are on crime in a raggedy ass city. Victor von Doom is a the reagent of an entire country with a GDP that rivals some superpowers in the MCU. Like, the USA has diplomatic relations with a blip in Eastern Europe, because Doom has the military power to wreck he US in open aggression. Latveria will lose in a prolonged conflict, that’s just a question of resources, but that little country would absolutely inflict upon the US in a slow bleed. Imagine the War on Terror but with competent leadership and actual, discipline, military strategy. Why the f*ck would Doom care what the f*ck is going on out in Jersey? More than that. the similarities between the two characters is staggering.

We all know the origin of Batman. We’ve seen that sh*t how many times now? It’s like getting a new Spider-Man joint and having to watch Uncle Ben die all over again. It’s trite at this point but so essential to the character, we need a refresher every time Bats shows up onscreen. That trauma informs everything he is, as it would if you watched your parents gunned down in cold blood as a child, and then laid with their still warm corpses for however long until the police came. What a lot of people don’t know is the origin of Doctor Doom. Being a villain, Doom rarely gets his motivations explored outside of some megalomaniac Dr. No type f*ckery. However, Victor von Doom is a person. He started out life as a happy kid and learned to be Doctor Doom, just like Bruce learned to be Batman. Doom is actually a refugee. True, Doom was born an aristocrat, but Latveria was overthrown when he was still young so he was never able to be raised in that level of opulence. His mom was also murdered before he was ten years old. Just like Bruce, Doom experienced a horrific truth that would color his world perspective for the rest of his life. Doom would eventually find his way to the US as he was brilliant. Like, unheard of intelligent and it would be his exposure to the US lifestyle, after years of conflict and struggle, which would make him realize how easy life could be if someone just did what was necessary. And then Reed happened.

Reed Richards was, is, a fulcrum in Vic’s life. They have a relationship similar to Batman an Superman but the opposite. Whereas Batman values Clark’s perspective because it helps him keep perspective, Vic finds Reed to be absurd. He sees Reed for who e is and doesn’t understand why no one else can. Reed Richards is a reckless, excitable, short-sighted, glory-hog. He is. If you read the character with any semblance of realism, you’d see that. Ho many times has Sue comments on how she and the rest of his family, take a backseat to science? How many times has Reed, himself, sacrificed a relationship or to, in service to the solution of an equation? Doom saw all of that in college. Reed represents the structural issues of the world and it frustrates Vic to no end. In some continuities, the genesis of Vic going full Doom rest on an accident Reed commits because of that shortsightedness. It goes a long way to checking Reeds ego and he does become a better person for it, but it was at the cost of scarring Vic for life, both physically and mentally. Yet another example of the system, ruining Doom’s life.

Bruce, after his trauma, has kept a strong support system. First and foremost, since day one, he had Alfred. Doom had no one. Bruce then built a family, adopting all of the children and surrounding himself with love. Doom’s one true love died and was dragged down to hell. We know this because he punches out Mephisto whenever he can. Also, his mom is down there, too. Bruce eventually met Diana and Kal, becoming fast friends and life long confidants. Outside of Catwoman, I think Diana makes for the perfect romantic partner of Bruce and that is shown in several continuities. Reed just reinforced Doom’s disgust with the machinations of the world, eventually further degrading Doom’s tenuous hold of his ability to trust in others, by psychically maiming him. The negative impact Reed had on Doom’s life is f*cking profound, man. I’m not saying Doom should have taken it as far as he did, but it’s hard to argue against trying to kill a dude who had ruined years of your work, destroyed you reputation, and physically maimed you forever. That doesn’t seem wholly outrageous to me. I think it’s called justifiable homicide? The only reason Doom stopped trying to murder Reed is because Valeria was born. Valeria became the first person Doom felt real affection for, since the death of his wife. I think Morgan le Fay could be another, but that might have just been a time-space booty call. Valeria Richards and her relationship with he Uncle Doom, is what gave Vic the strength to be better. Bruce had that love his entire life, even immediately after his darkest day. Doom went decades without it.

Up until Valeria was born, all Doom had was his time spent as a destitute street rat, struggling to survive, to inform him about life and the world at large. That brazen cruelty for sure emotionally crippled him in a lot of ways, I'm not even going to start to defend his arrogance or superiority complex, but trauma does that. That's why i think Bats would eventually come around. They've both seen the absolute worst of the world and, in a lot of ways, go about righting those wrongs in the same way. If you pay attention, and the writer is worth their salt, you'd see that Latveria is an autocratic socialist paradise. Latverians are among the most literate, healthy, and happy people in the 616. Jobs are plentiful and crime is almost non-existent. Mans even cured cancer, which he made available to the world, if those people choose to make the trip to Latveria for treatment. The world of 616, at large, likes to paint Vic as this evil despot but, if you interview a laymen of Latveria, they’ll sing his praises. Most people forget that, before Doom returned for his birthright, Latveria was a whole ass occupied state. Think the relationship between Israel and Palestine. Latveria was basically falling into doorknobs for Symkaria and pretending that they weren’t in an abusive relationship. Doom showed up and changed all that. It was a bloody f*cking conflict, for sure, and i am certain Vic committed war crimes, but the end result was a free Latveria with a strong international presence. Doom is a hero to those people but a villain to other nations because of how he rose to power and, more importantly, how independent he made hi country from the world system. Doom did what was necessary to free his people, a march too far for Bruce and that’s why Gotham is the way that it is.

People who don’t know the character like to paint Vic as ego-maniacal villain, and that was valid when comics were just "hero smash bad guy", but we've grown beyond that. Every pop culture interpretation of Doom, outside of the comics, has him as this stoic, arrogant, asshole, dictator bu that’s just not an accurate portrayal of how Doom is in a modern capacity. Vic is definitely an autocrat but he’s no dictator. He can be cruel at times to specific individuals but he is generally benevolent to his people. He doesn’t portray himself as a strongman but he does let it be known he’ll nuke anyone or anything if it means furthering his overall goals which, currently, is the safety and security of Latveria. His country isn’t a police state and his people are free to do as they please but their is a line, just like everywhere else in the world. Doom just has a shorter one and enforces that with extreme prejudice. I’m not going to sit here and say everything is great in Latveria, it’s definitely not, but it ain’t so hot in 616 America either. How many Civil Wars have they had? What about that whole  tidbit with Hydra Cap? There is nuance and gray nowadays, areas that both Bats and Doom comfortably call home. Batman is, objectively, not a pure hero. He is, at best, a chivalric anti-hero and similarly, Doom is more of an anti-villain than the mustache twirling, boogeyman, mastermind pop media portrays him to be. Batman and Doom are basically the same person, with the same motivations, only Doom is willing to go much, much, further than Bruce; A difference in method you an attribute to their respective upbringings.

If Doom had the same support system as Bruce, he’d create miracles. We’ve seen glimpses of that throughout the years. Dooms last run culminated with him essentially obliterating an entire universe where he had the support necessary to build a proper utopia. Our Doom couldn’t fathom the choices made by this variant Doom because of how broken he is. If Bruce was alone in his formative years like Victor, he’d commit atrocities. We’ve seen glimpses of that over they years, too. There are various narratives that explore just such a tragic turn of events, explored in the Death Metal series of books. Dawnbreaker immediately comes to mind. Bruce and victor are the same side of the same coins. It's literally a crap shoot as to which side of the alignment chart either leans. And as if to inform my point further, we just recently had Joker War. That book went a long way to exposing the absolute necessity of raw force, in order to properly “save”Gotham. Joker was able to completely dismantle that entire city by attacking the machinery put in lace to make it run. He effectively proved that The Batman was part of the problem and would never be the solution because Bruce doesn’t go far enough. He puts out fires but never address the sparks which start those blazes. He doesn’t go far enough. He never will. His code won’t allow him to. But Doom can. Doom did. Honestly, if you really want to keep it real, what is Bruce's endgame? What does a healthy Gotham City look like? It looks a lot like f*cking Latveria.

So to answer this question outright, i don’t think they even fight. The way this hypothetical was set up had three rounds: the first being a standard donnybrook, the second being prep time, and the last being god mode. To be perfectly honest with you, it wouldn't make it past the first round. If i had to say, with pedestrian or normie level understanding of he characters, Doom sweeps all categories. For Round one, Doom’s armor trumps all of Batman’s gadgets. For Round Two, Doom has more resources at his fingertips for prep. For Round The God Emperor Doom exists. He created several realities and killed a few Beyonders. Batman sat in a chair which gave him access to all the wisdom in the multiverse, and realized there were three Jokers. Doom all the way. My informed opinion as someone who adores both these character more than most would have me think there wouldn’t even be a conflict to begin with. I think they’d investigate the inciting catalyst, meet in person with intent to attack if necessary, size each other up until one of them made the proposal to just talk, they'd converse, and the fight would end with both of them walking away from each other with begrudging respect. Doom would admire Bruce's will and Bruce would understand the necessity of Doom's position in the world because, if you can make it make sense, Bruce will usually agree. Batman, for all of his shortcomings, is not naive to the world. He’s seen the same darkness as Doom. Doom, for all of his pompous arrogance, understands the struggle to maintain faith in those around you, even if that noble aspiration is misplaced. Bruce is one bad day away from Doom and Doom is a decades worth of days from being Bruce. They mirror each other and i think they’d see that, taking each other as cautionary tales before becoming collaborators. I don’t see them ever really becoming friends but i don't think they’d ever be true enemies.

[patriotsnet]

Did Democrats Or Republicans Founded The Kkk

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-democrats-or-republicans-founded-the-kkk/

Did Democrats Or Republicans Founded The Kkk

The Kkk Was Founded By Democrats But Not The Party

Democrats Founded the KKK.mp4

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by ex-Confederate soldiers Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group was originally a social club but quickly became a violent white supremacist group.

Its first grand wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, an ex-Confederate general and prominent slave trader.

Fact check:

Experts agree the KKK attracted many ex-Confederate soldiers and Southerners who opposed Reconstruction, most of whom were Democrats. Forrest even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention.

The KKK is almost a paramilitary organization thats trying to benefit one party. It syncs up with the Democratic Party, which really was a;racist party openly at the time, Grinspan said. But the KKK isnt the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party isnt the KKK.

Although the KKK did serve the Democratic Partys interests, Grinspan stressed that not all Democrats supported the KKK.

The Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism senior fellow Mark Pitcavage told the Associated Press that many KKK members were Democrats because the Whig Party had died off and Southerners disliked Republicans after the Civil War. Despite KKK members’ primary political affiliation, Pitcavage said it is wrong to say the Democratic Party started the KKK.

Fact check:Yes, historians do teach that first Black members of Congress were Republicans

The Conservative Coalition Vs The New Deal Coalition

Now that we know the basics, the changes in both parties in the 1900s are perhaps best understood by examining;the Conservative Coalition;and the New Deal Coalition.

The Conservative Coalition was a coalition between the anti-Communist Republicans like Nixon and Reagan and conservative Southern Democrats. It arose to oppose FDRs New Deal progressivism, and it blocked a lot of the progressive legislation the New Deal Coalition tried to pass from the 1930s to the 1960s. The socially conservative solid south;was still its own entity. It sometimes voted;with other Democrats, and sometimes broke off into its own factions. See the 1960 election Kennedy v. Nixon v. Harry F. Byrd. The Coalition tellingly dwindled post 64 Civil Rights and ended in the Clinton era as conservative southerners became Republicans and formed;the modern construct of the Red States and the Blue States.

Meanwhile,;the New Deal coalition explains the progressive coalition of Democrats and Republicans the Conservative coalition opposed. Today the two parties largely resemble these coalitions.

A Summary Of The Solid South Switch

To summarize the above claims before we get to the details:

In 1860 the Democratic Party Platforms were about Small Government and States Rights, and the more aristocratic Republican Platform about Federal Power and Collective;Rights, but by;2016, the opposite is;true .

This is because the conservative south and old Republican Progressives can be said to have switched parties in reaction;to events that occurred from the Gilded Age to the Bush and Clinton years. These changes that are well symbolized by the 1968 election, but not explained by that alone.

To understand what changed, we must become familiar with;people like W. J. Bryan, Teddy, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, Henry A. Wallace, Strom Thurmond, FDR, MLK, and Hoover. We must look at the Red Scare, the Dixiecrat States Rights Parties, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Nixons Southern Strategies, the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition, etc. See;Democrats and Republicans Switched Platforms.

The full story aside, in the early days:

Populist social liberals used to ally with the populist socially conservative solid south .

The social liberal elite like Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton were in the Federalist party with classical conservative Tory-like figures and factions.

That pairing;of factions is either hopeful or a blight on history, depending on your perspective.

How the South Went Republican: Can Democrats Ever Win There Again? .

Also Check: Is Red The Color Of Republicans

In The Wake Of Trump’s David Duke Controversy Many Republicans Have Tried To Tie The Kkk To Progressivism

Its not news that Donald Trump appeals to white supremacists and his slowness in rebuking former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Dukes support hardly qualifies as surprising at this point. Whats instructive is how right-wing figures react. Earlier this week, political troglodyte Jeffrey Lord attempted to deflect criticism by calling the Klan a leftist terrorist organization perpetuating violence to further the progressive agenda.

That, of course, is entirely wrong. A short lesson in the basics of 20th;century American political history explains why.

White supremacist Southern Democrats were a key part of President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal Coalition. They used their large numbers, unity and seniority to exclude as many black people from as much of the New Deal benefits and protections as possible and to stop the federal government from doing anything about lynching. Then the black freedom movement and white allies insisted on civil rights. In reactionary response, those white southern Democrats left the Democratic Party en masse, as evidenced by Strom Thurmonds Dixiecrat presidential campaign in 1948 and Richard Nixons opposition to school busing and play for segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallaces constituency.

White southern Democrats were explicit about their racism, and its no mystery that they left the party when it yielded to civil rights movement pressure, and as blacks began to make up a larger part of its constituency.

Did The American Political Parties Switch Clarifying The Semantics

People often ask,;did the American political parties switch?, but this question is semantically wrong, and thus we should address it before moving on.

Parties can switch general platforms and ideologies .

Voters can switch parties .

However,;the parties themselves only switch when they hang-up their hat to become a new party;.

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Southernization Urbanization And Big Government Vs Small Government

Today the Republican party doesnt have a notable progressive left-wing and the Democratic Party doesnt have a notable socially conservative right-wing.

Instead both parties have establishment and populist wings and the parties are divided by stances on social issues.

In other words, regional interests and the basic political identities of liberal and conservative didnt change as much as factions changed parties as party platforms changed along with America.

The modern split is expressed well by;the left-right paradigm Big Government Progressivism vs. Small Government Social Conservatism, where;socially conservative and pro-business conservative factions banded together against socially liberal and pro business liberal factions, to push back against an increasingly progressive Democratic Party and America .

This tension largely created the modern parties of our two-party system, resulting in two Big Tents;who disagree on the purposes of government;and social issues. This tension is then magnified by the;current influence of media and lobbyists, and can be understood by examining;what I call;the Sixth Party Strategy and by a tactic called Dog Whistle Politics).

The result is that today the Democratic Party is dominated by liberal Democrats and Progressives.

Meanwhile, most of those who would have been the old;socially conservative Democrats now have a R next to their name.

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Great Depression Shrinks Klan

The Great Depression in the 1930s depleted the Klans membership ranks, and the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. The civil rights movement of the 1960s saw a surge of local Klan activity across the South, including the bombings, beatings and shootings of Black and white activists. These actions, carried out in secret but apparently the work of local Klansmen, outraged the nation and helped win support for the civil rights cause.;

READ MORE: How Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ Confronted an Ugly Era of Lynchings

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech publicly condemning the Klan and announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with the murder of a white female civil rights worker in Alabama. The cases of Klan-related violence became more isolated in the decades to come, though fragmented groups became aligned with neo-Nazi or other right-wing extremist organizations from the 1970s onward.;

As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League estimated Klan membership to be around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center said there were 6,000 members total.

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Limited Government States Rights And Anti

Had the populist liberals, who agreed with;limited government but did not agree fully on social issues, not aligned, there would have been a Federalist dominance in early America. The;dominant factions would have been northern know-nothing-like nativists, social progressive Roosevelt-like or Hamilton-like elites, and quasi-loyalist Aristocrats like Adams.

The founders were not pro-slavery. However, slavery;was part of the culture and economy of many nations; the South was one such region.

Abolishing slavery meant crippling the Souths votes and industry. This was the;main argument for slavery by the Solid South historically. It;didnt stop the abolitionists like Hamilton from pushing for the abolition of slavery;as;he pushed for a central bank or federal control . However, it did result in many key compromises from the 1770s to mid-1800s.

A Reconstituted Early 20th Century Kkk Attracts Members From Both Sides

The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party

After Reconstruction, and as the Jim Crow period set in during the 1870s, the Klan became obsolete.;Through violence, intimidation and systematic oppression, the KKK had served its purpose to help whites retake Southern governments.

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isnt as tight with the second Klan, Grinspan said.

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Why It Doesnt Make Sense To Equate Modern Democrats With The Old Southern Democrats

The Democrats, formally the;anti-Federalists,;had an;aversion to aristocracy from the late 1700s to the progressive era.

That truism;led to the southern conservatives of the solid south like;John C. Calhoun and small government liberals like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren allying;in the same party;for most of U.S. history.

However,;that changed;after Civil Rights under LBJ and the rise of Goldwater States Rights Republicans .

Today the solid south, and figures like Jeff Sessions, are in an alliance in the big tent of the Republican Party . This was as much a response to the growing progressiveness of the Democratic Party as anything.

One simple way to confirm this is to look at the factions of;Lincolns time. There were four. They;were:

The Northern liberal Whig/Republicans,

The;Nativist Know-Nothing; allies of the Whig/Republicans,

The Southern Democrats and their Northern allies , and

The;Free Soil;;allies of the Democrats who;took a libertarian like position.

Todays Democrats are more like socially liberal Whig/Republicans , libertarians are like Free Soilers , Trumpians are like Nativist Know-Nothings , and Southern Democrats are like the modern Southern conservative Republicans.

The current parties are thus:

Social Liberals and Neoliberals vs. Social Conservatives and Neoliberal Conservatives AKA Neocons .

Clearly, the country has never been fully polarized, even at its most polarized.

Military Reconstruction And The Birth Of The Kkk

After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, the northern elite Radical Republican Progressives used the military to force the south to reform. At the time the Deep South used things like apprenticeship laws to extend slavery past the end of the War. The KKK took a;stand in defense of the old Southern way of life in a society divided by murder, military occupation, and;mayhem.

To be clear, Military Reconstruction is a term that;describes;the occupation of the South, and the KKK;formed as a response to it.

From that point on the South becomes Redeemed by Southern BourbonsAKA Northern Oligarchs who help the South;replace slave labor with wage labor.

The above might;be viewed less critically;if it wasnt for a notable speed bump:

Before Reconstruction could end naturally, in 1877, the Republican establishment traded the reformation of a few southern states for the Presidency when Tilden beat the Republican Hayes.

At that point, the Gilded Age began.;Gilded Age Republicans Redeemed the South and liked to be seen as putting aside the issue of race to focus on modernization and becoming a superpower.

The Gilded age gave way to the Progressive era. And in those eras, most of the country again minimized;issues of;race to focus on;other minority rights such as womens rights. Then, after that came the World Wars.

Radical Republicans From PBSs Reconstruction: The 2nd Civil War.

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The Rise Of Modern Social Liberalism And Social Conservatism

Later we get a third way with Bill Clintons New Democrats. This third way is an extension;of the;progressive bourbon liberal wing, but mashed-up with the progressive social liberal wing, and Reagan-era;conservatism. These three social liberal ideologies which Clinton embodied can collectively be referred to as an;American liberalism. These factions, which we can today denote as;progressive, neoliberal, and social liberal, can be used to differentiate types of liberals on the political left from the New Deal Coalition and the modern Democratic party of today.

TIP: As noted above in the introduction, there is no one way to understand Americas political ideologies, but each angle we look at things from helps us to better understand;bits of the historic puzzle.

Outside The United States

Aside from the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, there have been various attempts to organize KKK chapters outside the United States.

In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country, and circa 2012 the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.

Recruitment activity has also been reported in the United Kingdom.

In Germany, a KKK-related group, Ritter des Feurigen Kreuzes , was established in the 1920s. After the Nazis took over Germany, the group disbanded and its members joined the Nazis. Another German KKK-related group, the European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has organized and it gained notoriety in 2012 when the German media reported that two police officers who held membership in the organization would be allowed to keep their jobs.

A Ku Klux Klan group was established in Fiji in the early 1870s by white American settlers, although its operations were quickly put to an end by the British who, although not officially yet established as the major authority of Fiji, had played a leading role in establishing a new constitutional monarchy that was being threatened by the activities of the Fijian Klan.

In São Paulo, Brazil, the website of a group called Imperial Klans of Brazil was shut down in 2003, and the group’s leader was arrested.

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The Rise Of America First Nativism: Anti

During the 1830s to 1850s, as tension builds, third parties spring up like the northern nativist Know-Nothings;. This faction;pushed back against immigration in places like NYC and was more likely to be allied with the Whigs than the Democrats.

The conflict between Catholic immigrants and Know-Nothings is;the subject of the movie Gangs of New York.

These Know-Nothings were like a Northern version of the KKK but were notably;more concerned with immigration than slavery.;The soon-to-be KKK and the earlier;Know-Nothings shared an aversion to Catholics, Jews, non-whites, and non-Protestants in general, but much else was different.

The Know-Nothings were accused of being in bed with;Northern abolitionists,;and;their American party really never;caught on in the south due to them being perceived as more elitist and northern.

Thus, although each region breaks into;different groups, one should note that the slavery south is not;the only faction with socially conservative position, and certainly, they arent the only authoritative group. Remember, they are opposing northern elitists who are perpetuating their brand;of economic and political inequality.

Looking To The Classics And Factions For Proof

One good and not-so-divisive way to explain history is to look at the classics, especially those who focus on state-based political factions over political parties.

Classic works of this sort of political history, like V.O. Keys Southern Politics in State and Nation , make it very clear that the Solid South had historically always voted lock-step for the Democratic Party . Of course, the voting map over time, actual recorded history, and so much else tell this story too, but a well respected book like this is a great secondary source!

Today the Solid South is with the Republican Party and today old Socially Progressive Republicans like Teddy arent in the party .

This isnt to say that some of the more progressive Dixies, Bryan followers, and even economically minded Southern;Bourbons arent in the Democratic Party, they obviously are, just look at Carter, Clinton, Gore, and Bernie .

Likewise, the GOP have their constants. The;conservative Federalist pro-business faction, the neocons be they switched Bourbons, Gilded Age post-Reconstruction Republicans, or traditional Federalists, and the Federalist War Hawks are still in the Republican Party, as are the nativists;of the north Know-Nothings.

However, despite what didnt change, a ton did, including the party platforms, key factions, and a large swath of the voter base.

Modern Democrats know this well, they lost the 2016;election and didnt get one state in the Southern Bloc for Hillary .

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A Century Of Jim Crow But Otherwise Lots Of Progress

From 1877 to at least the 1960s, the Solid South KKK-like;Progressively Socially Conservative Democrats remained a formidable faction of the Democratic Party.

This is true even though the party was increasingly dominated by Progressives like William Jennings Bryan. We can see in Wilson that both factions held sway in the party, Wilson was both a progressive liberal and a son of the Confederates.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow | PBS | ep 1 of 4 Promises Betrayed.

TIP: During the late 1800s and early 1900s Eugenics was a popular theory. In this era, we might find;Margaret Sanger, liberal economists and social scientists, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, a young Hitler, and the KKK all agreeing on aspects of eugenics. There are many sides;of the eugenics argument, and one must study its history in earnest before making a judgment call. Very;radical right-wing propaganda equated birth control with;genocide, but there was a wide range of beliefs. An espousal of;negative eugenics is part of the dark history of the Democratic party.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

When protests kicked off throughout the nation a week and a half ago, commentators turned to history to make sense of events. One year dominated the conversation: 1968. Racial tensions, clashes between police and protesters, a general sense of chaos — 1968 and 2020 seemed to have a lot in common. Observers wrote about how Trump’s use of “law and order” rhetoric echoed Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. The comparison makes broader sense, too: 1968 was a destabilizing year in American politics, marked by Civil Rights protests, uprisings born out of racist oppression, assassinations, violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (classified later as a “police riot”) and protests against the Vietnam War. Racial tensions and inequality were at the center of the instability that year, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. sparking uprisings in cities across the country.

But 1968 isn’t the only chapter in American history that’s relevant to the current crisis. America has a long history of racial injustice, which makes it difficult to isolate any one precedent for the current environment. History has a way of building on itself; the injustices of one generation are passed on to the next, even as incremental progress is made. This is why I want to share with you three other episodes that also help contextualize the moment we’re in now. They, like 1968 and the broader Civil Rights movement, highlight the depths of violence and injustice that black Americans have faced, and explain why everyday political processes have failed to bring about lasting systemic change.

1990s: National attention on police brutality spurs action … sort of

The early 1990s saw two connected developments that still shape the dynamics of policing in the U.S. First, in 1991, before there were cell phones everywhere, a witness in Los Angeles caught police officers beating Rodney King on a hand-held camcorder, and the video caught the nation’s attention. The four officers charged in the incident were acquitted, which sparked further national outrage, and some Los Angeles residents took to the streets, turning to violence and destruction of property. In total, the demonstrations lasted for five days.

The Rodney King episode is different in important ways from the protests happening now over George Floyd’s death, but there are still some similarities. Namely, it was a high-profile incident of police brutality that underscored just how differently police treat black Americans from white Americans. Additionally, a bystander’s video recording of the officers beating King brought the incident to national audiences, heightening a broad sense of injustice when the verdict was announced.

The fallout after the King verdict is worth considering in this moment. For one, some research shows that the event triggered lower public trust in the police in Los Angeles, especially among African Americans.

The role of the federal government is instructive here as well. In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson requested military assistance under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which Trump has suggested he might also invoke now. But LA’s ordeal also prompted federal change — Congress passed legislation allowing the Department of Justice to order reforms of police departments found to have engaged in misconduct. That ability has allowed the federal government to investigate police departments and root out poor practices. This oversight, however, has not been enough to prevent police killings, as we saw again with Floyd.

This provision was also part of a larger piece of anti-crime legislation — the now somewhat-infamous 1994 crime bill that helped create the mass incarceration crisis and forced recent Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to confront their past stances on crime. The crime bill arguably helped to create some of the challenges today’s protesters are responding to. As sociologist Philip McHarris explained in The Washington Post, the bill “flooded black communities with police, helped states to build prisons and established harsher sentencing policies.” These policies not only helped to create the conditions for further police violence, but by expanding policing and incarceration in the U.S., they also helped to diminish the political power of many black communities through disenfranchisement and disengagement.

The point is that while focusing national attention on police brutality brought about needed change in some respects, reforms fall short when the system charged with implementing that change has racist origins.

Reconstruction: The federal government fails to protect black lives

After the American Civil War ended slavery in 1865, there was no road map for what Southern society would look like, but white Americans quickly adoped two major changes that harmed formerly enslaved people. First, Southern states passed laws restricting black citizens’ freedoms and essentially preserving the abuses of slavery. Second, violence against freed people living in those areas changed form but very much continued, and included the destruction of homes and churches, and sexual violence.

Particularly relevant to the current moment: Then-President Andrew Johnson allowed all this to happen. He failed to extend federal protection to the victims of the violence that Southern whites were engaging in, and, through his liberal use of pardons and lax loyalty requirements, he even allowed former Confederate leaders to find important roles in new state governments. These individuals, once in power, enacted oppressive measures. As historian Annette Gordon-Reed describes in her biography of Johnson, simple things like hunting and fishing became criminal activities for many black Americans, meaning they were increasingly dependent on their employers for their livelihoods.

Johnson’s decision to allow both state and non-state violence against southern blacks deeply shaped American racial politics. The laws states adopted in this period ultimately created the status quo that the civils rights movement of the 1960s pushed back against.

But this historical period is also a pivotal one in understanding race relations in America today as it highlights the lasting repercussions of morally bankrupts presidential judgment. As my colleague Perry Bacon and I wrote a few days ago, the events of the last few days — and years — suggest that Trump is not interested in using federal power to help those protesting racial injustice, and is, at best, indifferent to those goals. Experts have compared Johnson to Trump for years. History shows us that when federal leaders ignore racial injustice and violence — and certainly when they embody and enshrine it — that injustice and violence continues unabated, even if its form changes.

Early 1900s: Black Americans organized and met opposition at every turn

The power structure created after the Civil War led to a lynching crisis in the South (and elsewhere in the U.S.). Thousands of lives were lost in this brutal and inhumane system of vigilante justice — journalist Ida B. Wells, for instance, wrote extensively to document the violence of lynching and to spread awareness nationwide about what was happening.

But it is also in this dark chapter of American history that black American activists entered a new phase in organizing against systemic racism, using a variety of approaches. As political scientist Megan Ming Francis has written, this period gave birth to civil rights organizations like the NAACP, which pushed to change policy through Congress, the White House and the courts.

Those efforts made a real difference. Francis emphasizes the way in which black Americans organized and achieved these changes despite their exclusion from much of the political process and lack of traditional political power. These groups increased public awareness, improved legal standards and persuaded presidents to publicly denounce lynching.

The struggles of this movement, however, also illustrate how slow and frustrating it can be to work through official government channels. For instance, at the urging of these early civil rights activists, the House of Representatives passed an anti-lynching bill. But the bill died in the Senate after a filibuster, and no federal anti-lynching law was ever passed. (The latest anti-lynching bill was held up in the Senate as recently as June 4, 2020.) The American political system makes change difficult. In both Congress and the White House, Southern votes exerted a great deal of influence, and the opponents of an anti-lynching bill had both political power and the power of the status quo.

Every moment in history is distinct, and there are no perfect parallels for what’s happening in 2020. However, looking at other points in both the distant and recent past helps us see how deeply racial injustice is ingrained in the American system. The 1968 comparison can be helpful, but it also tempts us to frame the situation in terms of tranquility and unrest. But “tranquility” has been defined by those in power — almost always whites. Looking at other events helps answer some deeper questions about why people have taken to the streets to demand change and why protesters may be able to accomplish more faster by disrupting “normal” life. Because the system itself is part of the problem, politics, again and again, has set up the rules to make it difficult to pursue accountability and justice within the system.

[evergloffpress]

Bottle of Blog: Comic Book Reality Vs. Probable Reality

The citizens of both the DC and Marvel Universes deal with a continuous flow of global ,galactic and Universal threats on a nearly daily basis.

Alien invasions. demon swarms, demented gods, supervillain armies, mythical monsters, mad scientist, mutant terrorists, and just about every malicious malcontent bent destroying mankind has been dreamt up and bestowed upon the comic book page. However, when the dust settles and our heroes have done away with the crisis du jour everything goes back to normal. No fall out what so ever. No new legislation or social upheaval. Things return to the status quo.

As of the human race was never enslaved by a time-traveling conqueror. As if the entire population of the planet was not granted superpowers to combat the living embodiment of Armageddon. As if the Earth was never attacked by Sinestror and the Yellow Lantern Corps. As if Atlantis never attacked the surface world. As if the Earth did not endure a rampage by a nearly unstoppable brute force of nature called Doomsday. As if the planet was not turned into a prison for intergalactic criminals. As if an evil version of Superboy did not try to alter history. The Red Skull, Despero,Magneto, the Green Goblin,Lex Luthor, the Legion of Doom, General Zod, The Joker, and so many others have laid siege on mankind one way or another and despite all their repeated efforts to so do nothing ever changes.

Which I find exceptionally improbable considering the delicate state that is human nature. I am very aware that the above scenarios are in themselves ridiculously implausible to begin with but bare with me here.

Events like the American Civil War, both World Wars and the often referenced 9-11 attacks have changed the world in profound ways.

Major incidents of that magnitude happen in the comic book world more often than not.

Billions of dollars in damages and significant body counts would arise causing entire countries and economies to collapse. If this would happen in our reality we would find ourselves living in a very different society than what we are accustomed to. Major cities such as New York City would see a mass exodus being that supervillains tend to congregate there. Civil discord would take root insisting that our leaders implement a plan of action to deal with these perils if they had not chosen to do so already. Countries would cut themselves off from one another declaring martial law or the world would unite against these threats placing us in a state of perpetual war being that the bad guys are always plotting and scheming. Supervillain execution would be the norm. The new repressive government in charge would not make the mistake that a city such as Gotham makes while dealing with the likes of the Joker and his fellow inmates at Arkham. It seems the asylum has a virtual revolving door policy allowing them to wreak havoc upon the city whenever they choose. The same can be said about any institution meant to incarcerate criminals in either of the comic book universes. New modern day Witch hunts would be invoked. Anyone exhibiting abilities beyond what is considered commonplace would be made into a pariah or taken into custody for ”observation” in interment camp-like conditions. Like the X-Men themselves, they would not be celebrated but feared no matter what their intentions may be. Welcome to the world of Alan Moore's Watchmen only with the volume dialed up to one hundred. Plummeting humanity into the refuge of a new dark age with a new set of religions to match the old.

For the record, I am NOT advocating a totalitarian regime on any level. I am merely musing on what could reasonably happen should our world be more like the DC or Marvel Universe. As history has witnessed many times before fear is a powerful motivator. The likelihood of giving up our personal freedoms for a safe and secure society is a foregone conclusion in the wake of repeated supercriminal attacks.

In all likelihood we would certainly perish should big bads like Galactus, Thanos, Darkseid, the Celestials,Brainiac, Dormammu, Ultron or the Anti-Monitor decide to target Earth. Considering we do not have the likes of the Avengers or the Justice League to save our bacon from the above mentioned cosmic calamities. Making the Orwellian nightmare sparked by the lesser funny book foes an exercise in futility. Talk about ending on a downer. Grim and gritty indeed.

Olivet Evergloff

April-16th-2019

Post credit script...

With all the brain power in the Marvel Universe, for example, why have they not cured cancer?

They have a list of megaminds a mile long.

Why haven't the likes of Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner , Hank McCoy and T’challa to name a few have not decided to tackle diabetes?

Here's an idea why not protect the Earth from the non-stop plethora of alien invasions by teleporting the entire solar system to another part of the galaxy whenever a threat comes near? Like that collection of caped eggheads could not slap together some doohickey that can make that happen and figure out a suitable power source in the process. Calculations could be made so that the system is not randomly teleported into the center of a giant star like a navigation computer figuring out light speed routes does. Now what to do in case of a large scale planetary magic attack?

Don't be silly that would never happen.😉

[aion-rsa]

Will the Real WandaVision Villain Please Stand Up?

https://ift.tt/2NdA7zB

This article contains WandaVision spoilers.

WandaVision is in its home stretch, with one big “villain” reveal hitting at the end of episode 7, and more expected any episode now. Agatha Harkness’ basement gave off some real strong bad gal vibes, but historically in the comics she’s never been the mastermind behind Wanda’s troubles, so much of the world is expecting another.

And while all the speculation so far has centered on Mephisto – justifiably so, considering his history with Wanda, Billy, Tommy, and Master Pandemonium’s arms – we think there’s one dark horse contender that not enough people have been talking about. With his history with Wanda and his future with the Avengers (and very likely in the MCU, if the tea leaves we’re reading are correct), there’s a better than decent chance that this guy will be popping up in WandaVision’s final episodes. 

But first, let’s get one thing straight…

Agatha Harkness…is a red herring?

The end of episode 7 of WandaVision plays up the sinister aspects of Agatha Harkness. Her basement looks like it could have been ripped from the set of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. But that doesn’t mean she’s actually evil. 

In fact, through the entirety of Wanda’s story in the pages of Marvel Comics, Agatha has been one of the few people actually interested in Wanda’s well being. Sure, she was often very matriarchal about it, but she actually seemed to care that Wanda was messing with her own children’s existence. And in a Scarlet Witch solo miniseries from the mid ‘90s, she was the only one actually concerned with trying to give Wanda agency. It would be a big swerve for the show to adapt her into an outright villain.

However, she was also prominently involved in Wanda’s “nexus being” storyline as the one trying to snap Wanda out of Immortus’ trance (more on that in a minute). I am willing to bet a small amount of money that Agnes is not the main villain of WandaVision, just acting shady about how she’s trying to break Wanda free of someone else’s control.

That you, Mephisto?

We’ve been inundated with Mephisto references to this point – between all the “Demon Spawn”s and Coronet Theaters and devils in details. And to be completely fair, Mephisto makes a lot of sense as the big bad of WandaVision.

Billy and Tommy’s birth in the comics was a bit of a mystery when it happened. As in, how could a woman and a synthezoid possibly have offspring? Also the fact that they were twins was a surprise, but I don’t know that that’s especially relevant. Anyway, turns out Doctor Strange is a crappy OB and also, the way a woman and a synthezoid could have children was if the woman loved the synthezoid very much, she could capture wild magical energy loose because of damage caused to the lord of Hell’s soul by a battle with Franklin Richards, channel that energy into her womb, and create life and souls with it. Mephisto was not powerful enough to escape battle with the Fantastic Four’s firstborn, and Wanda unwittingly used shards of his soul to create Billy and Tommy.

Later on, a movie exec who cut a deal with Mephisto, one Master Pandemonium, tried to capture the twins, as he believed that the kids were actually fragments of his lost soul. Alas, instead they were just his arms, and when he went to reabsorb them into his body, Mephisto hopped in and took his complete soul back from the sleazeball with babyhands.

So Mephisto is deeply entwined with the origins of Billy and Tommy, and with Wanda’s story in the comics. But what if he’s not in the show? What if, while everyone else is focused on Mephisto, WandaVision actually gives us…

Immortus

Immortus is, among other things, the Scarlet Centurion, Iron Lad, Victor Timely, Pharaoh Rama Tut, and a Pope. He is a continuity black hole, but the simplest explanation is that he’s the oldest version of the being who, at varying points in his history, was/is/would become Kang the Conqueror. 

Here’s a…profoundly condensed version. 

The being who would become Immortus was born in the 30th century, to a post-scarcity world of peace, prosperity, and plenty. He was bored as shit by this. So he stole a time machine, traveled back to ancient Egypt, ruled as Pharaoh Rama Tut for a bit, got a taste for conquering, and eventually became Kang, who would come to rule tens of centuries as the undisputed lord of time. Eventually he got so good at conquering that he ended up just…ruling…instead of conquering anymore, and that was where his downfall began. 

After a series of paradoxes he got his own damn self into, he eventually hooked up with the Time Keepers, a trio of beings from the end of all time trying to do a bunch of stuff that ultimately would end up ensuring their own creation. As a brief aside, the Marvel time travel characters are like if you kept introducing new invasive species to a pond to wipe out the last invasive species you put in the pond. It’s grandfather paradoxes all the way down. 

Anyway, the Time Keepers put Immortus in charge of cleaning up his own timeline as well as monitoring the Avengers segment of the timestream. Along with his mastery of time, Immortus also had the ability to dance around the multiverse. He could peer between timelines, prune the bad ones, trap Kang and Songbird and Yellowjacket in the wild west, etc. etc.

Also his name is Nathaniel Richards.

The Fantastic Four Connection

Wait, does this mean Immortus is the father of Mister Fantastic, Reed Richards?

Technically no. But he may be a descendant of Reed Richards. Or Dr. Doom. That’s where he gets the time portal from. Apparently. 

Read more

TV

WandaVision: The Mystery of the Aerospace Engineer

By Mike Cecchini

TV

WandaVision: Is SWORD Hiding MCU Fantastic Four Clues?

By Mike Cecchini

This is probably not how they’re introducing the Fantastic Four to the MCU. It would be very weird to, say, flash back to Howard Stark and Nathaniel Richards going on a SHIELD mission in the ‘50s that had them cross paths with the Time Stone, have Howard believe Nathaniel was lost in action when Richards merely created an offshoot timeline that included the Fantastic Four and mutants, only to have an immortal Nathaniel, embittered by countless lifetimes of loss and hollow conquering, travel back to find a way to remerge the timelines so his past self could have a happy life. 

It would be particularly ridiculous for that to happen in a future Marvel show like Loki. Anyway, let’s get back on subject.

What Does Nexus Mean?

The commercial in episode 7 featured an anti-depressant called Nexus, a pointed reference to one of Wanda’s roles in the greater Marvel Comics cosmogony. Wanda is a Nexus Being, an entity with tremendous power over the path of reality, who can alter futures even after they’ve set, create branching timelines, and possibly prevent powerful, important beings in the future from being born. And they typically have exceedingly powerful children – kids who, when fully mature, can rival universal constants like Eternity, the Living Tribunal, Chaos, Order, or Death. 

In the comics, Wanda was a threat both to the Time Keepers, who wanted nothing more than to ensure their own existence would come to pass, and Immortus, who wanted to also ensure his own timeline would come to pass and ALSO screw those fish faced Time Keepers out of their jobs. To do this, he decided the best path would be to be a real dick to Wanda.

First, he tricked Wanda and Vision into falling in love, thinking nobody could make a baby with a synthezoid. Then he screwed around with Vision’s body and timeline, making him inhabit the body of the original Human Torch, then not inhabit that body, then do both at the same time. Then he just up and drove Wanda insane, infusing her with additional power to amp her nexus abilities, letting her manipulate the timestream at a whim.

Which leads us to…

MCU Phase 5: Avengers Forever

Here is a sampling of things we know or can reasonably ascertain about the future of the MCU. 

Time travel is probably going to be the thrust of Loki. We see the Time Variance Authority in the trailer, along with a brief flash of statues that look like the Time Keepers. 

A lot of the MCU TV shows seem to be pointing towards Young Avengers. Kate Bishop is in Hawkeye, Billy and Tommy are in WandaVision, and while it’s not a TV show, Cassie is in Ant-Man 3.

Also in Ant-Man 3 is Kang the Conqueror himself. He fits the Young Avengers theory – the youngest version of Rama Tut/Kang/Scarlet Centurion/Immortus was Iron Lad, the mysterious Iron Man analogue from the teen hero group. 

Chris Evans is rumored to be coming back one more time for an Avengers role.

The Young Avengers theory feels like a slam dunk. It would be the least surprising thing in the world to have Patriot (Eli Bradley, the grandson of Isaiah Bradley, a recipient of an experimental super soldier serum in a dark, Tuskegee Experiment-style follow up to the original super soldier program) show up in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and there’s no way Marvel would spend that much energy laying the groundwork for a new generation of Avengers and not have it pay off. However, if you squint hard enough, you can see a second path being cut by these shows.

Avengers Forever.

Avengers Forever is a 1998 miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco that is widely beloved for its distillation of decades of Marvel continuity into one epic story. It has Kang and the Kree Supreme Intelligence gathering a team of Avengers from disparate points in the timeline – Yellowjacket from the early days of the Avengers; Hawkeye from just after the Kree-Skrull War; a disillusioned Captain America from a low point in the medium past; present day Wasp and Giant Man; and Songbird and Captain Marvel from a future Avengers team – to battle Immortus and the Time Keepers for the life of Rick Jones. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

All the elements are there, from the time travel nonsense to the easy opportunity to get the whole gang back together. The key is Immortus, and he could be revealed soon in WandaVision.

The post Will the Real WandaVision Villain Please Stand Up? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3biWZpm

[warholiana]

Lovely review of my Warhol bio by Michael Millner in the US edition of The Spectator:

“An extraordinary and revealing biography — surely the definitive life of a definitive artist….There is something interesting, revealing or humorous on just about every page. Gopnik deftly excavates his data mine. His prose is precise and pointed, and his year-by-year narrative clips along. He is also a master of pithy and informative character and historical sketches.”

Magus of mass production

Warhol by Blake Gopnik

Ecco, pp.976, $45.00

reviewed by Michael Millner

This article is in The Spectator’s April 9, 2020 US edition.

‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,’ the artist said in the East Village Other in 1966, ‘just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This quotation re-appeared in 2002 on the US Post Office’s commemorative Warhol stamp. It’s fabulously fitting for a stamp that reproduced a self-portrait, but when scholars recently compared the audiotapes of the interview with the printed version, the passage wasn’t on the tapes. Warhol sometimes invented interviews from whole cloth. He answered questions with a gnomic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or, refusing to speak at all, allowed proxies like his ‘superstar’ Edie Sedgwick to answer for him. After all, he was just surface — leather jacket, shades, wig. The magus of mass production was there and everywhere forever, but nowhere in particular. This negation of personality seems a publicity ploy, or the evasiveness of a shy man, or possibly the self-protection of a gay man in pre-Stonewall America. It was all of this, but also much more. The self-as-surface routine was perfect for a new kind of celebrity, one founded less on accomplishment and talent and more on presenting a surface for the projected desires of a mass audience. Authenticity and the sense of a deep self were obstacles to the creation of this new celebrity persona. Warhol made millions by autographing screen prints that were mass-produced by anonymous assistants. Warhol somehow understood how this all worked. Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to working-class Catholics from eastern Europe who barely spoke English, he realized the power and danger of being known to the world. The flipside of ‘15 minutes of fame’, Warhol suggests again and again, is death. The paintings of Marilyn Monroe memorialized her suicide; those of Jackie Kennedy, her suffering following her husband’s assassination. After Warhol survived his own assassination attempt in 1968, he allowed Richard Avedon to photograph the surgeon’s scars that crisscrossed the surface of his torso. There is no narrative development or personal bildungsroman in Warhol’s art, and his affectless manner resists psychologizing, the biographer’s stock-in-trade. His images are impressions, flashes whose immediacy, flatness and repetition carry little sense of progression. The Brillo box contains no story, and the subject of a film like Empire, with its eight hours of static footage of the Empire State Building, remains inanimate. Despite Warhol’s resistance, Blake Gopnik has written an extraordinary and revealing biography — surely the definitive life of a definitive artist. He accomplishes this through broad and deep, even obsessive, research into what he calls Warhol’s ‘social network’. Gopnik reports that he consulted 100,000 period documents and interviewed 260 of Warhol’s lovers, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Warhol kept everything — he was a hoarder, collector and archivist all his life — and Gopnik has left no archival folder unopened or box unperused. Across 976 pages and more than 7,000 footnotes on a separate website, he recreates the swirl of ideas, culture and especially people that orbited Warhol. Warhol famously thought of his studio as a factory, producing work after work off an assembly line. The catalogue raisonné of his paintings, drawings, films, prints, published texts and conceptual works would, if it were ever completed, rival that of the other master of 20th-century self-replication, Picasso. Gopnik has surveyed it all.

There is something interesting, revealing or humorous on just about every page. Gopnik deftly excavates his data mine. His prose is precise and pointed, and his year-by-year narrative clips along. He is also a master of pithy and informative character and historical sketches: ‘Warhol’s Pop wasn’t about borrowing a detail or two from commercial work, as many of his closest colleagues [like Robert Rauschenberg] did; it was about pulling all its most dubious qualities into the realm of fine art and reveling in the confusion they caused there. ‘He wants to make something that we could take from the Guggenheim Museum and put it in the window of the A&P over here and have an advertisement instead of a painting,’ complained one early critic of Warhol’s, getting it right, but backward: Pop pictures started in the windows and then migrated to the museums.’ Warhol is about the Age of Warhol as much as Warhol himself. We learn about the new possibilities of gay life in 1950s New York, the city’s underground film scene, the history of silk-screening (so important to Warhol’s art), the fluctuations of the art market, the history of department-store window design. We learn about fascinating things we may not even want to learn about, such as the size and color of Warhol’s penis. (Large and gray, like the Empire State Building.) Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949 and quickly made a name for himself as a commercial illustrator, especially of women’s shoes. He lived for two decades with his mother, Julia, one of his most influential muses, and sought out an emerging coterie of gay artists including Truman Capote, with whom he had a stalkerish infatuation. The great Pop paintings of the early 1960s transformed American art. No less important was Warhol’s mid-Sixties salon and studio, the Silver Factory (silver because wallpapered in aluminum foil). This perverse and fecund anti-commune of ‘superstars’ and hangers-on spawned Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, as well as Warhol’s wannabe assassin, Valerie Solanas. On June 3, 1968, Solanas shot Warhol in the name of feminist revolution. His heart ceased beating on the emergency room table before a determined surgeon saved him. In the 1970s, he turned to what he called ‘business art’, mainly portraits of other famous people. He died in 1987, aged 58, after gallbladder surgery. Gopnik unpicks many of the conventions of Warhol’s non-biography. Warhol wasn’t an aesthetic rube when he arrived in New York. He had received an extraordinary avant- garde education from four years at the Carnegie Tech art school and at the Outlines gallery, which had brought Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Francis Bacon, Merce Cunningham and many other transformative artists to Pittsburgh in the 1940s. Warhol did not suddenly reinvent himself as a Pop artist in the early 1960s. As he built a successful career illustrating advertisements in the Fifties, he regularly tried to cross the line between commercial and fine art — a crossover he finally achieved in late 1961 with ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’. Warhol was baptized ‘Drella’ by acquaintances — part bloodsucking Dracula and part innocent yet social-climbing Cinderella. But Gopnik also argues that one of Andy’s greatest desires was for compassionate companionship. This was never achieved. The ‘routine’ gallbladder surgery which led to his death was anything but routine. He had been very ill for weeks but avoided treatment out of a lifelong fear of surgery and a misplaced faith in the healing powers of crystals. Emphasizing Warhol’s radical ambiguity in art and life, Gopnik makes it impossible to say anything easy about him. His Warhol is a complex artist practicing what Gopnik, in a marvelous turn of phrase, calls ‘superficial superficiality’. The Warhol brand, the images of branded goods, famous faces and dollar bills, celebrates consumerism but also leaves us a little nauseated from our commodity fetishism. Warhol’s endless ‘boring’ films are hard to ignore because they give us so much space and time to think. They are studies in modern emptiness, and thus deep meditation. Warhol the critic of modern celebrity was also one of its greatest adulators. This double image of Warhol seems just right. ‘His true art form,’ Gopnik writes, ‘first perfected in the first days of Pop, was the state of uncertainty he imposed on both his art and his life: you could never say what was true or false, serious or mocking, critique or celebration... Examining Warhol’s life leaves you in precisely the same state of indecision as his Campbell’s Soup paintings do.’ Gopnik’s analysis of Warhol’s ambivalence evokes another great observer of midcentury American culture. Lionel Trilling, the gray-suited lion of Columbia’s literary studies, would have hated Warhol, had he deemed the Silver Factory worthy of a visit. Still, Trilling’s America is Warhol’s: ‘A culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate — it is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions.’ To Trilling, the great American authors contained ‘both the yes and the no of their culture, and by that token they were prophetic of the future’. Warhol absorbed and reflected the affirmations and negations of his America — but was he prophetic of ours? Yes and no. For a long time now we have lived in the Age of Warhol. If he were alive today, he would film us staring blankly at the social networks on our smartphones, hour after hour, while nothing and everything go on and on. By retaining ambivalence, Warhol allowed us to recognize and experience the deepest ethical dilemmas of American life — and he paid a price for being our screen and mirror.

[deserviing-a]

verses 

  after your laughter / there will be tears ( pre-bridge )

any thread that takes place before the brooklyn bridge incident when gwendolyne is twenty. she is generally a freshman/sophomore/junior at empire statue university, working towards a bachelor of science in biochemistry. she lives with her father for the most part, and takes an active interest in feminism and politics. her freetime is spent with her friends ( peter / mary jane / flash / harry ) at the coffee bean, campaigning for local/state politicians, or at all ages night clubs. 

gwendolyne generally doesn’t any heroes during this time, and her opinions on them are that they are good people, but their world is very distant from her. 

  oh don’t fail me now / put your arms around me and pull me out ( post bridge )

any thread that takes places in a universe where peter saves gwen, similar to the “ what if? ” issue. superhero life becomes more normal for gwen, but she still focuses primarily on her studies. she graduates with her BSc, and moves on to graduate school to obtain her masters degree in biochemistry. clone shenanigans still happen, but usually starts later in gwen and peter’s life ( pm for more details ). gwen’s feelings towards the clones are a mixture of responsibility and guilt, and the event changes her feelings towards cloning and makes her very anti-cloning. 

after graduating, gwen begins working as a research professor/teacher. most of her research focuses on genetics. during the civil war, gwen generally tends to side with captain america especially after sue storm joins him. after civil war, i don’t generally view one more day, brand new day, superior spider-man as being canon. gwen does leave new york for a few years though, traveling to seattle to get away from superheroes after her life is constantly put in danger. if clone conspiracy happens, it normally happens while she is in seattle and she doesn’t take much of a part in it. she later moves back to new york city, after the events of “ go down swinging ”  to resume being a research professor/teach at esu. 

this verse is ship dependent, and gwen can be shipped with characters besides peter. i normally view them as having a daughter in her second year of graduate school, and their daughter’s existence does influence gwen’s decisions, but it isn’t required. 

let me go ‘cause you are just a shade of what i am / not what i’ll be ( clone conspiracy )

usually set in 616/verses where gwen dies. the “ soul ” in the “ reanimated ” body of gwen stacy is her original soul, meaning it is very much gwendolyne stacy and not just another clone. but gwen comes back to a world where she is largely forgotten, and where most of her friends and family are dead or have moved on from her. 

instead of returning to new york city after the events of clone conspiracy, gwendolyne instead chooses to stay on the west coast ( particularly seattle ) to figure out who she is, and what she wants to do with her second chance at life. she holds no ill will towards peter or mary jane, and instead of going back to school she works with research scientists who focus on genetics. 

well my heart is gold and my hands are cold ( earth-617 )

after the spider-gwen of earth-65 saved her from being thrown off the bridge by norman osborn, gwendolyne stacy of earth-617 decided to become her own hero. at first, she dropped out of school and worked as an independent detective, wanting to help the innocent in any way she could without powers. her detective prowess became widely known throughout new york city, painting a target on her back. 

protection from those who would try to stop her came from miles warren, albeit unintentionally. during his attempts to clone gwen, miles discovered that peter parker was spider-man, and he created radioactive spider isotopes in order to try and replicate these powers in other clones. the experiment backfired after he exposed the isotopes to the lizard serum and accidentally created a symbiotic lifeform. 

when gwen and peter tracked warren down to confront him, the symbiote bonded with gwen as it could feel her negativity and rage. gwen became gwenom, and nearly killed warren as a result. it was the clone that warren made of her, joyce delaney, that stopped her from killing him. her fear of what the murder would turn gwen into reminded her of the spider-powered gwen she had met years ago. remembering how the symbiote had fed on the spider-powered gwen’s rage and anger, and how it had nearly led her to murder, gwen stood down and controlled the symbiote. 

with her newfound powers and abilities, gwen went to the reed richards of e-617, and together the two of them created a wristwatch for multiversal travel based off of her dna. this watch allowed her to travel to other universes, and after many many universes, gwen realized that the day spider-gwen jumped off the bridge to get back to her own universe was the day she should have been thrown off it and killed. 

angered at the cruelty, and how unfair the multiverse was, gwen decided to take destiny into her own hands. wanting everyone to know who she was, she and the symbiote created a costume similar to the outfit she wore on the day she should have died, and they became detective gwenom. her goal was simple: 

prevent gwen stacy’s from dying, recruit other spider-women, and prevent warren from cloning her. 

detective gwenom spent decades working behind the scenes, saving gwen stacy’s and protecting them from professor warren, or preventing him from cloning her altogether. those she could not save, she mourned. those she could, she protected. 

along the way, gwenom learned of the web of life and destiny, and the role of spider-totem’s. despite this knowledge, she often avoided such things, viewing it as prophetic “ bullshit ” that was the reason why so many versions of her were dead. she did meet once or twice with the master weaver, and was aware of the inheritor’s. her priority though, remained saving the gwen stacy’s of the multiverse. 

when the gwen stacy of e-65 became a spider-totem, gwenom watched her closely and even worked with the master weaver to manipulate her into certain situations, most notably the cloning and carrion virus situation on e-616. she later interfered with gwen’s wristwatch, causing her to go back in time to e-617 so that she would not murder murdock. 

with the web of life and destiny gone, karn dead and the inheritors no longer a threat, gwenom wanders the multiverse and gives help where needed. she knows that one day, the web will come back and her hope is to help change it so that the destiny of gwen stacy is no longer to die.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Last February, a website called Rave News reported that leading vaporwave producers were gathering in Montreal for an emergency summit to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Vaporwave, an electronic subgenre conceived on the web in the early 2010s, is perhaps best described as post-apocalyptic mall music, with producers like Macintosh Plus and Saint Pepsi (now Skylar Spence) warping muzak, smooth jazz, and dated adult contemporary into airless, warbling soundscapes. It was a progressive-leaning genre that seemed to satirize consumer culture. "I always assumed it was transparent through my work that I leaned left," vaporwave pioneer Ramona Xavier, the woman behind Macintosh Plus, told THUMP.

But now, according to Rave News, vaporwave was mysteriously attracting fascists.

The article's comments section was quickly swarmed by neo-Nazis eager to defend their interest in vaporwave. "The National Socialists who lived in the time of Hitler were big fans of Richard Wagner," one wrote. "But in modern times, it is appropriate for us to turn to modern music." There was just one problem: the report, like everything else on Rave News, was fake news. No anti-fascist meeting of vaporwave artists had actually taken place.

"Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."—Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer founder

The point of The Onion-like satire wasn't clear. But knowingly or not, Rave News had hit on a real trend. On SoundCloud and Bandcamp, self-identified fascist musicians really have appropriated vaporwave, along with synthwave, a genre that nostalgically recapitulates the soundtracks of early video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and 80s movies like Blade Runner and Halloween. Today's fascists have stamped synthwave and vaporwave with a swastika and swirled them together to concoct a new electronic music subculture called fashwave (the "fash" stands for "fascism"), and another related microgenre called Trumpwave. The aesthetic of both might be summed up as Triumph of the Will on a Tron grid.

Fashwave is almost entirely instrumental, and wholly unoriginal. If it weren't for the jarring track titles—"Demographic Decline," "Team White," "Death to Traitors," to cite a few by fashwave artist Xurious—you might not be able to tell the difference between fashwave and the microgenres from which it draws inspiration. Occasionally, though, a track will interrupt its celestial synth atmospherics or arcade-like 8-bit bloops with a sample of Adolf Hitler ranting at a rally, or President Trump's speeches spliced together to make him boom, "The heroes are those who kill Jews!" The effect is a hammy nightmare—think Jane Fonda leading one of her 80s exercise routines at a Nuremberg rally.

Fashwave has become propaganda for the neo-fascist movement known as the "alt-right," a term that originated on America's far-right fringe in the early 2010s. Proponents of the loosely configured movement tend to reject "political correctness," trade, immigration, Islam, feminism, the left, "globalism," and establishment conservatism—which are also more or less the targets of Trump and, after his takeover, much of the Republican Party. Like fascism through the decades, the alt-right is shot through with contradictions; many of its followers disavow racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. But its underlying motive is still that of the fringe from which it sprang: white ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism.

With Trump's election and the spread of far-right parties in Europe, the alt-right is on the ascent. Like its Nazi and Italian fascist forerunners, it wants to infiltrate and remake popular culture. And fashwave—with its sonically inoffensive, largely lyric-free instrumentals—is the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal.

On 4chan's /pol/, the web's unofficial alt-right headquarters, posters talk frankly of fashwave as a "trap to make our ideas seem friendly and approachable," as one user wrote. Another warned that the slogans on fashwave-related art work needed to be softened for wider consumption: "Careful guys, the phrase needs to be oblique and vague, not direct 'GAS THE KIKES' /pol/ memes. Try some subtlety."

"I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small."—alt-right leader Richard Spencer

With its tinny musical quality and tiny scope, however, fashwave is a long way from exuding any real cultural power, and might flame out any day. Until Buzzfeed brought the music into mainstream awareness with an article in December, it was virtually unknown beyond alt-right circles. There are only a handful of major fashwave artists, and they're not headlining any fascist raves or military parades. Instead, they're toiling in the internet's depths, getting a few thousand listens for every track. Leading fashwave producer Cyber Nazi's two biggest hits, "Right Wing Death Squads" and "Galactic Lebensraum," cracked 50,000 YouTube views—respectable, but hardly a cultural Reichstag fire.

Still, the alt-right's gatekeepers have adopted fashwave as the movement's signature sound. Black Sun Radio, an online neo-Nazi station, is saturated with both fashwave and non-fascist synthwave. Andrew Anglin, founder of leading neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, last year christened synthwave the "soundtrack of the alt-right," praising it as "the Whitest music ever [sic]" for its ostensible lack of African rhythmic influence. He posts a recurring feature called "Fashwave Fridays," which includes a synthwave playlist alongside typical synthwave imagery, like 80s women in bright spandex and retro sports cars. "The music is the spirit of the childhoods of millennials," Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. "Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."

Over the phone with THUMP, Richard Spencer—president of white nationalist group the National Policy Institute, and widely regarded as the inventor of the term "alt-right"—said he loves fashwave. "Sometimes when I'm doing business, busy-work, I'll just flip on Xurious or Cyber Nazi on SoundCloud or YouTube and just listen to it," the white supremacist writer and publisher, who sports a Third Reich-reminiscent "fashy" haircut, said. "I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small." (Spencer recently became a national meme when he was punched in the face by an anarchist while giving an interview to ABC News, footage of which has been set to different popular songs, including "Sandstorm," and which gave rise to the hashtag #punchanazi.)

Spencer has incorporated fashwave aeshthetics into the alt-right's branding. In November, at a National Policy Institute conference in Washington where Xurious was a musical guest, Spencer unveiled a logo for the movement. Its geometric "A" and "R," cast against a starry sky, looked like letters from an alien language, and over the mic, Spencer said the design was inspired by "synthwave nostalgia."

Fashwave's visuals, circulated on Twitter and 4chan, are just as essential as its music. Typical vaporwave pop-art—such as Windows 95 logos, Japanese characters, and Greco-Roman statues sprinkled on pastel or neon backgrounds—mingles with Nazi iconography, like Hitler in a Hawaiian shirt. At the same time, the neon-lit cityscapes of synthwave visuals are populated with red-eyed cyborg death squads.

In an email to THUMP, Cyber Nazi proclaimed fashwave to be the "direct heir" of Futurism, the 1910s avant-garde art movement that hitched itself to Italian fascism. The Futurists gloried in technological advances such as trains, automobiles, and electric light, as well as the violence of heavy industry and war. Similarly, "We have the internet and computers," Cyber Nazi wrote. Viewed a certain way, fashwave does reflect a kind of present-day Futurist project: a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan and the new Twitter alternative, Gab. In synthwave and vaporwave—genres born, like the alt-right, largely on the internet—the movement has found a natural fit.

Meanwhile, fashwave fans have cast aside punk, folk, and metal—music traditions with long histories of being appropriated as vehicles for far-right ideology—as relics. "It's impossible to build anything with [those] old and expired genres," Cyber Nazi told THUMP. "We are young people who have nothing to do with the skin heads gangs, hoolingans or kkk masons. [sic]" This disavowal, however, doesn't mean fashwave represents a friendlier fascism; in an interview on Right Stuff Radio, Cyber Nazi casually mentioned his hatred of "niggers" and "sand-niggers."

Vaporwave and synthwave aren't the first electronic music genres to be appropriated by fascists, either. In fact, they're just the latest iteration in a long history of co-opted machine-made sounds, one with roots in the early 20th century.

"It's impossible to build anything with old and expired genres"—fashwave producer Cyber Nazi

Back in the 1910s, Futurist thinker Luigi Russolo called for an explosive "art of noises" for the industrial age, and in the 1970s, early industrial and noise musicians consciously rose to the challenge. According to Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by S. Alexander Reed, pioneers like Spahn Ranch, Nurse with Wound, and Pornotanz aimed to critique society's invisible totalitarianism by conjuring it as violent noise. However, industrial music's nihilistic outlook and martial overtones—including its use of fascist symbolism and regalia for shock value—also attracted neo-Nazi fans. An example of what Reed calls industrial's "often intentional language of ambiguity" can be found in Laibach, a leather-clad Slovenian group whose name refers to the Nazis' term for their occupation of Slovenia. The group has embodied a vaguely Stalinist aesthetic since the 80s so convincingly that North Korea welcomed them to Pyongyang in 2015.

As industrial music was emerging in the 70s, Kraftwerk was busy in Germany laying the groundwork for electronic pop music. The group always insisted that their artistic vision of a dawning cybernetic age was a continuation of the radical modernism of 1920s Weimar Germany rather than a homage to the Nazi era. But Kraftwerk's automaton-like presence recalled soldiers marching in lockstep, and the cover of their 1975 album, Radio-Activity, pictured a Nazi radio set called the Volksempfänger. That tension led Genosavior, one of the scene's artists, to praise Kraftwerk on Twitter as an "Early #FashWave prototype." One alt-right meme even rechristens them "Fashwerk."

https://soundcloud.com/user-625608547/team-white-free-download

Spencer, for his part, says his favorite bands are Depeche Mode and New Order—two groups that are practically synonymous with the 80s, the decade in which the alt-right bigwig grew up. But unlike most other fans, he sees a fascist sheen on the icy synth plains of the New Wave music they pioneered. Upon surface inspection, you can see where he might have gotten the idea. According to a biography of the band, New Order traced its name to a stray phrase from the Situationists, a postwar French art collective of anti-authoritarian Marxists. But "New Order" was also Hitler's term for his program of world domination. The band's earlier iteration, Joy Division, borrowed its name from brothels in the concentration camps, in addition to putting a drawing of a Hitler Youth drummer on the cover of its 1978 debut EP, An Ideal for Living. To the band's dismay, plenty of skinheads misunderstood where the band was coming from, and showed up at Joy Division's concerts.

Over the phone with THUMP, Spencer said he thought New Order and the New Wave bands that took after them "were consciously or unconsciously channeling... something darker, more serious, maybe more authoritarian."

At least with New Order, he's right, although it's complicated. On the one hand, the band was critiquing fascism as a growing menace in a late-70s Britain where imperial decline and industrial decay had radicalized a stagnated white working-class (sound familiar?). On the other hand, as Simon Reynolds recounts in his 2006 history Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, singer Bernard Sumner "enthused about the beauty (the art, architecture, design, even uniforms) that emerged despite 'all that hate and all that dominance.'" Fellow member Peter Hook, writes Reynolds, admitted to the dark allure of flirting with fascist aesthetics. "We thought it was a very, very strong feeling," Hook said.

That guilty fascist charge, so acutely felt by New Order in the 70s and 80s, now flows shamelessly through the alt-right, finding full expression in fashwave.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth, the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."—Stefanie Franciotti AKA Sleep ∞ Over

But fashwave taps into still another lineage in the history of modern music—that of vaporwave's raw material, muzak, which in turn is haunted by the specter of fascism.

In September 1934, the National Fascist Militia Band, an Italian brass band created by Benito Mussolini, entered the New York studios of the newly formed Muzak corporation and recorded one of the first-ever sessions of muzak. There were 25 songs in the set, including an Italian ditty called "March on Rome (Anthem for a Young Fascist)" and America's own "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Muzak corporation piped the National Fascist Militia Band's tunes into hotel lobbies, restaurants, and homes under a sanitized alias: "The Pan-American Brass Band."

The Muzak corporation wasn't a fascist outfit itself, but its use of canned easy-listening music to spur on shoppers and workers had stark martial origins. Its founder, Major General George Owen Squier, was America's chief signal officer during World War I, responsible for the military's communications network. The company's patented "stimulus progression"—playlists calibrated to maintain workers' energy levels and morale through the day—first came into wide commercial use during WWII in armaments factories. According to Elevator Music: A Surreal History, by its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, muzak was everywhere: trickling out of megaphones at a Nixon inauguration, calming cattle in slaughterhouses and astronauts on their way to the moon, keeping missile operators awake and alert in underground nuclear silos. As if winking at the critics who called muzak (a portmanteau of Kodak and music) an instrument of societal control, the Muzak corporation branded itself a "System of Security for the '70s," as well as "The Total Communications System."

By 2009, following the economic crash, the Muzak corporation went bankrupt. (It was eventually bought out, renamed, and revived, and now creates customized playlists of pre-existing songs for store branding.) Around the same time, left-leaning experimental electronic artists like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Ramona Xavier began plumbing all the bland sonic ambience of capitalism, including muzak and largely forgotten pop and smooth jazz numbers, resulting in what would later be known as vaporwave.

Lopatin, best known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never, looped and slowed down bits of old pop songs for a 2009 compilation called Eccojams Vol. 1, released under the alias Chuck Person. Ramona Xavier's 2011 album Floral Shoppe distorted 80s pop and old smooth jazz, and her retro net-art aesthetic, presented as kitsch, has a become canonical vaporwave signifier, extended and reinterpreted by later acts like 2 8 1 4 and Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, released the same year, assembled cheap MIDI presets, the Skype login sound, and other bits of pointedly contemporary digital detritus into a gratingly cheery faux-muzak orchestra. While the project's absurdly gleeful tone leaves it unclear whether Ferraro's vision of life in the digital age is utopian, dystopian, or neither, that ambiguity and perhaps ambivalence has persisted in the music of the vaporwave scene he helped inspire.

In a 2011 essay that helped define the genre, Adam Harper asked: "Is [vaporwave] a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?" "Both and neither," he continued. "These musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound."

The development of vaporwave ran parallel to that of synthwave, which emerged in the mid-2000s, rebooting the synthy 80s film scores by composers like John Carpenter, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream. Within the past two years, the semi-ironic nostalgia of synthwave and vaporwave has outgrown its subcultural roots and seeped into the mainstream—a process exemplified by MTV's use of vaporwave in branding, and the popularity of the soundtrack to hit Neflix series Stranger Things, by Austin synthwave group S U R V I V E.

At the same time, fascists have flipped this retromania around, collapsing the ironic distance into a vortex of nostalgia for the worst elements of the Reagan era. According to Spencer, the alt-right's fascination with the 80s stems from looking back on the decade "as halcyon days, as the last days of white America." Fashwave, then, directly links pop culture's generalized 80s nostalgia to the alt-right's racist ideology. The "one connecting factor" of white nationalism, an alt-rightist declared on Twitter, is "a belief in the supremacy of the 1980s. This is the goal."

A vaporwave video by satirical artist Mike Diva

Stefanie Franciotti, who records under the alias Sleep ∞ Over, emerged from the same Austin-based, synthesizer-centric scene as S U R V I V E. She is decidedly anti-fascist, and described fashwave to THUMP as "weaponized nostalgia.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth," she said, "the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."

Today, arguably, the 80s are back, but with a few modifications. The Reagan rictus smile has slumped into a scowl, and the Shining City on a Hill is to be ringed by a great wall. At the center of it all is Trump, a living time-capsule of 80s capitalist excess and garishness, and thus the ideal subject for fashwave. In "Trumpwave," a track by the synthwave artist iamMANOLIS is annexed to play over footage of a younger Trump wrestling at WWE, hitting on women, and eating stuffed-crust for a Pizza Hut commercial. Below the video, a YouTube commenter wrote: "When you see all these older videos it all makes sense. It's not that Trump is weird and we're going towards some parody of a society, it's that we already live in a parody. Trump is bringing back the sanity of the good old days." Another wrote simply: "The Donald is here. I feel the capitalism! <3 "

"Trumpwave" is an exemplar of the genre by the same name. Trumpwave shares an alt-right audience and at least one producer—Cyber Nazi—with fashwave. But the fashwave off-shoot is distinct in appropriating mainly vaporwave, and in its emphasis, through both sampled audio and video clips, on The Donald himself. In Trumpwave, he is recast as the modern-day inheritor of the mythologized 80s, a decade that is taken to stand for racial purity and unleashed capitalism. "Ivanka Vaporwave," a production by an alt-right YouTube channel, slows down the Cosmat Angels' 1985 "I'm Falling" over old clips of Trump's daughter Ivanka modeling as a young teenager. Cyber Nazi's "Take Back Our Future" rolls light muzak over stock footage of early 90s New York on a sunny day and Trump awkwardly dancing on Saturday Night Live.

Trumpwave exploits a vulnerability in vaporwave: its ambivalence about the cultural detritus that inspired it. This careful tension between irony and earnestness was part of what made vaporwave fun—it flirted with the implicit transgressiveness of appreciating its aggressively commercial source material. But that ambiguity left the aesthetic distressingly easy for the alt-right to appropriate by stripping it of irony and playfulness—by taking it literally, as a glorification of capitalism. Similarly, when synthwave artists exhumed 80s movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator, they also dressed the music in the decade's fatalist retrofuturism. A glance at the album art of Cyber Nazi—with its jackbooted cyborg cops going door to door—shows how for fascists, this dystopia is utopia. Extrapolating from the 80s, fashwave embraces that decade's grim sci-fi forecasts as paradise.

There's nothing inherently fascist about any sound—everything is context. But the deployment of vaporwave and synthwave by the alt-right proves that fascism has survived the defeat of the Axis, incubating its own culture even as it lost all political power. New Order, Kraftwerk, and many others traced an enduring fascination with fascist aesthetics. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi subcultures thrived in the shadows of genres like industrial, punk, metal, and trance. Fashwave is just the most recent in a long line of fascist appropriations, stretching beyond music: the Nazi swastika is, of course, a literal inversion of a Buddhist symbol. But unlike other genres, fashwave arrives at a time when fascism itself is surging to global power for the first time since the 30s, and both its music and visuals can seem like a premonition of the future. Refracting a nostalgia for the 80s and a love of capitalism through the prism of Trump, fashave projects an image of a looming dystopia, one that grows a little more plausible by the day.

[96thdayofrage]

Black Awakening, Class Rebellion

“The Black movement has been and will continue to be the foundation for the emergence of other liberation movements” in the U.S., says Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, whose Black Awakening in Obama’s America has been described as “the most important book of 2016.” However, the Black Misleadership class stands with corporate power. “Black officials uphold a status quo that is institutionally racist and incapable of delivering the goods to Black people.”

“We have to fight for something different, another way out of the two-party duopoly.”

George Ciccariello-Maher: The introduction to your book — Black Awakening in Obama’s America — is a reference to Robert Allen’s 1969 classic Black Awakening in Capitalist America, which in its attentiveness to the complex interplay of race and class arguably represents a predecessor to your own book. To what extent do you see your work as a sequel to Allen’s analysis of a prior generation’s struggle?

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Allen captured the way that the Black movement had the capacity to shake the American state to its core. The Black Awakening was not just an issue for Black people — it was a threat to the system itself. And the system reacted accordingly. Allen pays particular attention to the repeated attempts of capital to absorb, usurp and in some cases coopt the Black movement. In the aftermath of the rebellions in 1966 and 1967, business makes a concerted effort to insinuate itself into Black urban neighborhoods as the friendly face of capital after Black people had been burning and looting business operations. For some, the overtures of business were welcomed. The promise of black-owned businesses and greater access to American affluence was alluring. But for the majority of Black people, it was the struggle that promised a greater future.

The Black eruption of 2014 was not just a replay of events that preceded it 45 years earlier. It was a reaction to crises that went unresolved and continue to dog working-class and poor Black people. There have always been class tensions among African Americans, but they were magnified in the late 1960s and 70s as the political establishment and business class combined in their efforts to develop a Black middle class that could be called on to manage Black cities and the people who lived in them. In part, the Black movement today is a response to the failure of that strategy. Its most spectacular collapse was in Baltimore. Allen anticipated these developments and we have much to learn from him.

When Obama was elected, there was serious talk about a “postracial” America. A few short years later, this idea that we have transcended race seems more like the punch line to a bad joke. You understand Obama as emblematic of Black leadership that is nevertheless “post-Black” — actively complicit in the colorblind narrative that has brought us to where we are today. How do you interpret what you call the “illusion” of the Obama years, and have Black Americans “awakened” from that slumber?

When Obama was elected, 70 percent of Black people believed that King’s dream had been achieved. There were enormous expectations that a Black president would mean real improvement in the lives of ordinary Black people. Obama cultivated that belief through the course of his presidential campaign. He linked his candidacy to other upsurges from below that upset the status quo; he talked about the abolitionist movement, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the Stonewall Uprising for LGBTQ liberation, and of course, he invoked the civil rights movement and situated his electoral victory as the ultimate fruit of that struggle. But from the beginning, Obama then went out of his way to distance himself from Black demands, even though Black voters were the reason he won the White House.

Obama had promised very little, other than the ability to forge a new atmosphere in Washington, but he delivered even less. Perhaps more perniciously, however, he preserved the space where Black people were continually blamed for their own condition. He mocked poor parents’ eating and reading habits while parroting right-wing mythologies about Black fathers and that Black students think success means acting white. Meanwhile, not only is life not improving, but Black unemployment, underemployment, housing security and other barometers of the quality of life were deteriorating. All the while, Obama was overseeing the deadly status quo within the criminal justice system. All of this combusted in the summer of 2014 when Michael Brown was murdered in the streets of Ferguson. Enough was enough.

A group centering on Adolph Reed has recently criticized you for claiming that, “When the Black movement goes into motion, it throws the entire mythology of the United States — freedom, democracy, and endless opportunity — into chaos.” But isn’t this point — which as you write was shared by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Richard Nixon alike — just transparently true? From Radical Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, isn’t it simply undeniable that, just as white supremacy is the linchpin of US capitalism, Black movements have always catalyzed broader anti-capitalist resistance?

It is patently true, which made the negative reaction to the statement bizarre. The US is a deeply ideological society — mainly because it is so completely and thoroughly unequal. The tiny clique that controls resources and the political class in this country relies on its well-rehearsed myths about social mobility, the American Dream and the “exceptional” and unparalleled greatness of the United States. The Black movement derails that entire train of thought. We are talking about a people brought here in slavery and then when slavery ended, a people subjected to one hundred years of legal subjection and second-class citizenship, and then for the last fifty years a people segregated in poor and under-resourced neighborhoods, terrorized by police and then disproportionately imprisoned.

If the world understood the ways that Black people have been victimized by the US, this country’s authority — which flows through its self-promotion as the world’s greatest democracy — to impose its will on the rest of the world would be called into the question, as it was in the aftermath of World War II. It is why the Black movement has been the foundation for the emergence of other liberation movements as it was during the rebellion of the 1960s.

Built into this criticism is the suggestion that you somehow uphold a simplistic understanding of the Black community that neglects class contradictions, and yet — again like Allen’s critique of Black capitalism — you dedicate an entire chapter to “Black Faces in High Places,” borrowing a potent phrase from Amiri Baraka. You offer a searing critique of Black mayors from Carl Stokes to Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and you show how Black elected leaders bet on pragmatism and the community lost. Against this failed wager, you bet on what Malcolm X called the “little people” against the “big people.” What has been the role of Black elected officials and economic elites historically, and what is that role today?

The most significant development in Black life over the last 45 years has been the emergence of the Black political class. By the end of the 1960s, white political machines could no longer govern Black majority cities. The political establishment believed that Black elected officials could contain the Black rebellion and, more importantly, impose austerity in ways that white officials believed they no longer could. With some exceptional examples, this had largely been true before the explosion in Baltimore in April of 2015. If Obama is the greatest example of the failure of formal Black politics to address the needs of ordinary Black people, there are hundreds of smaller, local examples of this same phenomenon. Black officials uphold a status quo that is institutionally racist and incapable of delivering the goods to Black people.

Donald Trump has been elected — in no small part because poor people stopped showing up for a Democratic Party that doesn’t represent them. Against accelerationist arguments, this isn’t a good thing, but the reality is that people are fed up with the Democrats and in the streets ready to fight. What does this mean for Black struggle and for the broader movement for revolutionary change?

Exactly. Liberals expect poor and working-class people of all races and ethnicities to just suffer, but suffer in silence for the sake of the Democratic Party. Clearly, Trump will be a disaster for the working class, but the Democrats have been a disaster in slow motion. Inequality has increased, as has brutality and injustice. There is only so long people will just continue to allow a party that consistently insists that it is the “party of the people” to ignore their basic needs and only offer not being a Republican as the alternative.

But we cannot underestimate the challenge — the crisis — Trump represents for the Black movement and working-class people in general. He is now populating his cabinet with racists, retreads and reactionaries who want to roll the clock back. He wants to put a segregationist in as chief law enforcement officer in the country, as the Attorney General. This man has declared the Black Lives Matter movement to be terrorist and the groups that populate the movement as terrorists. So these are significant challenges.

The number one priority right now is that the left must grow and must be ideologically combative as well as politically combative. When I say the left must grow, it means that our activism cannot only be with hopes to return Congress to the Democrats in 2018 or to “get back to” the good old days of the “normal” slow drip of neoliberalism as opposed to the tidal wave promised by Trump. We have to fight for something different, another way out of the two-party duopoly. We have to be in the streets confronting the Trump agenda and the fascist menace he has awakened. But we have to also articulate a political vision for the kind of world we want and the kind of politics that can win.

A better world is possible. It’s called socialism and it will require a multiracial working-class rebellion organized on the principles of solidarity and with anti-racism at its core. We have to fight like we’ve never fought before. Our lives and the planet depend on it.

[day0one]

Fact check: Democratic Party did not found the KKK, did not start the Civil War

The claim: The Democratic Party started the Civil War to preserve slavery and later the KKK

As America marks a month of protests against systemic racism and many people draw comparisons between current events and the civil rights movement, an oversimplified trope about the Democratic Party’s racist past has been resurrected online.

“Friendly reminder that if you support the Democrat Party, you support the party that founded the KKK and start a civil war to keep their slaves," claims an image of a tweet Instagram user @snowflake.tears shared on June on 19.

Many Instagram users read between the lines for the tweet’s implication about the modern Democratic and Republican parties. Some argued this past action discredited current liberal policies while others said it did not matter.

“Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln fought to free the slaves, but he also created the Republican Party, and was the leader of it to help fight to free the slaves, yet it’s said that most black people still vote for Democrats who fought to keep the slaves,” user @shrukenshmuck commented.

“I’m a conservative but I find this argument pretty stupid because clearly that’s not what they support anymore, values change overtime,” user @james.dubee wrote.

Historians agree that although factions of the Democratic Party did majorly contribute to the Civil War's start and KKK's founding, it is inaccurate to say the party is responsible for either.

Instagram user @snowflake.tears has not yet returned USA TODAY’s request for comment.

This is not a new argument Princeton University Edwards Professor of American History Tera Hunter told USA TODAY this trope is a fallback argument used to discredit current Democratic Party policies.

“At the core of the effort to discredit the current Democratic Party is the refusal to accept the realignment of the party structure in the mid-20th century,” Hunt said.

In September 2019, NPR host Shereen Marisol Maraji called the claim, “one of the most well-worn clapbacks in modern American politics.”

Comedian Trevor Noah tackled the misleading trope on an episode of "The Daily Show" in March 2016, after two CNN contributors debated the topic.

“Every time I go onto Facebook I see these things: ‘Did you know the Democrats are the real racist party and did you know the Republicans freed the slaves?’” Noah joked. “A lot of people like to skip over the fact that when it comes to race relations, historically, Republicans and Democrats switched positions.”

A similar meme attributing the claim to U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson has been circulating social media since November 2016.

“Who started the KKK? That was Democrats. Who was the party of slavery? Who was the part of Jim Crow and segregation? Who opposed the Civil Rights Movement? Who opposed voting rights? It was all the Democrats,” the meme reads.

Other posts making more specific claims about the Democratic Party starting the Civil War or founding the KKK continue to circulate.

This trope was rated false by PolitiFact and the Associated Press in October 2018.

A faction of the Democratic Party started the Civil War Abolitionists founded the Republican Party and elected President Abraham Lincoln in response to escalating tensions around slavery after the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 threatened the balance of slave states to free states.

Southern states, primarily lead by Democrats, initiated secession proceedings and launched the Civil War. However, historians say the party is not to blame.

“The short answer is that the Democratic Party did not start the Civil War,” Hunter said. “The war was initiated by Southern slaveholding states seceding from the United States.”

Fact check: Congress did not designate Confederate veterans as U.S. veterans

Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Curator of Political and Military History, Jon Grinspan agreed with Hunter.

“A splinter of a splinter of a Democratic Party really contributed to the secession and the coming of the war,” he told USA TODAY. “It would be wrong to say the Democratic Party started the Civil War. It would be right to say some Democrats really contributed to the start of the Civil War.”

Grinspan pointed to the many Democrats, nicknamed Copperheads, that fought for the Union as evidence that the Civil War was not Democrats versus Republicans.

Fact check: Joe Biden's great-grandfather didn't own slaves, fight for Confederacy

KKK was founded by Democrats, but not the party The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by ex-Confederate soldiers Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group was originally a “social club” but quickly became a violent white supremacist group.

Its first grand wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, an ex-Confederate general and prominent slave trader.

Fact check:Photo shows Biden with Byrd, who once had ties to KKK, but wasn't a grand wizard

Experts agree the KKK attracted many ex-Confederate soldiers and Southerners who opposed Reconstruction, most of whom were Democrats. Forrest even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention.

“The KKK is almost a paramilitary organization that’s trying to benefit one party. It syncs up with the Democratic Party, which really was a racist party openly at the time,” Grinspan said. “But the KKK isn’t the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party isn’t the KKK.”

Although the KKK did serve the Democratic Party’s interests, Grinspan stressed that not all Democrats supported the KKK.

Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism Senior Fellow Mark Pitcavage told the Associated Press that many KKK members were Democrats because the Whig Party had died off and Southerners disliked Republicans after the Civil War. Despite KKK members' primary political affiliation, Pitcavage said it is wrong to say the Democratic Party started the KKK.

Fact check: Yes, historians do teach that first Black members of Congress were Republicans

A reconstituted, early 20th century KKK attracts members from both sides After Reconstruction and as the Jim Crow period set in during the 1870s, the Klan became obsolete. Through violence, intimidation and systematic oppression, the KKK had served its purpose to help whites retake Southern governments.

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

“The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isn’t as tight with the second Klan,” Grinspan said.

Political parties switch stance on racial progress According to Grinspan, the Republican Party was much more concerned with protecting African Americans and their voting rights from its founding through the early 20th century. In the mid-20th century, both parties' stances on racial equity began to switch.

“It starts with FDR and the New Deal, but the actions with Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s with the Voting Rights Act and civil rights legislation really kind of seals the deal,” Grinspan said.

Fact check: Southern Dems held up 1964 Civil Rights Act, set filibuster record at 60 days

As the Democrats introduced policies to support voting rights, it became the favored party for most Black voters and has remained so since. With that realignment, many racist voters who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left the Democratic Party to become Republicans.

“That was 150 years ago and the parties are totally different today,” Grinspan said. “It’s like a dinosaur to a modern-day bird. So much evolution has happened. These really aren’t the same groups anymore.”

Noah has mocked the political trope of highlighting the Democratic Party’s racist past to question its current progressive policies.

“That was true in like 1910, but then after World War II Democratic presidents like Truman and Johnson started supporting civil rights laws and that led to a mass exodus of racists from the Democratic Party,” Noah mocked the claim in 2016. “Just because something used to be something doesn’t mean it still is. What matters more is what it is now.”

Fact check: Yes, Kente cloths were historically worn by empire involved in West African slave trade

Our rating: False We rate the claim that the Democratic Party started the Civil War to preserve slavery and founded the KKK as FALSE because it is not supported by our research. Experts agree that although factions of the Democratic Party were responsible for the South's secession and the rise of the KKK it is inaccurate to claim the party is responsible for either. The Democratic Party was undoubtedly the party of racism and white supremacy during and after the Civil War. However, it evolved throughout the late 20th century, and garnered the support of most Black voters.

Our fact check sources: USA TODAY, "'You have to keep at it': What Black Lives Matter demonstrators can learn from civil rights protests of the past" Princeton University Edwards Professor of American History Tera Hunter NPR, "The Original Blexit" YouTube, "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" PolitiFact, "No, the Democratic Party didn’t create the Ku Klux Klan" Associated Press, "Ku Klux Klan not founded by the Democratic Party" History.com, "Republican Party Founded" Smithsonian National Museum of American History Curator Jon Grinspan Encyclopedia Britannica, "Copperhead" Khan Academy, "The First KKK" Encyclopedia Britannica, "Ku Klux Klan" Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Democratic Party did not found the KKK, did not start the Civil War

[writingguide003-blog]

Troll Busters helps protect women writers from online bullies

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/troll-busters-helps-protect-women-writers-from-online-bullies/

Troll Busters helps protect women writers from online bullies

During a reception for Womens History Month hosted by President Barack Obama on Wednesday, he spoke before a room of some of the most powerful women alive. In his remarks, Obama addressed the imminent threat of online harassment for women, shining a light on its importance.

And while she wasnt present at the White House gathering, Michelle Ferrier understands what its like to be harassed better than mostand thats why she decided to do something about it.

1. At @WhiteHouse Women’s History Month event, @POTUS talks about #onlineharassment

Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) March 16, 2016

2. @POTUS: The internet is interwoven in our lives – women deserve to exist freely & w/out fear on the internet #onlineharrasment

Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) March 16, 2016

3. @POTUS: Men must also speak up & demand better from their sons, coworkers, friends #onlineharassment

Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) March 16, 2016

At the Women’s Media Foundation hackathon for women news entrepreneurs in January 2015, Ferrier, the associate dean for innovation, research, creative activity, and graduate studies at Ohio University, came up with the idea for Troll Busters. Its an online service meant to help women, mainly writers and journalists, combat the so-called online trolls who attack, harass, and threaten them on a regular basis.

If a woman writer is experiencing harassment on Twitter, she can head to the Troll Busters site and report the incident. Volunteers or staff will typically respond to incident within an hour or so by firing a warning shot, as Ferrier told the Daily Dot. This means tweeting something at the person who reported the incident to let her know the Troll Busters are there and ready to look out for her.

Troll Busters is funded by a $35,000 grant awarded by the Knight Prototype Fund. A mixture of paid staff and volunteers keep things running basically 24/7, because you never know when a troll might strike.

It wasnt originally Ferriers first idea, but Gamergatean organized backlash by male gamers against female gamers and journalistswas in full swing at that time. She realized that was her hook.

Here I am watching all this Gamergate stuff on my Facebook feed, and it started triggering my own emotions about what happened to me, Ferrier said. And in the same anonymous way it happened to me, it was driving womens voices out of journalism. So I proposed the anti-Gamergate solution.

Ferriers experience with harassment didnt happen online like so many other women, but she acutely understands the terror of receiving violent threats.

Ferrier is a former journalist who lived in fear for many years. As a writer for a newspaper in a predominately white area in Florida, Ferrier made a splash as its first African-American columnist. She and the other columnists were the only staffers to have their photos featured in print, which opened them to the ire of the masses. Theyd routinely receive physical hatemail at the office or home, but Ferrier became one persons specific target.

Troll Busters

Somebody started writing me, I brushed it off the first time. I got another letter, brushed it off that time. But the letters continued to strike a very violent, racist tone, and there were other things about the letters that I received that were really disturbing, she said.

But after taking a closer look at the letters she repeatedly received, it dawned on her that this wasnt a lone, disturbed man. She found that not only the language and threats, but also that the letters themselves made me believe this person was part of an organized hate group and that this was something an organized hate group was doing to to put me in fear and intimidate me enough to stop writing.

For three or so years, the threats continued to roll in. She tried to involve local law enforcement. The police said they were investigating, but there was no evidence of an investigation, Ferrier said.

Because of law enforcements inaction, she was forced to do her own investigating, began disguising herself, taking different routes to work, and even learned to shoot a gun. In the absence of knowing who or what she was fighting, she had to be ready for anything. But in 2010, she received what would be the last letter from her harasser, and she finally had enough.

My students thought we were in post-racial America.

I called my husband and said ‘I just cant do this anymore,’ she said. She packed up her family, moved to North Carolina, and started teaching at a small private university in an attempt to move on from the previous years horrors. However, a racist incident on the mostly white campuswhich involved a car full of men shouting the N-word at a black female student and attempting to hit her with the vehiclereminded her that trolls and bullies exist in every pocket of the world, and looking the other way would do nothing to assuage it.

Thats when she decided to share her past with her students.

My students thought we were in post-racial America, Ferrier said. By the time I finished telling my story and what happened to me, half the class class was in tears. But she wanted to make sure that a broader point was being made, and that it was not just an isolated experience of someone the students respected. This is not about me. I want you to think about how you can make a difference and what we can do as bystanders and targets, she told them.

Ferrier would eventually end up in Ohio where she resides. And at the hackathon, she once again drew on her painful past to make a broader point and impact a wider audience.

Troll Busters

This service has no impact on the trolls themselves, other than them seeing that an arbitrator is involved. The Troll Busters never respond to the harassers comments, no matter how vitriolic, and instead focus on providing support for the target of abuse. Theyll send inspirational quotes, safety tips for dealing with harassment, and general words of encouragement to remind women in the public eye who speaks their minds that they shouldnt be ashamed and theyre not alone.

Ferriers experience shaped this approach to conflict mitigation. During the dark days in Florida, one of her faithful female readers could tell from her writing that something was up. The two ended up speaking, and her reader offered up her own familys home as a safehouse for Ferrier, her husband, and children.

It was a twist, that I was wasnt going to try and track down who did this stuff. I wanted to come up with something that supports the target. Ferrier said. What can we do to support targets and keep them online?

Other resources have popped up, of late, to make women or anyone oppressed online feel more safe. The Womens Media Center launched its Speech Project in February, spearheaded by Soraya Chemaly and Ashley Judd. Chemaly, a writer and activist, and Judd, the well-known actress, both experienced cyberbullying. Their project aims to put a name to the type of harassment a person is experiencing which has shown to help combat it.

Anita Sarkeesian, one of the focal targets of Gamergate, and activists Renee Bracey Sherman and Jaclyn Friedman created a safety guide called Speak Up & Stay Safe in December. Their extensive experience with trolls made them the perfect people to provide guidance.

“Every day, women of all ages and all backgrounds and walks of life are speaking out,” President Obama said at the reception on Wednesday, as Cecile Richards, Nancy Pelosi listened. “And by telling their stories, by you telling your stories, women are lifting others out of the shadows and raising our collective consciousness about a problem that affects all of us.”

Illustration by Jason Reed

Read more: http://www.dailydot.com/

[frontstreet1]

Seahawks And Titans Won’t Come Out For Anthem

Baltimore Ravens players kneel down during the playing of the U.S. national anthem before an NFL football game against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley Stadium in London, Sunday Sept. 24, 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

NEW YORK — The Latest on the sports world reacting to President Donald Trump’s remarks about pro football (all times Eastern):

3:50 p.m.

The Tennessee Titans are joining the Seattle Seahawks in deciding not to come out for the national anthem.

The Seahawks announced nearly 30 minutes before kickoff that they would not stand for the national anthem because they “will not stand for the injustice that has plagued people of color in this country.”

The Titans followed 10 minutes later by saying they will remain in the locker room during the national anthem. They posted a statement on their website noting they want to be unified as a team with the players deciding jointly that staying inside was the best course of action.

The team also said their commitment to the military and community is “resolute” and that “the absence of our team for the national anthem shouldn’t be misconstrued as unpatriotic.”

Seattle has been one of the more outspoken teams in professional sports on social issues, led by Michael Bennett, Richard Sherman and Doug Baldwin.

— AP Sports Writer Teresa M. Walker reported from Nashville, Tennessee

___

3:40 p.m.

The Los Angeles Sparks did not participate in the national anthem before Game 1 of the WNBA Finals, joining a long list of protests being conducted on football fields across the NFL.

Moments before the Sparks and Minnesota Lynx were scheduled to line up for the national anthem, the Sparks left the floor. The Lynx stood arm-in-arm with each other while the anthem was performed. As soon as it was finished, the Sparks re-entered Williams Arena to a chorus of boos.

The gesture comes in solidarity with NFL players who either sat, took a knee or did not take the field for the anthem after President Donald Trump criticized football players for enacting such protests. At least 130 players were kneeling or sitting during the first NFL games.

— AP Sports Writer Jon Krawczynski reported from Minneapolis

___

2:55 p.m.

It appeared no drivers, crew or other team members participated in a protest during the national anthem to start the NASCAR Cup series race Sunday in Loudon, New Hampshire. Several team owners and executives had said they wouldn’t want anyone in their organizations to protest.

Richard Childress, who was Dale Earnhardt’s longtime team owner, said of protesting, “It’ll get you a ride on a Greyhound bus.” Childress says he told his team that “anybody that works for me should respect the country we live in. So many people gave their lives for it. This is America.”

Hall of Fame driver Richard Petty’s sentiments took it a step further, saying: “Anybody that don’t stand up for the anthem oughta be out of the country. Period. What got ’em where they’re at? The United States.”

When asked if a protester at Richard Petty Motorsports would be fired, he said, “You’re right.”

Another team owner Chip Ganassi says he supports Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin’s comments. Tomlin said before the Steelers played on Sunday that players would remain in the locker room and that “we’re not going to let divisive times or divisive individuals affect our agenda.”

___

1 p.m.

NFL players used the national anthem to show their defiance to President Donald Trump’s criticism, with at least 100 players kneeling or sitting in protest and one team staying in the locker room.

Most teams in the early afternoon games locked arms in solidarity. At least three team owners joined their players.

More than 100 players sat or knelt, the form of protest started last season by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick is now a free agent, and supporters believe teams have avoided signing him because of his protest.

The Pittsburgh Steelers remained in the locker room as the national anthem played before their game with the Chicago Bears. Coach Mike Tomlin stood by himself on the sideline.

How each team would observe the national anthem emerged as the center of attention on this NFL Sunday in the wake of Trump’s critical remarks toward players who don’t stand for the anthem.

Tomlin had said before the game that Pittsburgh’s players would remain in the locker room and that “we’re not going to let divisive times or divisive individuals affect our agenda.” Tomlin added that the Steelers made this choice “not to be disrespectful to the anthem but to remove ourselves from this circumstance. People shouldn’t have to choose.”

___

12:40 p.m.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a tweet that the league will re-air a unity television advertisement Sunday night that it first ran during February’s Super Bowl.

The one-minute spot called “Inside These Lines,” will be shown during the Sunday night game between the Oakland Raiders and Washington Redskins.

Over images and video of NFL players embracing one another on the field, the narrator says “Inside these lines, we don’t have to come from the same place to help each other reach the same destination.”

Goodell said that President’s Trump’s remarks about the NFL demonstrated “an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL.”

___

12:12 p.m.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have decided to stay in their locker room for the national anthem before their game against the Chicago Bears, coach Mike Tomlin has told CBS.

The move was apparently in reaction to President Donald Trump’s suggestion that NFL owners fire players who kneel for the national anthem.

Several players from the Jaguars and Ravens decided to kneel in the first NFL game of the day in London. Then Tomlin said his players would not be on the sideline at Soldier Field in Chicago for the anthem.

— AP Sports Writer Jay Cohen reported from Chicago

___

12:13 p.m.

Former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagilabue called President Donald Trump’s comments on NFL players “insulting and disgraceful.”

Tagliabue, who was in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a guest of Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, spoke to the media before Carolina’s game against the New Orleans Saints.

“For me to single out any particular group of players and call them SOB’s, to me, that is insulting and disgraceful,” Tagliabue said. “So I think the players deserve credit for what they do. And when it comes to speech they are entitled to speak. And we are entitled to listen. We are entitled to agree or disagree. But we’re not entitled to shut anybody’s speech down. Sometimes you don’t like what you hear and that is true in life in lots of contexts, but you can’t shut people down and be disgraceful when you are doing it.”

Richardson is not making a statement on the Trump’s remarks, per team spokesman Steven Drummond.

— AP Sports Writer Steve Reed reported from Charlotte, North Carolina

___

11:45 a.m.

A handful of Miami Dolphins players are wearing black T-shirts supporting free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick during pregame warm-ups.

The shirts have “#IMWITHKAP” written in bold white lettering on the front.

Kaepernick was the first athlete to refuse to stand during the national anthem as a protest. This season, no team has signed him, and some supporters believe NFL owners are avoiding him because of the controversy.

Among the players sporting the shirts before their game against the New York Jets are wide receiver Kenny Stills, running back Jay Ajayi and offensive linemen Laremy Tunsil and Ja’Wuan James. Stills, also a team captain, posted a photo on Twitter of himself wearing the shirt , along with the post: “In case you didn’t know!”

— AP Sports Writer Dennis Waszak reporting from East Rutherford, New Jersey

___

11:30 a.m.

Outside the Buffalo Bills’ New Era Field, fans were tailgating as normal with no signs of protests or indications of support.

Last season, vendors here sold anti-Colin Kaepernick jerseys — including one with him pictured in the crosshairs of a target — before the San Francisco 49ers game at Orchard Park on Oct. 16. Kaepernick was jeered once the game began.

Kaepernick was the first player to refuse to stand during the national anthem.

“If they do this as a whole team, I will want my money back as a season-ticket holder and I’ll never come back to a game again,” fan Mike Ragyna said when asked about the prospect of players protesting during the anthem.

“There’s no reason they can’t stand for the national anthem and get up on a soapbox afterward and do it then,” Ragyna said.

— AP Sports Writer John Wawrow reported from Orchard Park, New York

___

11:15 a.m.

Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan calls it a privilege to stand arm-in-arm with players during the national anthem in London.

Khan stood between tight end Marcedes Lewis and linebacker Telvin Smith at Wembley Stadium and then released a statement to express his support for players. Coaches and other team personnel from both teams did the same before the game against the Ravens.

About two dozen players on both teams kneeled, something President Donald Trump has said owners should fire players for.

“It was a privilege to stand on the sidelines with the Jacksonville Jaguars today for the playing of the U.S. national anthem at Wembley Stadium,” Khan said. “I met with our team captains prior to the game to express my support for them, all NFL players and the league following the divisive and contentious remarks made by President Trump, and was honored to be arm in arm with them, their teammates and our coaches during our anthem.”

___

11:02 a.m.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is defending President Donald Trump’s attacks on football players who kneel during the national anthem.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning, Mnuchin says the National Football League enforces other types of rules and Trump thinks “owners should have a rule that players should have to stand in respect for the national anthem.”

Mnuchin adds that “they can do free speech on their own time.”

Trump suggested during a speech Friday night that NFL owners should fire players who kneel during the national anthem. A handful of NFL players have refused to stand to protest several issues, including police brutality.

___

11:01 a.m.

The Pittsburgh Penguins say they’ve accepted an invitation from President Donald Trump to go to the White House after winning the Stanley Cup.

The Penguins released a statement Sunday saying they respect the office of the president and “the long tradition of championship teams visiting the White House.” The Penguins were honored by Barack Obama after winning the Stanley Cup in 2016 and previously by George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s.

“Any agreement or disagreement with a president’s politics, policies or agenda can be expressed in other ways. However, we very much respect the rights of other individuals and groups to express themselves as they see fit.”

Trump revoked the White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors Saturday, after the team had said they might not accept.

—Stephen Whyno reporting from Washington

___

10:55 a.m.

A White House adviser says the president lashed out at NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem because he stands with Americans who want the anthem respected.

Marc Short is director of legislative affairs. He argues on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that President Donald Trump believes NFL players have First Amendment rights, but that owners should have the right to fire them.

Trump seemed to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House because of star Stephen Curry’s public opposition to him.

Asked why Trump is inflaming tensions, Short says the Warriors started it. He says players “were the ones that first went out ... and began criticizing the president.”

___

10:15 a.m.

Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti says he “100 percent” supports his players’ decision to kneel during the national anthem ahead of Sunday’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Wembley.

At least seven Ravens players and more than a dozen Jaguars players took a knee during the anthem while the rest of the players stood locked arm-in-arm in an apparent response to President Donald Trump, who said this week that NFL owners should fire those who disrespected the American flag.

But the Ravens issued a statement from Bisciotti minutes after kickoff, saying: “We recognize our players’ influence. We respect their demonstration and support them 100 percent. All voices need to be heard. That’s democracy in its highest form.”

Jaguars owner Shad Khan stood arm-in-arm with his players during the anthem.

___

9:30 a.m.

About two dozen players, including Baltimore Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs and Jacksonville Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette, took a knee during the playing of the national anthem before the start of the teams’ game at Wembley Stadium on Sunday.

Other players on one knee during the performance included Ravens linebacker C.J. Mosley, wide receiver Mike Wallace and safety Lardarius Webb as well as Jaguars linebacker Dante Fowler, defensive tackle Calais Campbell, defensive end Yannick Ngakoue and cornerback Jalen Ramsey.

Players on both teams and Jaguars owner Shad Khan, who were not kneeling, remained locked arm-in-arm throughout the playing of the national anthem and “God Save The Queen,” the national anthem of Britain.

No players were kneeling during the playing of the British national anthem.

President Donald Trump had a suggestion on Saturday for National Football League owners whose players decide to take a knee during the national anthem: fire them.

Sep 24 2017 3:55 PM EDT By The Associated Press

[topsolarpanels]

The next investments in infrastructure should include more than roads and bridges

Reed Hundt Crunch Network Contributor

Reed Hundt is the founder and chief executive of the <a href="http :// coalitionforgreencapital.com/ “Coalition, and was the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997.

How to join the network

While both political parties seem to agree that Congress should expend several hundred billion dollars on infrastructure, their spending plans ignore one of the most woefully out-of-date pieces of American infrastructure.

Taxpayers should money not just asphalt and concrete but also induce a huge increase in private investment for power. And not only power, but renewable power.

No less an esteemed official than former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chief executive, Henry Paulson Jr. citedthe need tocreate conditions that encourage private investment in clean technologies.

The a chance for investment exist. Falling costs for renewable generation, battery storage breakthroughs, electric and hybrid vehicle advances, distributed solar and in-building efficiency measures all invite hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

The problem in power is that almost all capital expenditure has been funded by consumerspending of about $400 billion a yearon electricity. With this money, private sector firms have maintainedcapital expenditures at about $100 billion a year.

Expecting consumers to pay a lot more for electricity in order to fund greater capital expenditure is not the way to gamble. State regulatory commissions wont stand for that. And, fortunately, this is not necessary.

The 115 th Congress should pass two measures to bringing hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment into the power sector, funding new transmission, generation, upgraded distribution monopolies, and behind-the-meter solar and efficiency measures.

First, Congress should money their own nationals green bank that would capitalise state and local green banks. These entities would stimulate new private sector investing by adding a measure of public capital.

How do we know? Because since its creation in 2011 the Connecticut Green Bank has proven that a compound of one-tenth public fund and nine-tenths private capital can lead to an increase of$ 1 billion in total investment in clean power solutions all of which construct customers better off.

Because Connecticut is about one percent of the United States population, we can extrapolate that the Connecticut techniques alone would cause an additional $100 billion in capital expenditure in power. Rhode Islands Green Bank, New Yorks Green Bank, and similar organizations in a dozen other countries also testify to the catalytic effect of a pinch of public capital.

Seeking to spread these successes to other states, Connecticut Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy have introduced a Green Bank Act. Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen and representatives from the Connecticut delegation introduced a version in the House. A bill like theirs should be top of the orders of the day for the next Congress.

Its high time to abandon the near-religious conviction of some that public capital can never be combined with private capital( as if we were talking about matter and anti-matter ). Arecent report from the New Climate Economyclearly states TAGEND

Public green investment banking can facilitate private investment in low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure, leveraging relatively limited public resources to maximize impact.

Second, Congress should prohibit nations from limiting competitor in generation, transmission or behind-the-meter installations. In many other industries( aviation, transportation, communications are examples) Congress has mandated reduced nation regulation and expanded competitor. That same paradigm needs to be applied to states. New Yorks system of using the distribution grid as a platform for competing businesses is a model for the nation.

When I was the chairman of the FCC from 1993 to 1997, I happily followed the bipartisan mandate of Congress in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to open the door to a surge of capital spending on internet access and digital cellular.

About a trillion dollars came from investors into the telecom infrastructure. The new money transformed the economy and society by building a new platform for information creation and exchange. Everything we now use for communications depends on this new platform; nothing we have now would work on the old platform. Economically, the result was federal budget surpluses and a rising standard of living for every income quintile in the United States.

Breakthroughs in power technology now make a repeat performance possible for that sector too.

There is no doubt that the growing chorus of think leaders is right to say that increased infrastructure spending will induce increased economic growth. But vehicles alone should not be the only beneficiaries. Power should be abundant and affordable. It is the lifeblood of an info economy. Its marketplaces the businesses involved in the creation, distribution, and consumption of electromagnetic waves should enjoy accelerated growth driven by a massive surge in private sector-led spending on the power infrastructure.

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