#“dissident right”

[tomorrowusa]

Far right ideologues, like DeSantis buddy Chris Rufo, like to refer to themselves as the "dissident right". That is a euphemism to hide their true anti-constitutional pro-dictatorship nature.

Chris Rufo, a rightwing culture-war celebrity and close Ron DeSantis ally, has maintained a close relationship with IM-1776, a “dissident right” magazine that regularly showers praise on dictators and authoritarians, puffs racist ideologues, and attacks liberal democracy. The outlet’s editors and writers – many of them so-called “anons” working under pseudonyms – have variously advocated for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act; celebrated figures such as the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the proto-fascist Italian nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio; and advanced conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic, and what they term the “regime”, a leftist power structure that they imagine unites the state, large corporations, universities and the media.

Rufo and his cohorts are working to muddy the difference between themselves and the less extreme right.

Last month a “manifesto” written by Rufo – The New Right Activism – ran in the online and print versions of IM-1776, and Rufo has publicly urged his audience to buy and subscribe to the outlet. He has also co-hosted a series of Twitter spaces with the magazine’s editors, beginning in July last year. In one of them, recorded in October, he indicated an interest in incorporating the “dissident right” more fully in mainstream political discourse, saying: “I think there is a room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and and engage in thoughtful dialogue.” More recently, he has expressed a personal interest in expanding the range of acceptable political discourse. On the Pirate Wires podcast earlier this month, he told host Mike Solana of his own activism: “I try to play that game, I try to lay traps, I try to provoke certain reactions, I try to launder certain words and phrases into the discourse.”

Rufo's rag IM-1776 glorifies domestic terrorists.

Last June, IM-1776 published an obituary of Ted Kaczynski by another pseudonymous author calling themselves “The Prudentialist”. Kaczynski died in a federal prison last year at the conclusion of a life sentence he received for a 17-year mailbombing campaign that killed three of his targets and injured 23 others. Describing Kaczynski as “allegedly a lone wolf terrorist, but also a mathematical genius”, the IM-1776 author relativized his crimes and explained that Kaczynski’s “iconic status on the contemporary right can be partly attributed to the devastating critique of the left included in his famous manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future”.

The Republican Party is now the Trump MAGA Party. It refuses to call out extremists and is cozy with foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. Permitting Republicans to gain power puts the country under the control of the anti-constitutional "dissident right" who advocate Red Caesarism.

The ONLY way to defeat Republicans/MAGA/the "dissident right"/Red Caesarism is to vote Democratic. Any talk from the third party curious about impotent minor party candidates should get an instant reality check; the last presidential election won by a non-Democrat or non-Republican was in 1848.

[odinsblog]

“This brutal war is not only mass murder of people and destruction of the infrastructure, economy, and cultural sites of Ukraine, but also a severe blow to the future of Russia, a country that is now pushed back into totalitarianism, but this time into a fascist totalitarianism.

We are being punished for daring to criticize authority.” —Oleg Orlov

[weaselle]

how did this happen. this is bad.

this is now i have to buy a gun and be prepared for a literal civil war bad.

the next four years are going to be so bad we might not wind up with a whole country at the end of it. There is going to be so much more violence and oppression and militarized bigotry.

anyone who voted for trump or withheld their vote or voted third party is dead to me.

[the-great-games]

My fears regarding TikTok go beyond the blatant propaganda, narrative control, and censorship. I am concerned about the algorithm and the potential it has to be weaponized. It is so specific and accurate to find what niches, beliefs, and subcultures people are a part of that it could be used to identify people/groups the government want to target. The US didn’t want China to have the data because they wanted the data.

For instance, if they wanted to target crafty, left-handed, eldest siblings, who like [insert specific sports team here] all they would have to do is pull on the threads of the algorithm to have the accounts and information of people who were sorted into these specific boxes.

[agentfascinateur]

Somewhere there's a hauntingly beautiful symphony where Pavel Kushnir belongs.

Rest in peace 🕊️

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher. He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket. Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied: "The Russian national anthem."

Arrested for 4 social media posts objecting to the war in Ukraine. Died from a hunger strike in protest. 💜

[dissidentlibrary]

That's when I saw the photograph.

Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk

on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard in Paris

were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts

being reviled and spat upon by the mob

as she was making her way to school

in Charlotte, North Carolina.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro.

[spockvarietyhour]

I may have said this already but the aesthetic of this office is "Federation HQ"

[alexjcrowley]

Physically fighting the urge to make an edit of Eduard Limonov and Iosif Brodskij to Girl, so confusing

[willtheweirdrat]

holy SHIT this song hit so hard i cannot even describe it. its so fucking relatable and true, especially with the new anti-trans laws. PLEAS LISTEN TO THIS SONG MUTUALS

[klam-strakur]

I wanna host i want to have sex in a bed i wanna be able to fuck without time constraints

[marionto]

Police takes phone and computer from activist in El Salvador

Early today, the house of the artist and digital activist, Temple of Evil, was raided. Just as, in the case of another journalist, they took his computer and mobile phone. They told him that his case is not publicly available.

[ariadneslament]

You know what guys? I was called a liberal today by some Mr Everything Middling's her-country-didn't-send-its-best spouse and being accused of having no respect whatsoever for family values for wanting Harris to win over women's issues. Funny, because I have never indulged myself in shitty men, never done hookup, and always believed in the sanctity of marriage since I was a teen girl, as long as it is based on mutual respect, fraternity, and reason, instead of a go-to-the-gutter-together blind devotion; basically just like how I (we all should) approach religions, NO? :) Of course, all thanks to my small c-conservative parents and their loving yet disciplined and smart upbringing ❤️🌸. It's not everyone's privilege.

[underthewingsofthblackeagle]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Viewing the prosecution of Sterry as an early skirmish in Toronto’s free speech struggle reframes the entire issue. The first chapter of Betcherman’s The Little Band gestures in this direction by explaining the religious and cultural outlook of Toronto’s elite and their defenders: conservative Protestant (usually evangelical in outlook), British or anglophile, Tory, staunchly imperialist, royalist, and pro-capitalist. Business owners, Conservative politicians, army officers, clergymen, the Orange Order, and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire were core components of this swath of Canadian society. A.E. Smith, the clergyman-turned-communist, bluntly described Toronto as “the citadel of reaction and religious Toryism,” while J.S. Woodsworth called the city “smug,” “intolerant,” and “village-like.”

If, prompted in part by the Sterry trial, we view the Toronto free speech struggles not simply as another Red scare but more specifically as an attempt by the Anglo-Protestant elite to keep Toronto locked into late-nineteenth-century cultural patterns, we begin to see more clearly the reasons why rationalists and radical Christians were repressed alongside communists. One telltale connection is the presence of Emerson Coatsworth as the presiding judge in Sterry’s trial. He was also the dominant voice on the Toronto Police Commission, and a key supporter of the Toronto-based Canadian Christian Crusade (CCC), an anti-atheist organization formed in 1929.

….

On 5 May 1929, the police broke up a street meeting organized by the Rationalist Society of Canada. Founding members Lionel Cross [Toronto's first Black Canadian lawyer], Styles, and Leavens promptly lodged a complaint with Chief Draper and the police commissioners. They asserted that police had orchestrated the situation “by aiding and abetting persons to create a disturbance at their meetings and then [intervening] under the guise of a ‘breach of the peace being imminent’ to justify their action.” The RSC officials insisted that, “in matters of fundamental rights and liberties, they [would] permit no one to abrogate,” and they would continue holding open air meetings, just as they had for “the past four years.” They were aware, however, that Toronto’s elite, despite their frequent praise for “British freedoms,” did not believe that liberal principles protected radicals or blasphemers. On 4 August the Star published a letter from Cross spelling out this contradiction:

“I have been trying to reconcile our ideas of British liberty with the attitude of the police in breaking up the meetings on the street of those with unconventional ideas, while religious gatherings are undisturbed.”

Cross was told by an inspector that both the public and his men found rationalist speeches objectionable, and that was reason enough. Admitting that appeals to the authorities had been a waste of time, Cross asked the readers of the Star: was it possible to “arouse an enlightened public sentiment to correct this?”

On 13 August 1929, policemen forced a crowd out of Queen’s Park, in an effort to forestall a communist meeting that had not even started. The violence meted out to communists and bystanders alike shocked many of those present and sparked a furor in the press. While this incident has been discussed in the existing historiography of the “free speech struggle,” another case only a few days later has been overlooked. On the following Sunday night (18 August), police ordered an “atheist” meeting of almost five hundred people near Massey Hall to disperse. This was almost certainly a gathering of the RSC. “The crowd took exception” to the interference of the police, and “as they walked slowly towards Yonge Street they jeered [at] the officers and called upon them to stop a religious meeting” being held on a nearby street corner. Indeed, members of this “throng” themselves interrupted the religious gathering, which ended in disorder.

While this confrontation was not violent, the way it was reported in the next day’s Globe reveals the extent to which Toronto’s unbelievers were characterized as an existential threat to Canadian values, alongside communists and “foreigners.” First of all, the paper argued that police action had been entirely justified because the rationalists had blocked the street. More significantly, however, its coverage of this story was surrounded on all sides by bold headlines warning Torontonians of the dire threat they faced from depraved agitators. The rhetorical question, “‘Is It to Be Bolshevism or Constitutional Government?’” spanned the top of the page. Another headline trumpeted: “Communism Spells Murder, Pillage, Merciless Tyranny, Says Shields, and Would Eliminate Civilization.” That lengthy article praised the eloquence and logic of a sermon by the fundamentalist Baptist minister T.T. Shields, who denounced atheism, communism, modernism, anarchy, and the Toronto Star. The adjacent piece interviewed four prominent Conservatives: Anglican canon H.J. Cody, war veteran and businessman J.J. Shanahan, politician Alfred Morine, and publisher S.B. Gundy. Not unexpectedly, all four praised the police and condemned leftists. “Exaggerated Stories on Reds, Distortion of Report Alleged,” was the title of a nearby article about the police action in Queen’s Park the week before. It reprinted a letter from someone who claimed to have been present and asserted that the police had had no choice but to break up the “sullen,” “ugly” crowd, composed of threatening “foreigners” who would have become violent if given the opportunity; concerns over police brutality were simply the product of “scare headlines” and “gross misrepresentation” orchestrated by the Star. In the Globe’s coverage, the rationalists were merely one element of an ominous outside force that sought to overthrow “Toronto the Good.”

Rationalists, radicals, and their allies contested this view of events. On 2 October 1929 a heated meeting (which according to the mayor threatened to become “a regular donnybrook”) was held at city hall to address concerns over the public exercise of free speech. Chief Draper and Judge Coatsworth were present and subject to intense cross-examination by R.E. Knowles, Salem Bland, and others. Hard questions were aimed at Coatsworth in particular. After the judge explained that only seditious meetings were prohibited, an unnamed voice called out, “What about a man’s religion?” Coatsworth replied, “I don’t interfere with any man’s religion,” but he went on to caution that blasphemy would not be permitted either. One audience member pointedly asked him, “Aren’t you connected with a religious organization?” (The judge was a prominent member of the United Church of Canada.) Coatsworth responded, “I’ve been connected with a religious organization all my life, but it interferes with none in their religion.”

William Styles attended that 1929 meeting as the RSC representative. He argued that his group had “inalienable rights” to hold meetings in public places, and that “any trouble in the parks has been caused by the police themselves.” He complained about “a hysteria among certain people in the city that there is going to be a revolt.” Styles said he had seen many socialist meetings and had never witnessed a riot; but “now every meeting is construed as being unlawful.” He went on to declare that the rationalists would not “submit to a dictatorship,” defiantly concluding, “I submit that the chief of police is the servant of this city and not a dictator.” When a Free Speech Conference was called for 12 October, the “Canadian Atheist Society” was listed among its supporters, alongside Bland, Knowles, and a number of communist-affiliated organizations.

The conflict was played out well beyond the streets. Direct police pressure in 1929 led to theatre and hall owners reneging on their arrangements with communists and other leftist groups; it is possible the same thing happened to the rationalists. Early in the year, the RSC suddenly moved their meetings, going from the Victoria Theatre on 16 February to the Occident Hall a week later. After indoor lectures resumed in the fall, there were a number of other rapid venue changes: from the College Assembly Hall to the Brunswick Hall, and then, after a gap in the schedule, a move to Winchester Hall for the winter and spring of 1930. RSC officials never publicly addressed the changes but, given the timing, it is certainly conceivable that they were having trouble finding people who would rent them space.

…

That would change early in 1931, when the Globe declared, “The eyes of atheism and the eyes of bolshevism in North America are fixed for the moment on Toronto.” This renewed burst of outrage was provoked by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, luminary of the American freethought movement. His Kansas-based company, Haldeman-Julius Publications, was enormously prolific in its production of affordable books, pamphlets, and newspapers. His series of “Little Blue Books” would become particularly influential across North America. The publisher was himself a socialist and an atheist of Jewish descent who never shied away from controversy. Upon hearing reports of the Toronto free speech battle, he decided to support local unbelievers and test the authorities by printing an “Atheist Special Edition” of his American Freeman newspaper and distributing “copies numbering in thousands” in the city.

This provoked the ire of the Globe, which denounced not only Haldeman-Julius’s atheism but also his support for “companionate marriage.” An editorial entitled “Keep This Trash Out” declared:

the atheist and the ‘Red’ have so much in common that it behooves Christian people to be on guard against their insidious style of propaganda. Their methods are so similar that general direction from Moscow is more than a suspicion.

The aim of both was the same: “the overthrow of established conditions that have been developed through the centuries.” Something had to be done. Canadians could not reasonably be asked to tolerate “widespread circulation” of arguments in favour of companionate marriage and “blatant, scoffing atheism.” Fortunately, something could be done: censorship. Crown attorney Eric Armour believed that the Atheist Special Edition of the American Freeman contained blasphemous libel and that anyone who distributed or kept it “would be subject to a criminal charge.” Indeed, he believed many American publications should be barred from Canada. Chief Draper agreed that the Freeman should be kept from circulating by mail, and pronounced that if it were sold from the city’s newsstands “police action” would be taken.

Haldeman-Julius was not intimidated. He responded by sending a telegram to the Globe a few days later. It began:

Please announce in your columns that I am coming to your city for lecture in hall to be announced soon. Will explain to your people why I am an atheist and why atheism will make Toronto a more civilized city. Will defy your Chief Constable to stop my meeting. Will also print extra edition of Freeman for free circulation and will send friends of mine to every house in Toronto to deliver free copies of paper.

The publisher also said he would attempt to bring Clarence Darrow with him because he anticipated trouble from Chief Draper, “who I understand is a tinpot tyrant and a small edition of Mussolini.” Haldeman-Julius then sent a message to Draper himself, asking if the chief would guarantee his safety at a Sunday afternoon meeting “explaining the philosophy of atheism and the falsity of Christianity and the corruption of the Catholic Church.” He took pains to stress the fact that “this special campaign is not being financed by Moscow, but by myself personally as a great believer in free speech and free assembly.”

…

Haldeman-Julius seems to have changed his mind about visiting Toronto, but he did produce a special “Canadian Free Speech Edition” of the American Freeman for distribution in the city. In it he declared, “If there isn’t free speech for an atheist in Toronto, then there is no free speech in Toronto.” Since the man himself remained out of reach, the Globe decided to use Haldeman-Julius’s example as a stick with which it could beat local free speech advocates. Earlier in the year sixty-eight professors from the University of Toronto had signed an open letter arguing that the actions of Draper and Coatsworth violated the British principle of freedom of speech. The Globe’s editorial writers claimed repeatedly (and without evidence) that Haldeman-Julius was allied with these professors and that militant atheism was the natural outcome of their line of thinking.

One reason that the Globe took this approach was that it fit popular pre-existing narrative whereby orderly Christian Canada was threatened by irreverent and destructive outsiders. This narrative was extremely common when communists were being targeted, but it was invoked to explain and belittle the rationalists as well. The reader will recall Rev. F.C. Ward-Whate having employed the reliable rhetoric of outside agitators (“mongrel curs”) during the Sterry case and calling for the rationalists to be immediately jailed and deported. At that time the Evening Telegram stressed the links between Canadian and American rationalists. In a breathless article entitled “U.S. Is Controlling Centre of Toronto’s Rationalism,” it warned that “organized atheism in this city is receiving support via the same channels as does Communism.” As proof, the Telegram pointed to the RSC’s friendly relationship with Franklin Steiner and his American Rationalist Association of Chicago, “whose horrible doctrines are a derivative of the black atheism of Moscow and Berlin.” In Ontario this type of anti-American imagery dated right back to the time of the United Empire Loyalists.

Toronto’s rationalists resented this line of attack and took pains to refute it. Cross “denied with considerable warmth” the claim that he had come from the United States. “I was born in the British West Indies, saw war service overseas and am now pleased to call myself a Canadian,” he told a Star reporter. When the Sterry incident began, Styles made a point of stating that the Rationalist Society stood for “the integrity of the British empire.” He and Leavens also strongly rejected the allegation that they were outsiders, insisting that they were, respectively, third- and fourth-generation Canadians. Styles derisively pointed out that it was Ward-Whate who was the immigrant. The clergyman would probably have seen no shame in that: he was a Briton, and Toronto was a British city. It was Americans and “other” foreigners who were the problem. We may, however, detect a certain irony in the fact that Canadian authorities wanted to eject Sterry from the body politic, even though he was a British citizen who had lived in Canada for seventeen years. The quality of “Britishness” was claimed by both Toronto’s elite and by the rationalists. It was frequently invoked by Toronto’s elite as a marker of their authority, but they hastily distanced themselves from it when it became a limitation or a liability."

- Elliot Hanowski, Towards A Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. p. 142-149.

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

From what I understand, they're not banning TikTok because it collects information, but because it collects information and there's no judicial or political separation between TikTok and the CCP? And y'all theoretically understand why that's a good thing, given your (rightful) criticisms of how El*n M*sk has been using Twitter to lie?

i'm like actually legitimately loving that the result of the tiktok ban is decimating decades of propaganda against china in record time. everyone is flocking to the actual chinese-owned version of tiktok called rednote where they are being welcomed so warmly with the silliest jokes like "i'm your assigned chinese spy! i've been waiting for you! welcome!" alskdjgsld. folks are already making attempts to learn some mandarin to better interact with the chinese users. everyone realizing what our own government collects on us is twice as harmful as anything ccp could do with it. everyone waking up to the fact that every fucking facet of the american internet is designed to harvest and sell personal data off of you so what the fuck does it actually matter anyway if one more entity does it. us government managed to speedrun undoing their own fucking brainwashing it's so goddamn funny.