#I thought this was America not a Communist Country

[fozmeadows]

There's a lot of conversations to be had around the current influx of Americans to Xiaohongshu (RedNote/Little Red Book) ahead of the TikTok ban, many of which are better articulated by more knowledgeable people than me. And for all the fun various parties of both nationalities seem to having with memes and wholesome interactions, it's undoubtedly true that there's also some American entitlement and exoticization going on, which sucks. But a sentiment I've seen repeatedly online is that, if it's taken actually speaking to Chinese people and viewing Chinese content for Americans to understand that they've been propagandized to about China and its people, then that just proves how racist they are, and I want to push back on that, because it strikes me as being a singularly reductive and unhelpful framing of something far more complex.

Firstly: while there's frequently overlap between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between them matters in this instance, because the primary point of American propaganda about China is that Communism Is Fundamentally Evil And Unamerican And Never Ever Works, and thinking a country's government sucks is not the same as thinking the population is racially inferior. The way most Republicans in particular talk about China, you'd think it was functionally indistinguishable from North Korea, which it really isn't. Does this mean there's no critique to be made of either communism in general or the CCP? Absolutely not! But if you've been told your whole life that communist countries are impoverished, corrupt and dangerous because Communism Never Works, and you've only really encountered members of the Chinese diaspora - i.e., people whose families left China, often under traumatic circumstances, because they thought America would be better or safer - rather than Chinese nationals, then no: it's not automatically racist to be surprised that their daily lives and standard of living don't match up with what you'd assumed. Secondly: TikTok's userbase skews young. While there's certainly Americans in their 30s and older investigating Xiaohongshu, it seems very reasonable to assume that the vast majority are in their teens or twenties - young enough that, barring a gateway interest in something like C-dramas, danmei or other Chinese cultural products, and assuming they're not of Chinese descent themselves, there's no reason why they'd know anything about China beyond what they've heard in the news, or from politicians, or from their parents, which is likely not much, and very little firsthand. But even with an interest in China, there's a difference between reading about or watching movies from a place, and engaging firsthand, in real time, with people from that place, not just through text exchanges, but in a visual medium that lets you see what their houses, markets, shopping centers, public transport, schools, businesses, infrastructure and landmarks look like. Does this mean that what's being observed isn't a curated perspective on China as determined both by Xiaohongshu's TOU and the demographic skewing of its userbase? Of course not! But that doesn't mean it isn't still a representative glimpse of a part of China, which is certainly more than most young Americans have ever had before.

Thirdly: I really need people to stop framing propaganda as something that only stupid bigots fall for, as though it's possible to natively resist all the implicit cultural biases you're raised with and exist as a perfect moral being without ever having to actively challenge yourself. To cite the sacred texts:

Like. Would the world be a better place if everyone could just Tell when they're being lied to and act accordingly? Obviously! But that is extremely not how anything actually works, and as much as it clearly discomforts some to witness, the most common way of realizing you've been propagandized to about a particular group of people is to interact with them. Can this be cringe and awkward and embarrassing at times? Yes! Will some people inevitably say something shitty or rude during this process? Also yes! But the reality is that cultural exchange is pretty much always bumpy to some extent; the difficulties are a feature, not a bug, because the process is inherently one of learning and conversation, and as individual people both learn at different rates and have different opinions on that learning, there's really no way to iron all that out such that nobody ever feels weird or annoyed or offput. Even interactions between career diplomats aren't guaranteed smooth sailing, and you're mad that random teenagers interacting through a language barrier in their first flush of enthusiasm for something new aren't doing it perfectly? Come on now.

Fourthly: Back before AO3 was banned in China, there was a period where the site was hit with an influx of Chinese users who, IIRC, were hopping over when one of their own fansites got shut down, which sparked a similar conversation around differences in site etiquette and how to engage respectfully. Which is also one of the many things that makes the current moment so deeply ironic: the US has historically criticized China for exactly the sort of censorship and redaction of free speech that led to AO3 being banned, and yet is now doing the very same thing with TikTok. Which is why what's happening on Xiaohongshu is, IMO, such an incredible cultural moment: because while there are, as mentioned, absolutely relevant things to be said about (say) Chinese censorship, US-centrism, orientalism and so on, what's ultimately happening is that, despite - or in some sense because of - the recent surge in anti-Chinese rhetoric from US politicians, a significant number of Americans who might otherwise never have done so are interacting directly with Chinese citizens in a way that, whatever else can be said of it, is actively undermining government propaganda, and that matters.

What it all most puts me in mind of, in fact, is a quote from French-Iranian novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, namely:

“The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

And at this particular moment in history, this strikes me as being a singularly powerful realization for Americans in particular to have.

[edgybutnotveryedgy]

You know, i actually do think it would be fun to work on a show with a toyline and stuff. Like i don't see why you can't have an interesting story while still being an over glorified commercial. Like by all means i would want to work on more mature shows with deeper more complex stories as well, but i also don't see why one of the toy selling shows can't have good stories too.

If anything, I'd say that pushing the narrative that those shows are nothing but cheap capitalist garbage is for one invalidating to the artists who both design the toys and characters, as well as i feel like it keeps up the idea that media for children isn't worth investing much time and effort. Idk why not have fun making goofy shows with dolls and action figures that kids can watch with said dolls and action figures. There's just something so fun about the idea of kids being able to watch a show and then make up their own stories for the show with their toys.

I know that i did that when i was a kid, with shows like kids next door, avatar: the last air bender, teen titans, phineas and ferb, adventure time, etc. I didn't even have toys for those shows, but i know if i did, i would have had the best time playing out scenarios i came up with for those shows (there was a lot). Tbh if i ever have kids, i especially love the idea of being able to make a show and ask them what they think should happen and having fun with that.

Like idk. There's something that is so kid friendly about having shows like this. Unfortunately we live in a world where it's not always about the kids though, but about the money, and as a result i do feel like that can taint how said shows are produced. In general i think we need more Lauren Faust's and Man of Action's making childrens media and less money grubbing scumbags

[mesetacadre]

Is the belief at all valid that ultimately there is nothing much we in the imperial core can do for the global south (i.e palestine) and that liberation is largely in their hands only? Was there any time historically where that wasn't the case?

Maybe I am just doom and glooming but it really doesn't feel like there is much we can affect (though I still attend protest and do whatever my party tells me to, I don't air out these thoughts because I don't think they are productive)

Primarly I feel like building a base here for when shit goes south is the only thing we can do

My friend, we can't forget that, while imperialism is committed outside of our reach, it is fueled, supported, and justified in our countries. National liberation movements fight in their own frontlines, and we fight in the rearguard. If you have the impression that any real progress is impossible from our position, that is a product of the very limited development of the subjective conditions in your country. You and I have seen a myriad of protests and encampments this last year, which have had overwhelmingly no material effects on the genocide, but this is not inescapable.

In Greece, where the KKE is a legitimate communist party in the eyes of a significant portion of the Greek working class, their organization in and out of the workplace is very capable. In the 17th of October they, co-organizing with the relevant union and other entities (small note because when this happened some tumblr users seemed to misspeak, this action would have been impossible without the help and involvement of the KKE, take a look at the US to see what trade unions do without communist influence), blocked a shipment of bullets to Israel:

And merely a week ago, they blocked another shipment of ammunition meant to further fuel the imperialist war in Ukraine:

The differentiating factor in Greece that is not present arguably anywhere else in Europe and North America is their strong and established communist party, even their presence exerts an indirect influence in the broader working class, communist or not.

So are the rest of us meant to sit in our milquetoast protests and watch on with envy at the Greeks? No, because these are subjective conditions, and we have control over them. Even if most actions we do don't achieve anything materially, we gain experience, and the base for a proper organization of our class is built up. It's not just building that base for when something goes wrong in our countries, it's building a better base for the very next mobilization, the next action, the next imperialist aggression. The student movement of the imperial core is better off now in terms of lessons to be learned after the encampments than if they hadn't done anything (and the utility of the encampments wasn't completely null anyway, some unis in Spain have ceased all economic and academic relations with Israel).

[apas-95]

Hello, I'm sorry for bothering.

A lot of fellow comrades have been posting quite a bit about anarchists lately and I've noticed that they seem to be the majorly from North America (predominantly the US).

Do you think the heavy anti-communist propaganda in these countries is a big influence on, at least online, people's radicalization into anarchism and the aversion to us as "authoritarian takies"?

I've always felt like anarchism is not demonized as much (most anti anarchist propaganda, if you could even call it that, is the propagation of the rule-breaker rebel teen that cares for no one stereotype) because it simply isn't a threat to the capitalism like socialism and communism are. It feels like they'd prefer that people get radicalized into anarchism as it would be both improbable to have a revolution and if it did happen power would be easily taken back. Am I crazy, or does this make sense?

In general, yes, anarchism is significantly more popular in the imperial core; and during the cold war all sorts of 'anti-authoritarian' currents of thought were promoted by the west states as a means of countering Marxism-Leninism.

The most popular anticommunist works, like 1984, which was internationally published and adapted directly by the CIA and British intelligence, are ones that promote a supposedly 'leftist' opposition to socialism. The bourgeoisie would much prefer to deal with anarchists than Marxist-Leninists, which shouldn't come as anything of a surprise, given the last 100 years have been defined by their existential scramble to try to defeat Marxist-Leninist projects composed of hundreds of millions of politically-conscious workers armed with the most advanced weaponry and industrial bases - and the most successful anarchist projects have been, at best, small states formed in the power vacuums of civil wars led by Marxist-Leninist parties, or, more commonly, some sort of protest camp/community garden that gets destroyed as soon as a single cop walks into it.

Also posting the image to clown around a bit fhfhfh

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[asterrrrion]

Okay I should definitely be sleeping rn but ! I need to say this : I've seen a lot of international (mainly American people) on the internet describing the general situation of the world as chaotic etc because of Syria and Korea and Brian fucking Thompson and France (which is what I'm going to talk about here).

First off, the current french situation isn't really that groundbreaking or anything new right now, the country has been in a political crisis for... a while now, at the very least since 2018-19 although in my opinion it started much earlier.

It has been really chaotic for now nearly five months, since Macron dissolved the Parliament and the acting government in June after the European elections (there was a political strategy at play here however it failed pathetically which is something I'll get to later) ; however this isn't something on the scale of what happened in Korea, not even mentioning Syria. The government and the people are just (much like in America) extremely polarised because of years of neoliberal political decisions and it's showing and slowing the government down.

Tale as old as time, I know.

However ! I ask of you to never say that the extreme left and the extreme right united among themselves to take the centrist government down. While the Rassemblement National is a far right party (who is currently being charged for stealing a shitload of cash btw, hope you like the taste of lawsuits Marine), our current President Emmanuel Macron and his party (I would give you the name but tbh they've rebranded so many times I can't remember what it is rn so let's just use the old one En Marche) are NOT a centrist party, and LFI, even more so the NFP are NOT a far left coalition/party.

Saying they were a centrist party was what carried them through the 2017 presidential election until it became abundantly clear if it wasn't already that they were in fact very right-wing.

Macron started out in the Socialist Party who is, these days, not very socialist anymore and who we can in fact barely call left-wing as they tend to have pretty much the same ideals as you guys' democrats (which are our centrists, basically, we have different political scales).

So, to summarise (I am warning you right now I have unmedicated adhd and am studying history with a deep love for political history this will be 5000 words long) nearly fifteen years of french politics to analyse what got us into this mess and why I'm asking you to not say these parties are far left parties, here's this :

There are a lot of different political parties in France. Anyone can create one, and so that means that the left's biggest problem for the past *checks notes* now a bit more than a century, has been division.

The socialist party and the communist party, which used to make up most of the left wing, separated in 1921 or 22 can't remember over the 3rd International and the Soviet Union. That created the historical division between far left and left : which one wanted to overthrow the government (in the 1920s the anarchists and communists which... to the left is still the same today actually) and which one thought elections were the best way to change things (the socialists).

The communists were big for a long time but they kinda got demonized after the Marshall Plan for obvious reasons, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, while they remained the French Communist Party (PCF for short) they kinda stopped actively having communist ideals and being a big party. Nowadays they still exist but are a pretty small party and aren't exactly big revolutionaries (nor, to be honest, big communists).

The socialists had their time of glory, the Front Populaire, in 1936. It was an alliance between all left-wing parties to forbid the far right from being elected basically, as they had just attempted a basically coup d'état but not really a few months earlier. The thirties were, for also obvious reasons, a pretty rocky time in Europe. They did very very good (i'm a leftist if you haven't noticed by now. Also, duh, this is Tumblr.) social policies for the first year but quickly had to stop due to various economical and military issues and resorted to a pretty default not doing much type of governing (I promise you, this WILL become the signature pattern of the PS or socialist party).

They were elected again in the 80s, and pretty much did the same thing, and then again in 2012, and by then they were hardly a left wing party anymore, mostly a bunch of at best left centrists politicians and at worst right wing opportunists. So a new party emerged called La France Insoumise (LFI) who is now the biggest french left wing party led by an extremely controversial figure who has a bit of an ego problem (they've also, objectively, made a bunch of shitty decisions on handling inner politics of the party but we won't get into that).

Forgot to mention this but there's also the Greens, Les Verts, an ecologist party with vaguely leftist ideologies. Their ecology program is pretty much the same as LFI's but it doesn't really hurt to vote for them except for the presidential election.

Now, the Republicans on the other hand (our Republicans. not yours. obviously.) used to be a left-centrist wing party but they slowly became a right wing one at the beginning of the 20th/end of the 19th century as the monarchists and imperialists got the fuck out of the Parliament and the socialists came in. This is a prime example of a political scale being tipped to one side (rarely seen this way around). What you need to know is that except for Mitterrand in the 80s and Hollande in 2012, the country has been exclusively led by these guys from 1959 onwards. Or, not necessarily these guys but similar parties (yes I'm looking at you De Gaulle). Nowadays they're extremely divided and the whole party is falling apart between far right and traditional conservative right.

The Rassemblement National which used to be called the Front National (so RN or anciently FN) is a far right party who was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and a few nazis. Yes, you did read that right. No, I'm not joking. Funnily enough Jean-Marie was in the Resistance, but I don't wanna know what goes on in that guy's mind. They're now led by his daughter (as the dude is on death's door now, but there has been some family drama there also), Marine Le Pen, who has worked very hard in the past few years to make the party go from outwardly racist, misogynistic and homophobic to covertly racist, misogynistic and homophobic.

This means that aaaall of the decisions that caused poverty and misery for french citizens, mainly the lack of funding that goes into public service and the abandonment of any and all rural areas has led a lot of people to turn to the now not as demonized as before RN.

On the other side the left wing has been eating itself alive since Hollande in 2012 because of rivalries between the Socialist Party and LFI, which has cost them several times the presidential election, and less and less people are voting since more and more people are losing hope in modern politics.

Which leads us to 2017 : the election of Emmanuel Macron as President. Macron was originally a banker and Minister of the Economy under Hollande, but he changed sides and left the Socialist Party in 2016 to create En Marche, a party that was supposed to be a centrist party but was quite obviously a right wing one.

As the left was divided, LFI's leader and the socialist leader were outvoted in favour of him and Marine Le Pen for a second vote to determine the President ; this was his strategy. As long as the left was divided, he would win the first round of voting, then the second, because he knew that left-wing people would ALWAYS vote for him against Le Pen.

A LOT of shit happened under his mandate (to name a few, COVID, the gilets jaunes etc) all of which were handled very badly, and all of his decisions were neoliberal shit as always which didn't help anything and made it actively worse. That wasn't helped by the guy's ego (I am not kidding most politicians are arrogant but this is like on another level this dude seriously, dead-ass thinks he's the smartest person in any room he walks in) and general condescending behaviour and statements (like when he said "I like train stations, because you meet both people who have succeeded and people who are nothing". yeah. turns out the nation he's supposed to be representing wasn't a big fan of that one. wonder why).

In 2022 most people hated his guts, but as the left was still divided because the fucking socialists can't admit they're not the biggest leftist party anymore and the threat of the far right in power was more present than ever, he got re-elected. The thing is, right afterwards the presidential elections is held the legislatives. They're the election of both the Senate and the National Assembly, so the Whole Parliament.

Normally, this would just be a formality, as a people who has elected a president literally four weeks ago is generally going to vote for his party. It's important to note here, than TRADITIONALLY (can you hear the anger in my voice yet ?) the President, when choosing a Prime Minister, is supposed to choose from the biggest political party represented in the National Assembly. When that party is from another party than the President's, we call this a cohabitation.

Cohabitations are always a messy but pretty fun time, as the Prime Minister, usually only a lackey of the President, is now a member from an opposing party and as he has, constitutionally, enormous legal power (that he, usually, as a lackey of the President, only uses to support the President's politics). The thing is we hadn't had a cohabitation in a long-ass time, because the amount of time presidents were elected was specifically changed to avoid them and put the legislatives right afterwards the presidential election. The other thing is, when the entire country is only voting for you because the only other alternative is the far right...

Now, in 2022, the biggest party elected was still the President's. However, it was only a relative majority instead of an absolute one, which meant that they had to have support should they want to pass any law. So, instead of finding allies, they chose to use a lovely article of the Constitution, the now infamous in France 49.3. This article means that on budget laws (and ONLY on budget laws which... is definitely going to be totally respected and not at all ambiguously used) the government (read : the Prime Minister) can make a text of law bypass the National Assembly and be automatically applied.

But the Assembly has then the choice to vote in order to demote the Parliament. They tried. It nearly went through. It didn't though, in the end, because the Republicans were too divided for it to go through. However both of the major opposing forces, the entire left wing and the far right party the RN, voted it if I remember correctly. And most of the past two years until summer 2024 were just the government fighting with the National Assembly. They used a metric ton of 49.3, it's now a meme (and also a widely antidemocratic tactic that everyone hates).

In the summer of 2024, there were the European elections. Each country votes, and ours voted for the far right. Like, a lot. I'm not kidding when I say that the situation with the RN is pretty fucking critical. What matters here is also that the President's Party had a ridiculously low score.

Now, Macron won't be re-elected. He can't. Like, physically. You can't be elected more than twice in France. But he wants someone of his party to take over after he leaves (which btw is going to be difficult, I'll be very surprised if en marche lasts three weeks without him since they're also divided as hell), so he needs it to be popular.

So he did something that he thought was smart : he dissolved the government and the Parliament. That meant we had to have a new legislative election. We were scared shirtless as we were all sure the RN would be elected and we'd have an RN prime minister, which we know now by some sources is what Macron intended to be able to prove that his party is the best alternative to the far right in order to continue to be elected in the next Presidential elections in 2027.

But the morning after the annunciation, then LFI MP Ruffin called for an union of the left wing parties, which was by the way done remarkably quickly for parties that have been at each others throats for the past ten years (forgot to mention this but it HAD to be done quickly as our rat bastard President put the election literally a month and a half after annunciation).

So now Macron needed something to discredit the left in order to be considered the only candidate against the RN. And he found his thing : he demonized them. Because of their public support for Palestine, they were suddenly antisemitic (this is particularly vicious as antisemitic hate crimes have in fact been an issue since the beginning of the Palestinian genocide in France and a lot of Jewish people here are scared of antisemitism for, yk, very good reasons) and a far left party who was basically anti republican and composed of revolutionaries.

And it worked ! It helped that LFI has been seen as such for a while for a variety of reasons, mostly baseless, and that everyone conveniently forgot that the leftist union was and is made up of four different parties. The far left does not exist in the National Assembly in France. Not in the communist party, not in LFI. I'm not the one saying this, official statements by the state council are. But every right wing politician forgets that because it gets them elected. And people believe them. So stop spreading that lie, please.

The first round of voting was led by the far right, so for the second, Macron and the left allied themselves : in every district of voting where a leftist candidate, a macronist candidate and a far right candidate were still competing against each other, the candidate of the two with the least votes would resign their candidature to be able to give as little votes to the far right as possible.

In truth this wasn't completely followed by Macronists especially, some refusing to resign when against an lfi candidate, which is completely ridiculous and personally disgusts me. But it worked, and the left-wing won the election with the far right coming in third place. I cried that day, actually, from relief, as embarrassing as it is.

So that meant that Macron had to name, TRADITIONALLY, a left wing prime minister. Several names were offered (which was difficult as the socialists and government would veto any lfi member and the communists and LFI would veto any socialist member) and Macron said that he wouldn't name any government who had members from lfi in it. So the lfi leader did a pretty beautiful move and pulled out all of the lfi members of any and all propositions of government (this being, I remind, the biggest left wing party in France).

Macron still named a right-wing prime minister, denying the elections' result and preferring to work with the far right than with the left, left which might I recall got him elected. Anyway. So we got a very right wing government, borderline far right to appease the RN, who only managed to stay in place because of that fact.

They had to make 49.3 for most laws they wanted to pass as the Assembly was heavily divided in the past months. The leftist union voted to demote the government every time, but the RN wouldn't. And then, a week or two ago, on one of the most restrictive budget propositions for public service this country has ever seen, they remembered they had to look like they care about poor people since that's, you know, their electorate, and since the budget was of course forced through with 49.3 voted also to demote the government.

So now we have a new prime minister, supposedly more to the left although still, obviously, a right-winger. Nothing much changed. Can't fucking wait for 2027... And please don't say that the leftist union is far left or that Macron is a centrist. Neither are true.

[mydogatemymotivation]

(I tend to ramble and this post ended up getting long so I apologize.) I know this is dumb and totally the wrong thing to focus on during all this but I'm crashing out and I need a distraction.

I feel like I understand Kallus better. Like as a character. I've always loved him but this whole tiktok/xiaohongshu thing has helped me understand him. I know that that's weird but hear me out:

I always knew China wasn't what the government said it was, I've always wanted to learn Mandarin, thought the traditional clothes were beautiful, yadda, yadda. I never understood the narrative about China, I just thought, "there's no way that's all true". But, and its probably because I'm white, I never realized just how deeply ingrained sinophobia really was in the US until I was watching people on tiktok react to what they were seeing on xhs. the "omg, i didn't know what Shanghai looked like", the "wow, Chinese people are, like, normal people" (bruh). But what's insane here and why I thought of Kallus, other than Rebels living in my mind permanently (help), is how quickly the veil lifted for everyone.

It took one (1) night of scrolling for decades of American propaganda to fall apart. Completely. I've always thought these stories about someone learning the truth behind the lie needed to be done over time and from that standpoint I always thought that someone like Zuko had the more realistic story because he took pretty much all of season 2 and half of season three to figure it out. None of this is an insult to Zuko, of course, I think his character arc was done exactly the way it needed to be done. But it felt more realistic because I figured someone who had been subjected to so much propaganda his whole life wouldn't be able to undo all of it in one night, so from that point of view, Kallus' arc felt too quick.

Not anymore. I never considered the "jenga" method. Instead of taking months of work and travel and seeing everything with his own two eyes (methodically removing the lies piece by piece), it took one night where the veil was not lifted, but shredded entirely (the tower toppling because one piece was removed), where there was no one around to stop Zeb from looking Kallus square in the eye and telling him exactly what he needed to hear and showing him what he needed to see. And one night later Kallus went back to the Empire and saw right through everything decades of propaganda had tried to sell him. Imagine you're in a dark room and you finally find a light switch, you flip it, only to realize the room you're in is a disaster. You can turn the light back off if you want but you know what the room looks like now.

Americans got on xhs and were asked if we actually had to pay for ambulances or if that was just communist propaganda, if we really needed two jobs to survive, we saw the price of groceries in China, the advanced technology that's banned in the US, Americans saw a man preparing feed for his pigs and the food was such high quality that we thought it was for someones lunch until we saw the pigs on camera, this week we learned the Chinese don't pay property tax which is why there's less homelessness. Not saying China is a utopia, of course, they're still a dictatorship and all, but the standard of living is so insane. Even as someone who could kind of see that China wasn't what the government said it was, I'm still just floored. Even I didn't realize the difference was that stark. I knew America was atrocious, but this is actually insane.

Apparently I'm processing everything happening in my country through the lens of Star Wars. Because today I'm thinking I understand Kallus like I never have. He didn't need to be convinced, he just had to see the difference for himself. Americans (or in this case citizens from the Core Systems) end up too complacent. At a certain point Kallus' youthful idealism (that he probably had at some point, it seemed like he really wanted the Empire to be what it promised) eventually would've given way to an almost corporate apathy where he clocked into his desk job every morning and went home at night and tried to forget his workday. Disillusioned, but not seeing any way out, and hoping that everything wasn't what he knew it to be deep down.

There's one scene of him that no one ever talks about but it sticks out in my mind. I believe it's at the end of the episode (I don't remember the name) where Vader realizes Ahsoka is alive, he comes back to the Star Destroyer to contact the Emperor and Kallus is shooed away. As he's leaving he stops at the door and glares over his shoulder at Vader before the door shuts. I don't know why that one quick scene stands out to me so much but its one of his standout pre-fulcrum scenes to me and if you blink you miss it. I think it proves that he is disillusioned, that it shows there's a thought process in him that isn't "imperial approved", that he doesn't trust the people in power the same way we don't trust the people in our own government.

I really think Kallus is the best representation of American citizens right now. The thought process he has, the deconstruction, the disillusionment that has nowhere to go, the feeling you're doing something right, knowing deep down you're not, talking yourself into a knot to justify what you can't until eventually the dam breaks. Him leaving the Empire is so much wish fulfillment for a lot of people. Imagine there was an organized rebel movement in the United States right now that had backing, funding, militant organization, and a solid plan to take down the systems in place and tell me right now you wouldn't join the second you had a way in. Makes sense that at the end of the series he tells Pryce that he "stopped betraying himself". He knew, just like we all know.

Anyway. I lost tiktok tonight. Americans lost their first amendment rights tonight, even if you weren't on tiktok you should understand the gravity of this situation. I don't know why my brain has latched onto Star Wars to get me through this but you know what. Whatever.

I might be posting more here. I think I need a place where I can have interaction and discussion with people but we'll see. For now, have a directionless ramble.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 1, 2025

I do not much like the destruction of books. As a form of protest, it conjures sinister images from the past, most notably the Pathé news reels of brownshirts and students gathered around a pyre in Berlin’s Opernplatz under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis had raided libraries, universities and other private collections to harvest works by political dissidents, sexologists, “degenerate” artists and any others deemed to be “un-German”. Books by Left-wing authors such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Rosa Luxemburg were publicly incinerated, along with fictional works by the likes of Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. This was philistinism in its purest form.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalise his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lacklustre commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organisation devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalised religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behaviour is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will baulk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalisation of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalisation of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

--

==

"Why can't you just comply with our authoritarian religious codes?"

Because you want me to. Your religious codes are for you, not me.

This is literally terrorism. We are supposed to be afraid of what will happen to us if we don't submit to Islamic totalitarianism. That is reason enough to not just resist, but actively oppose and defy Islamic totalitarian demands.

[manie-sans-delire-x]

One of the many issues with the whole "women arent oppressed for being female/their sex isnt the basis of their oppression, its their gender" idea is that its basically saying that women are responsible for their own oppression/choosing their own oppression, and could easily escape it by simply choosing to be a man, then. If its your gender thats oppressing you, right? Why not? Lets just all be men.

It is mindblowing to me, how such a ridiculous, so obviously untrue, so easily dismantled idea became so widespread over the past few years. I had never heard of such nonsense, and suddenly it was everywhere. Its genuinely scary, and makes you lose a lot of faith in the public and humans in general.

And not to be too dramatic, but like, I never understood before, how an entire country could fall to the obvious lies and evil tactics of say, Nazi propaganda, or the Red Scare in America, and be able to become utterly convinced that one population was The Enemy- the source of all their problems, pure evil, who hated them and wanted to harm and kill them, when it was the complete opposite, whether it be the Jews or communists. To convince others to not listen to a word they say, lest they realize the truth, and any word of defense or sympathy for that one population was to be met in harsh punishment, that the person was now just as bad as the hated group. Any prior agreement now to be immediately nulled as soon as the accusation is made. No further thought allowed, under threat of social persecution. Believe and condemn any other thought or else. Race traitor, communist, non-believer, witch.

I do now.

[theyhavetakenovermylife]

Hiii! If you remember I'm your croatian follower, we talked about crazy balkan media and eurovision. I just switched accounts and deleted my old one. But that's besides the point because this USA vs European fans one shot made me laugh.

But I personally think the person who would give European reader the most shit about the differences would be Vern. I think he would just group all slavic accents as Russians or Europeans from bigger countries as fancy french folk etc. Or he would be kinda offended because we tend to be alot more blunt even if not with ill intentions

I also think master splinter would probably be most eager to learn and try the traditional foods and drinks.

Anyway I just wanted to share my thoughts and possibly talk to you. Unfortunately when I deleted my account I lost all the posts I liked from your blog but I'm sure I'll have more to like now on my new account. Hope you are doing well😊

Hello my favorite Croat!💚

I have a feeling that Splinter would just know a bunch of stuff about all sorts of countries, European or not. He will know a lot about traditions, and even if he has no idea what one is talking about, he will happily listen and ask questions, and even ask you to show him, how you cook certain foods.

Fucking, Vern is the time of guy that say "Europe, EU. What's the difference?", say that Slovenia and Slovakia is the same country, believe that Denmark and the Netherlands is the same country, yet somehow group Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and the Netherlands as Germany. I have so many.

"Of course I know about Europe, (Y/N)! There's the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia and Russia!"

Andorra? He has never head of it. Luxembourg? Nope. Monaco? Hell no. San Marino? Doesn't ring a bell. The Vatican? - "That's just Rome".

"Isn't Ireland in the UK?"

"You know, Scandinavia. Just like Finland".

"What do you mean Yugoslavia isn't a country anymore?"

"Did that Brit really just say fag to me???"

"Greece, Italy, Spain, all the same. They are old".

"Georgia is not in Europe! It's a state, (Y/N)!"

"Speak slowly (Y/N). I don't speak European".

"Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? What is that?"

"Moldova? What's that?"

"Romania isn't in Russia???"

"WAIT PRUSSIA ISN'T JUST OLD RUSSIA?!"

Or some inspired by things actual Americans have asked me or told me and my mom (my mom lived a year in the US in a Bible Belt state):

"Do you have phones in your home country, (Y/N)?"

"How was your first experience on a high way? No, I've never heard of the Autobahn".

"Hey, Europe. In America we speak English".

"Walkable cities are a scam".

"Wait. If you're European, (Y/N), then are you a communist?"

"Don't lie to me, (Y/N). There's no black people in European. You are all too racist for that".

And the one that almost made me throw hands:

"Denmark doesn't exist. You live in the Netherlands".

BITCH VERN, WE MIGHT BOTH BE FLAT AS FUCK, BUT OUR WINDMILLS ARE NOTHING ALIKE!!! THEY HAVE GABBER! WE HAVE DAKKE! THEY HAVE STROOPWAFEL! WE HAVE BUTTER COOKIES!! WE'RE NOT THE SAME!!!

Yeah, I feel like Vern would get more than a few slaps from a European reader😂

[jordanas-left-shoulderpad]

not my usual sideblog fare (and i probably won’t be posting more about the election on here) but i was reading this article earlier and honestly — it’s one of the better articles i’ve read about why the election went the way it did. it’s relatively brief, but touches on a range of factors, and both campaigns.

“Quite remarkably, the Trump campaign successfully branded Harris as both a communist – lax on law and order – and simultaneously too tough on crime. To many, she was both an ineffective vice-president and one who had her hands all over the Biden administration. Voters held these facts in their heads at once – and would not be persuaded otherwise.”

“Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers” … Many conversations would start with positive discussions on policy and then end on Harris and her gender. That is an extraordinary and uncomfortable truth.”

“I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false: the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.”

[weirdestcountryhumans]

North Korea and the Countryhumans Fandom: What We Get Wrong and Other Common Fandom Tropes That Make No Sense (To Me)

This is the spiritual sequel to this East Germany post. Disclaimer, asI feel I need to say this, knowing I am probably going to get comments on it.

This is not a post made in support of the North Korean government. I recognize and know that it is a dictatorship with a history of human rights abuses. This is a post criticizing a portrayal of North Korea as being nothing more than a terrible government.

North Koreans are people too, and condemning them all as evil due to a bad government is a shitty thing to do.

The first thing is the NK is evil and a terrible person, which has so many things wrong with it that I'm just going to break it down into smaller parts.

Nuke Obsession:

Pointed out to be by @geisterland, why does everyone make him the one obsessed with nukes? NK was not part of the nuclear arms race, and, if anything, like Geist pointed out, America and Russia/USSR be the ones obsessed with nukes because they were the ones who were a part of the nuclear arms race and also have so fucking many.

Anger Issues:

This is a matter of portrayal rather than a flaw in this character trait. It is not a bad thing to give North Korea anger issues, but it is a bad thing to portray the things he is angry about as unreasonable.

For example, painting North Korea as being angry over the Korean War and having that being a bad thing is a poor portrayal. Like it or not, North Korea has every right to be angry about a war, as many war crimes were committed against North Korea, like bombs, as well as torture of North Korean and Chinese prisoners.

While the North Koreans did start the war, Kim Il Sung told members of the communist party that South Korea had attacked first. That, although a lie, combined with the war crimes, gives North Korea every right to be upset. I am not saying that North Korea is innocent of war crimes in the Korean War; I am just saying that North Korea is well within its rights to be mad about this. This isn't something that North Korea would be unreasonably mad about, and his people did not "deserve" it.

Brainwashed by Government/No Free Will/Secretly Hates the NK Government:

Grouping these all together because I feel that they all have similar vibes.

First off is brainwashed by the government/no free will. As @geisterland pointed out, "Knowing how people treat real-life N. Koreans as just actors hired by the government to trick the foreigners, it just feels especially dehumanizing with him" (quoted directly cause they put it so well). It is very dehumanizing to portray him as being nothing but his government's beliefs. While yes, North Korea is a dictatorship, that does not mean that North Korea is incapable of his own thoughts (well, it depends on headcanons around dictatorships, I guess, but that is beside the point).

The point is that North Korea is going to have thoughts and opinions of his own and, like some countryhumans, may play an active role in the government. While it is not wrong to acknowledge that the North Korean government does create propaganda and does lie to it's people (although what country doesn't), North Korea is not that. Let the man have fucking hobbies. Make North Korea a person, not a caricature of what you think the country is.

This also ties into "secretly hates the North Korean government." It is a very Western view, the idea that North Korea has to hate his government because it is "evil" and he needs to be saved. North Korea is the country. He can probably be a little vocal about things he dislikes. I'm not saying make North Korea obey the government completely, see last point, but that North Korea is going to have mixed views on things, complicated feelings on others. He can like certain things about his government and dislike others. He is a person. Even people who adore their governments can find something they dislike.

Again, this is something I know is hard for a lot of people, myself included, to write because everything about it seems to intensely political. But here's a great tip.

You aren't writing politics. You're writing a person.

If you are unsure of how he might see things, check out North Korean newspapers. If you are unsure about how he might feel on something, and you don't feel that the sources you can find are trustworthy, maybe don't write that, or maybe his feelings are complicated on that.

But you can't overgeneralize things. North Korea is going to be as complex as any person. Maybe his government does lie to him, maybe his government tells him everything. Maybe he supports something because he wants to, or maybe he's doing it because he sees it as the best option. His relationship with his government can be complex and confusing.

He's a person. Not a robot. Not his government.

Make him a person.

Poorly Written English to show he is Asian:

Comes off as racist.

Hermit Kingdom Stereotypes

North Korea isn't liked by much of the Western World. He has been sanctioned by many, many countries. Part of these stereotypes come from the struggles that North Korea has as a country. I'm not saying North Korea cannot be an introvert. I'm just saying if you are going to make this a basis of her personality, you can maybe do at least a quick Google search to learn why this is.

North Korea knows nothing of the outside world

UN Member, and therefore, a member of subsequent UN bodies. A member of the World Federation of Trade Unions, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Group of 77, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Asia-African Legal Consultative Organization, International Hydrographic Organization and many, many more.

Does NK just never go to any of these political meetings? Is he locked in his capital 24/7?

He has to know something about the outside world. Even if he doesn't like leaving his country, there are so many organizations that he is a part of that I find it hard to believe he has never left it once.

Conclusion

I know people can get iffy when it comes to writing countries with dictatorships. I know it can be hard to balance what is the government, what is the people, what is the propaganda, how can I e sure I am doing it right?

But it is better to try and fail than not try at all.

You don't have to like the North Korean government. But the people of North Korea deserve to have a better portrayal of their country. They deserve to be seen more as just an evil dictatorship.

For the love of God, make North Korea a person.

[mariacallous]

Years after being accused of swinging a baseball bat at police officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Edward “Jake” Lang is now using encrypted messaging channels to create a nationwide network of armed militias in all 50 states.

Though he has been in prison for over 1,200 days, Lang is working with a network of election deniers and conspiracists to promote the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm for short. The group officially launched last week with 50 state-specific militia groups on Telegram.

Lang claims that the Telegram groups already have 20,000 members, including pastors, farmers, former military personnel, and currently serving sheriffs. However, multiple experts who reviewed the channels tell WIRED said that figure was wildly overestimated and that the real figure was closer to 2,500 members. But a group this size, they warn, is still large enough to cause a serious threat. And while unarmed members are welcome, the group is, at its core, a pro-gun organization. “We are pro open carry, pro always have it on you, rather than waiting for somebody else to be able to defend your life,” says Lang.

As the 2024 US election approaches, Lang says that Napalm will be focusing on potential “civil unrest” around the vote. “We have to make sure that we're prepared for any real-time scenarios, any eventualities,“ says Lang. “Civil unrest at any given moment, especially around an election time, is something that could come along, and so we have to plan for that contingency as well.”

Tensions around the November vote are already at an all-time high, and many Republicans refuse to say if they will peacefully accept the outcome of the November election. Over one-third of Americans now baselessly claim that President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was illegitimate. These conspiracies have led to a resurgence in far-right activity, of which Napalm is just the latest facet: Lang, along with all other members of the group’s leadership council, ardently believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump.

“We've noted considerable energy being put into resurrecting far-right paramilitary activism right now,” Devin Burghart, the executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), tells WIRED. “The growing talk of ‘Second Amendment remedies’ to unfavorable electoral outcomes is a serious cause for concern. Militia groups like Napalm promote political violence and sow the seeds for another potential insurrection.”

In addition to the election, Lang says that Napalm will respond to everything from natural disasters to Federal overreach, political protests, and potential Chinese invasions.

“I thought it was necessary to get organized in case these encroachments, these violations of our civil liberties, our natural rights were to escalate to a point where it'd absolutely be untenable and that we would need to defend ourselves.” Lang tells WIRED from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he is awaiting a trial set for September. “There is a tyrannical wave that has hit America that we've never seen before. And so it's time that people get organized in case they escalate to something that basically puts our very lives in danger.”

Lang, 29, is from upstate New York. He claims to have been an ecommerce entrepreneur and nightclub promoter before getting sober and finding God in late 2020. At the same time, Lang was getting deeper into “truther content” online that claimed Marxists and Communists were ruining the country. This content overlapped with election-denial conspiracies that led to the Capitol riot and inspired Lang to travel to DC.

Days after January 6, Lang was recruiting people into an armed militia on Telegram that would ostensibly fight against the incoming regime of President Biden.

“It was the first battle of the Second American Revolution—make no mistakes,” Lang wrote about the Capitol riot, according to a tranche of thousands of messages obtained by ProPublica. “This is WAR.”

That effort ended days later when Lang was arrested and charged with multiple counts of assaulting law enforcement officers, as well as felony charges of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding—some of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

After he was arrested, Lang became a figurehead for January 6 prisoners who have been falsely portrayed as “hostages” or “warriors” by Trump and his supporters. While in prison, Lang has published a book, helped produce several films, hosted his own podcast, and raised millions of dollars for inmates and their families—all related to the January 6 attack.

“It's important to recognize that Lang is, first and foremost, a grifter who knows that his ‘political prisoner’ schtick is his only shot at relevance,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “This is someone who has intentionally delayed his own trial date in an effort to remain in the spotlight and who continues to promote violent conspiracies.”

And though Lang’s original attempt at starting a militia on Telegram ended with just a few hundred followers and his arrest, he says that he has spent the past year creating Napalm from his cell with the help of far-right figures from around the country.

Among those who Lang has convinced to join his initiative is QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, who is the groups’ national vice chairman. Former New Mexico county commissioner Couy Griffin, who is known as the leader of Cowboys for Trump, is also on the council. In 2022, Griffin refused to certify the results of a primary election vote.

Stew Peters, who will act as the militia’s national communications director, is a Florida-based antisemitic podcaster who shot to prominence in recent years by pushing Covid conspiracies, including a wild claim that Covid vaccines were derived from snake venom. The claim was so outlandish that even other conspiracy theorists dismissed his claims as “trash.” Peters has also pushed QAnon conspiracies and white supremacist content and even called for the death sentence for the “traitors” that he claimed have stolen the elections.

When the site launched last week, one of those listed as a member of the council was Richard Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. When contacted by WIRED, however, Mack said he was not affiliated with the group: “Many groups contact me weekly to work together, but in order for that to happen they must join our mission and philosophy of nonviolence.”

Lang told WIRED that a member of his team had been speaking to Mack about his role with the group, and it was likely just a miscommunication. Hours later, however, Mack’s picture was removed from the website.

Guns appear to be a central aspect of all actions taken by the Napalm militias, even when responding to incidents like hurricanes, wildfires, or earthquakes. “Even in a natural disaster, people that are in desperate scenarios may do desperate things,” Lang said. “And I believe that open carry and carrying a firearm on your body is a natural right of all men, and it's not something to be shied away from.”

While Lang said non-gun-owners would be welcome to join the group: “They would still be trained, and they would definitely be supported in their eventual path to gun ownership.”

Though Lang says all militia activity to date has occurred online, Napalm plans to get into the real world soon. “We will have casual outings at local firing ranges for downrange training, different exercises on what to do if the power goes out, if the internet is shut down, if the water lines are contaminated, [and] wilderness survival training,” says Lang.

All new members have to go through a vetting process, which consists of a five-minute video call designed to weed out potential infiltration from law enforcement.

Once vetting has been completed, members are then placed in a private county-level chat group where they can communicate with other members of the militia. Neither WIRED nor the researchers we spoke to were able to gain access to the private chats.

In the past, a county-level militia cell structure has made it harder for law enforcement to infiltrate extremist groups.

Lang says the vetting process has been established in part as a response to what happened to militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the wake of January 6. “They had these public group chats, and people said inflammatory things on there, and so we don't have those,” Lang said.

Though Lang claims that the group has signed up over 20,000 members, some experts don’t believe him.

“The best we can tell is that the numbers that the group is claiming are grossly misleading,” Jared Holt, senior researcher of US hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED. “This is an aspirational project. It doesn't reflect any sort of organizing infrastructure that's actively been built. It is being promoted by a group of political hucksters and shock jocks. And I wouldn't be surprised if would-be joiners of these groups come to learn that there is some kind of membership fee, some sort of financial component involved here.”

Burghart and his colleagues at IREHR also reviewed the 50 state-level Telegram channels and found a total of just over 14,000 members. However, Burghart also says that he believes that this figure is “significantly artificially inflated, with real membership closer to 2,500.”

Lang did not respond to questions about whether the Telegram channels membership numbers were artificially inflated.

But even with inflated membership numbers and lack of real-world coordination so far, experts still believe attention needs to be paid to groups like Napalm.

“The promotion of this kind of rhetoric and just mobilizing people around this idea could have reverberating effects,” says Holt. “It certainly heightens the tension of the political environment. It could certainly drive individuals who are maybe suffering some sort of crisis into thinking about more violent action or taking more extreme measures in their anti-government worldviews. And even if one of these states materializes into something with a dozen people in it, that could still cause a real problem.”

[nastrond-skelly]

Remember kids

Israel is a puppet of NATO made to keep a hand in the middle east.

When the state was created they didn't even want holocaust survivors there because they thought of them as weak.

What is happening in Palestine is called an ethnic genocide through deprivation of resources and repeated bombing of infrastructure and civilian buildings supported by NATO, not "self defense".

Hamas has literally nothing to do with Isis, they're two completely different organizations.

If you're Jewish and support the liberation of Palestine you're not a self hating jew, you're a well informed human being with some fucking empathy.

The palestinians authorities have stated multiple times that when the stolen land is returned to the Palestinian population no Israeli civilians will be harmed or asked to leave the country, they will be free to leave if they wish but no such things will be forced upon them.

The image of Palestinian soldiers western media depicts is a gross dehumanization of people who are just fighting for the lives of their own people, the idea of them as women-hating gay-burning children-decapitating terrorists is some shit Israel made up to get centrists and liberals to support them.

If you feel guilty for having believed in Israel's bullshit in the past, don't, no one is immune to propaganda, i believed the russian federation was a communist country until i was 16 for fuck sake, we all fall for this shit when we're ill informed, even more if you live in countries like America when they barely tell you where Europe is.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Republicans Are Soft on Fascism

(I try to put my head in the sand, but I suffocate.)

Stephen Jay Morris

9/7/2023

©Scientific Morality.

Billionaire Elon Musk blames Jews for the failure of his social Media venture, “X” (formerly “Twitter). It has something to do with the ADL. I saw recent videos of neo-Nazis on a Florida bridge, waving their swastika flags left to right in view of the oncoming traffic. Hitler fan and podcaster, Nick Fuentes, tells the world he hates poor people. Anti-Semitism has come full circle, again, to being blatantly expressed in public. There used to be repercussions for talking shit about the Jews. I am watching this cadre of Jew haters unfold in front of my very eyes.  Lots of American Jews once thought that if they converted to Christianity and married a Gentile, they would be immune to being put in concentration camps or thrown into ovens. I can still hear my father pounding his fist on the dining room table, in a rage, yelling that the Jews are a religion not a race. “Why is he yelling at his family and not to real Jew haters?” I thought. That is a story for another time.

 But alas, you can’t convince a Nazi that Jews are white. They think and feel that Jews are a mogul race of mud people and should be destroyed. Once they find out that you are Jewish—bye, bye!

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a book, “It Can’t Happen Here.” It warned about the possibility of Fascism in America. I read that book in 1969. I told my parents and they thought I was crazy. America is the strongest country in the world, they said; it would never happen here!

It is now happening here. What about the owners of massive wealth and the military industrial complex? Do they care? First, the so-called deep state couldn’t give a damn about Jews at risk for death! Second, Nazis are pro-capitalism so long as White men control it. I’ve asked this question a million times: have you ever seen a Right winger protest a Nazi? Neither have I. Conservatives are soft on fascism. They get embarrassed by Nazis because they say the quiet rhetoric out loud. They say things like, “the East elites (Rich Jews) want to run our country” or “the globalists (Rich Jews) want to run the world!” They say, “the Jews will not replace us!” to which the conservative agrees, but thinks the Nazis are giving the game away.

But when it comes to Communism? Holy fuck burgers! Bomb them! Kill them all and let God sort them out! They know that Communists would take away their property and businesses and give it all to the poor. If you ask me, I’d rather live in Stalin’s Russia than in the 1950’s America, anti-communist hysteria. Fuck anti-Communism!!! Conservatives outlawed free speech in America in the 50’s. If you slightly inferred liberal tendencies in your speech, the FBI would tap your phone and follow you to work! You think I am exaggerating? Go through some time machine and find out. During the 50’s, if you were in America and, simultaneously, in the then Soviet Union, you wouldn’t know the difference! In Russia, The KGB would follow you around and, in the USA, the FBI would follow you around.

As an anarchist, I am not surprised. As a Jew, I am highly concerned. Oh, and your gentile spouse will not be spared. During the Nazi’s regime, many Aryans were put into camps for marrying non-Aryan husbands or wives. The price for race-mixing is death.

I sure miss the Jewish Defense League, even though they were Right wing, Zionist revisionists. They were pro-active. Whenever there were Nazi rallies, they were there with baseball bats. I am not pro-violence, but I am not pro-surrender, either. I’ll tell you one thing. I will not walk into a gas chamber peacefully. Never again, motherfuckers!

[hareofhrair]

https://www.tumblr.com/hareofhrair/749247301532499968/gonna-need-yall-to-stop-putting-biden-is-just-as

People who keep on screeching about the revolution that will occur if Biden loses and things get worse and how punishing America for "Genocide Joe" need to learn about Ernst Thalmann.

He was a communist leader who believed that the liberals of his time were an obstacle to a Communist society in Germany, and worked to allow Hitler enough votes to gain power, in the belief that Hitler would make things so bad that the people would turn to communism.

It backfired HARD, and Germany became a fascistic dictatorship, Thalmann himself was imprisoned and eventually executed, and communism DIDN'T come to Germany.

Because frankly that's exactly what these numbskulls are braying for; to commit the exact same mistake Thalmann made nearly a century ago, because they care more about punishing a society that they believe is an obstacle to their moral superiority than actually stopping a monster who will actively bring about the end of Democracy as we know it.

Yeah, accelerationism is an idiot child’s idea of politics.

But most of the nasty messages I’ve received about this post so far don’t seem to think Trump winning is a good thing— They seem to be under the bewilderingly incorrect impression that there’s some kind of third option.

That if enough people don’t vote for trump *or* biden neither will become president and the government will be forced to present better candidates? Or something?

Genuinely I can’t decide if the lack of coherent thought is evidence of the nightmarish state of education in this country, or evidence that these people are or are uncritically repeating the propaganda of actual literal Russian agents. We know, like for an actual fact with solid evidence, that they have done this before, on tumblr specifically! Have yall forgotten about the actual russian psyop in 2016 trying to convince everyone it was pointless to vote?

Either Biden or Trump *will* become president. You have exactly ONE action which can influence this decision. Neither of them are going to immediately turn around and denounce Israel. Biden will continue loudly supporting them publicly while taking only the most non confrontational action behind the scenes to try and stop the genocide, because Israel is vital to US imperialism in that part of the world and literally no action he attempted to take against them would ever amount to anything but his immediate impeachment. And Trump will not just loudly support Israel, but has already repeatedly encouraged them to “get it over with,” urging more aggressive measures to end the genocide as quickly as possible because he thinks it’s “a bad look.”

He’s also made public his plans to eliminate the entire Department of Education, erase not just protections for transgender people but federal acknowledgement of trans people at all, codifying binary gender into federal law, and his environmental and energy policies amount to, and I quote, “DRILL BABY, DRILL.” Among a host of other heinous fucking crimes against humanity. This is not conspiracy! These are his publicly stated positions!

Meanwhile, Biden has reinstated environmental policies Trump stripped and pushed for aggressive climate action, signed legislation to protect lgbt and interracial marriage, reversed the trans military ban and ensured trans people would have access to government services, passed the first meaningful gun control legislation in 30 years, signed executive orders to protect reproductive rights, pardoned all prior offenses for marijuana possession, signed an executive order to curb police violence by banning chokeholds, increasing accountability, and restricting the transfer of military gear to police.

Is it enough? Does that make him a good person? Fuck no! I’d still spit in his face if I ever met him. But to pretend there is no difference between him and Trump is blisteringly ignorant.

People in the my messages and the notes of that post have repeatedly declared I just don’t care about anyone outside my privileged class, and I gotta say evidence suggests they’re projecting hard. I’m a deeply impoverished queer disabled person living in the deep south. I know EXACTLY how much worse a Trump presidency would be. The only way someone could pretend it makes no difference is if they believe they’re secure enough that none of it would affect them, and they’re too self centered to realize not everyone is lucky enough to be in that situation.

My heart breaks for the Palestinian people every day. That sounds trite but I don’t know how else to say it. I read their posts, I share their calls for donations, a day doesn’t pass where I’m not reminded of their suffering and how utterly helpless I am to do anything about it. I wish to god there was something I could personally do that would make any kind of difference for them, but I can’t.

I am in an airplane that is falling out of the sky. I can’t stop it. I can’t save the people around me. I’m trying to put on my oxygen mask and my seatbelt, and someone is trying to slap them out of my hands and telling me I’m a selfish monster for wanting to live when other people are going to die.

I’m just tired of people telling me I should give up and die. I want to live.