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liongoatsnake · 2 years ago

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Our Panel, “Litter Boxes in School Bathrooms: Dissecting the Alt-Right’s Current Moral Panic” is on Youtube

A recording of our panel has been uploaded to Youtube by the official Othercon channel. It can be found here - https://youtu.be/WVjXOmN2IlU

Looking back, while we wish we could have done better on our panel and done right by the subject, we’re still glad we tried to cover such a potentially relevant current events topic. We want to strive to do even better next year though. We’ve already been trying to brainstorm what we might could do for Othercon 2023. Bibliography for our panel :

Bibliography

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Clegg, Helen, Roz Collings & Elizabeth C. Roxburgh. “Therianthropy: Wellbeing, Schizotypy, and Autism in Individuals Who Self-Identify as Non-Human,” Society & Animals, Volume 27 (2019): pages 403-426.

Eischens, Rilyn. “Republicans falsely claim schools are providing litter boxes for students identifying as cats” Minnesota Reformer, 28 April 2022, https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/republicans-falsely-claim-schools-are-providing-litter-boxes-for-students-identifying-as-cats/

Erickson-Schroth, Laura & Boylan, Jennifer Finney. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource For The Transgender Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Evon, Dan. “‘Furry Protocol’ False Rumors Circulate About Wisconsin Schools,” Snopes, 5 April 2022, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/furry-protocol-wisconsin/ .

Feijó, Pedro. "Doctors Herding Cats: The Misadventures of Modern Medicine and Psychology with NonHuman Identities," University of Cambridge, 2016. https://www.academia.edu/24718674/Doctors_Herding_Cats_The_Misadventures_of_Modern_Medicine_and_Psychology_with_NonHuman_Identities?auto=download.

FurScience, https://furscience.com/.

Gerbasi, Kathleen C, Penny L. Bernstein, Samuel Conway, Laura L. Scaletta, Adam Privitera, Nicholas Paolone, & Justin Higner. "Furries A to Z: (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism)." Society and Animals, Volume 16 (2008): pages 197-222.

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Hall, Jason. ��FUR-REAL: Iowa students, parents report kids wearing collars, barking, hissing as ‘furries,’” The Iowa Standard, 20 September 2021, https://theiowastandard.com/fur-real-iowa-students-parents-report-kids-wearing-collars-barking-hissing-as-furries/ .

House of Chimeras. A Timeline of the Therianthrope Community, Version 1.1. Updated 19 November 2021. www.houseofchimera.weebly.com.

Lupa. A Field Guide To Otherkin. Stafford: Megalithica Books, 2007.

MacLean, Logan. “False stories of litter boxes in P.E.I. schools meant to ridicule trans community, advocates say,” SaltWire, 22 Oct 2021, https://www.saltwire.com/atlantic-canada/news/false-stories-of-litter-boxes-in-pei-schools-meant-to-ridicule-trans-community-advocates-say-100649025/ .

Mardell, Ashley. The ABCs of LGBT+. Mango Media, 2016.

Midland Public Schools. “Midland Public Schools December 2021 Board of Education Meeting,” Midland Public Schools on Youtube, 21 December 2021, 1:28:35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDrxwMA36qw .

Mullin, Andrew. "Sharrow: 'Furries' are not using litter boxes in Midland school's bathrooms" Midland Daily News, 21 January 2022, https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/No-there-was-never-a-litterbox-in-a-Midland-16794724.php .

Neiwert, David. Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us. Lanham, Maryland: Prometheus, 2020.

O'Malley, Beth. “Watch now: Missouri senators discuss ‘furries’ and pronouns,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 May 2022, https://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/videos/watch-now-missouri-senators-discuss-furries-and-pronouns/video_05c9354c-7472-585d-9092-cee800eaf465.html .

Oliver, John. “Rocks: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive),” LastWeekTonight on Youtube, 29 May 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa3sK1iZxc .

PinkDolphin. "Species Dysphoria Within Alterhumans (therian/otherkin/kith etc)," 2020. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XMvXz-F_ks3saJr6ADYOfx4S6LE_btu2FHqBdN-grFo/viewanalytics?fbclid=IwAR08GSq_KwSJYUJJbvxT9z6a5d0kpxL0hDcH0uKF8S4lPv_W1jF409Fe0z0 .

PinkDolphin. “Therianthropy and Gender Experience,” 31 May 2020. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Eamup4muY5irH1Zv9kxG18yM2yoezh_z0sZP6agAtdk/viewanalytics .

Plante, Courtney N., Stephen Reysen, Sharon E. Roberts, & Kathleen C. Gerbasi. FurScience! A Summary of Five Years of Research from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project. Waterloo, Ontario: FurScience, 2016.

Proctor, Devin. On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space. The George Washington University. May 2019. https://search.proquest.com/openview/e156c24bf65c4efb0918a8db37433cce/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y .

Rajunov, Micah; & Duane, Scott. Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

“Republican retracts false claim schools placing litter boxes for ‘furry’ students,” The Guardian, 29 March 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/29/nebraska-lawmaker-litter-boxes-claim-debunked .

Roberts, Sharon E., Courtney N. Plante, Kathleen C. Gerbasi, and Stephen Reysen. "The Anthrozoomorphic Identity: Furry Fandom Members’ Connections to Nonhuman Animals," Anthrozoös. Volume 28, Issue 4 (2 December 2015): page 533-548.

Scaled-Silence. “Otherkin and Gender,” Google Forms, 4 June 2021. https://www.reddit.com/r/otherkin/comments/nsgro7/poll_results/

Scribner, O.. Otherkin Timeline The Recent History of Elfin, Fae, and Animal People, Version 2.0. Created 17 July 2010. Last modified 8 September 2012.

Sonious. “Michigan school board meeting littered with furry conspiracy around cat pan in bathroom,” Flayrah, 26 January 2022, https://www.flayrah.com/8556/michigan-school-board-meeting-littered-furry-conspiracy-around-cat-pan-bathroom .

Swenson, Ali. “Wisconsin school district does not have ‘furry protocol’,” WSAW-TV, 6 April 2022, https://www.wsaw.com/2022/04/06/wisconsin-school-district-does-not-have-furry-protocol/ .

Taylor, Kandiss. @KandissTaylor on Twitter, https://twitter.com/kandisstaylor/ .

Vittert, Leland. “Nebraska lawmaker falls for 'furry' hoax | On Balance with Leland Vittert,” NewsNation on Youtube, 29 March 2022, 4:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Ehwxc3t6Q .

Walsh, Matthias. “What you need to know about xenogender,” LGBTQNation, 2 March 2022, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/03/need-know-xenogender/ .

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#Otherkin #therianthropy #queerphobia #anti-otherkin #transphobia

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

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On June 2, 2020, a crowd of mostly white people arrived at a library parking lot in Bethesda, Maryland, to show solidarity with a Black Lives Matter rally. During the rally, one of the organizers had the crowd raise their hands and take a pledge to oppose racism. The attendees obeyed and repeated the pledge, many kneeling as though in prayer. A video of the event made its way around the internet, providing yet more evidence that America is experiencing a religious revival on the political left — and that the heart of this revival is the deification of group identity.

Until the last few years, identity politics — now commonly referred to as "wokeness" — has avoided serious scrutiny as a religious movement. Yet even before the Bethesda episode, political observers had an inkling of its religious character. Professor Elizabeth Corey's recollection of her experience at a 2017 conference addressing identity and the law offers one illuminating example. One of the presentations she described featured a call-and-response session that ended with an exhortation for political revolution. "I began to feel that I was not at an academic lecture at all," she wrote, "but at an Evangelical church with a charismatic pastor."

…

Scholars of religion tell us that the human person encounters the divine in two distinct ways: subjectively, as with matters of faith, and objectively, by performing rites in accordance with their faith.

The objective components of religious experience are those that onlookers can easily observe. They consist of what Wilfred Cantwell Smith calls "cumulative tradition" — the liturgies, processions, pilgrimages, public acts of penance, and other rites that faith communities celebrate. The behavior of the attendees during the Bethesda rally offers a useful illustration of such phenomena, as does the call-and-response session Corey described.

Within these cumulative traditions, people have personal encounters with religion. These encounters are subjective, in the sense that each person experiences the divine in a way that no outside observer can measure. Social scientists can record such encounters through interviews, but they can never experience them or reproduce them in their scholarship. Subjective religious experiences are very real, however, meaning that they cannot be dismissed simply because social-science methods cannot comprehend them. Gaining a full understanding of wokeness, therefore, requires an account of both its public rites and the subjective religious experiences of woke adherents.

We can begin our analysis of the emerging woke faith by probing its concept of the divine. Wokeness has an unconventional understanding of divinity that tends to disguise its religiosity from those accustomed to monotheism; in fact, the notion may not be fully recognized among its practitioners themselves. For the woke, identity is the source of divinity. Yet individuals are not divine on their own; they only participate in the divinity found in shared group identities.

Certain segments of wokeness also exhibit pantheistic traits in that they view the natural world as divine. For these adherents — particularly those who identify as vegan, green, and in some cases, indigenous — nature unmolested offers harmony within the individual and among the growing multiplicity of identities that make up humanity. For other segments of the woke community, human beings must adjust nature to render internal identities external. Gender re-assignment surgeries and hormone replacement or suppression regimens for transgender persons are among the most conspicuous examples.

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What Wade describes is a central rite of passage into the woke framework. The transition typically begins with a person living an ordinary existence of production and consumption. Over time, the individual notices how this way of life is lonely and unfulfilling. Traditional authorities are hypocritical or incompetent. Nothing is as it appears. There is a sense of living in a "Cartesian nightmare" in which the world exists not because God created it, but because the devil — or what in traditional Gnostic texts is called the "demiurge" — did. It is only when the individual discovers a small collection of like-minded believers who have pierced the veil to see past the illusions of the world that he "awakens." Together, woke believers become a people apart from and above those who still labor in the corrupted world of appearances.

These like-minded groups of believers replace the un-woke families, neighborhoods, and religious communities in which the woke individual was raised. Scholars and activists call these voluntary communities "families of choice" — safe harbors for woke individuals who feel unsafe in a traditional family or community, often because of bullying or violence they experienced. Woke families of choice are grounded in the identities that woke individuals adopt. To share an identity with others after becoming woke is to subject one's personal identity to the rules governing that group, and in turn, to police those rules.

According to the woke creed of intersectionality, human beings are composed of not just one, but a multiplicity of identities, among which are race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, and sexual preference. In his book American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell classifies these various identities using the terms "innocent" and "guilty" in an effort to compare wokeness to a kind of decomposed version of Protestant Christianity. According to Mitchell's account, the guilty identity, or scapegoat — namely the white, heterosexual male — must be purged in order to restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other identity groups. He is the "transgressor," Mitchell explains. "All others — women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ persons — have their sins of omission and commission covered over by scapegoating" this transgressor, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.

Yet wokeness involves a complicated system of ranks that do not break down easily into two, mutually exclusive categories. It's more useful to think of woke identities in caste terms, wherein the highest-caste identities are "clean" and lower-caste identities are increasingly "unclean." Unclean identities are those born into "privilege," while clean identities are those that suffer under oppressive cultural forces like whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, cisgenderism, Christianity, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and even humanity (as in the presumption of human beings' superiority to the rest of the natural world). A person bearing all of these identities is maximally unclean, since he is thought to have experienced no suffering and only privilege. Those individuals bearing oppressed identities — including racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, transgender persons, religious minorities, and indigenous people — are considered clean.

…

The key animating principle of wokeness is the collective struggle against the evil geist that inhabits the privileged, with the ultimate goal being the reversal of the advantages inherited by the privileged in favor of those who have suffered. The cleaner identities, by virtue of their cleanliness, have the standing to determine how the struggle is to proceed. The privileged, meanwhile, must atone for their unclean status by struggling alongside the clean. All must struggle, but the privileged must struggle most of all.

The primary means by which the privileged may join the struggle is through "allyship" — the subordination of their privileged identities to those who have historically endured the greatest suffering. For this reason, Mitchell is not quite right when he says there is no possibility of forgiveness in wokeness; it's just not the kind of Christian forgiveness that he and others recognize. Forgiveness for the woke comes from becoming a good ally. There is no absolution, however, as privilege is permanent. The privileged, therefore, are required to engage in constant, public acts of atonement.

The willfully privileged — those who refuse to struggle alongside the clean — remain unclean. The firmer their attachment to their privilege, the less clean they are. Whites who refuse to reckon with their privilege make up the majority of this lower caste, with the least clean among them being white supremacists — among which include neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, and even devotees to right-wing conspiracies like QAnon — who revel in their privilege. These are the untouchables of the woke hierarchy. Due to their willful privilege, they are thought to deserve any hardships they suffer.

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The afterlife for the woke is not one where the soul awaits the judgment of creation. Rather, like the pagan Romans, the woke find life after death through fama, or the renown due to a person who lived a glorious life. Similarly, fate for the woke seems to lie in the continued caste struggle. Yet whatever successes the woke might achieve, they are never complete, and are always subject to reaction. This makes the outlook of the woke a rather bleak one.

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As theologian William Cavanaugh observes, the claim that there exist boundaries between religion and non-religion, and that these boundaries are "natural, eternal, fixed, and immutable," is a relatively new phenomenon that came about "with the rise of the modern state." "The new state's claim to a monopoly on violence, lawmaking, and public allegiance within a given territory," he continues, "depends upon either the absorption of the church into the state or the relegation of the church to an essentially private realm."

In the latter scenario, state actors profess indifference on matters of faith, provided the faithful make no effort to interfere with the use of state power. This is the stance the woke ostensibly push for in the public sphere, especially with regard to traditional religious faiths (more on that later). Yet as philosophy professor Francis Beckwith has argued, such an arrangement is arguably incoherent, as matters of faith place the faithful under obligations to act on their faith in the public realm. To demand privatization of faith, therefore, is to ban it outside of the human heart.

The second possibility Cavanaugh raises is equally dangerous. In this scenario, the state absorbs the church and uses its monopoly on violence to impose at least outward compliance with the religious tenets of that church. In America today, these tenets are increasingly the tenets of wokeness.

If wokeness is a religion, it is a civil religion, in the sense that it merges one's duty to the divine to that of the state. For proof, one need only examine how in recent years, in cities across the nation, woke protesters have torn down statues of the old American civil religion of the founders, Catholic saints, and soldiers, and demanded new ones be built in their place to honor the gods of the woke pantheon.

For the woke, the state is the central entity through which clean identities struggle not only for justice, but to secure patronage. Eric Voegelin's Political Religions offers a useful example of how a religious patronage system works. Here again, we depart from Western — and indeed, modern — monotheistic faiths to draw comparisons between wokeness and a much older, polytheistic tradition.

In ancient Egypt, according to Voegelin, temples of the lower gods were linked in a patronage network that held the different regions together. The pharaoh patronized the gods of these temples by offering local priests and aristocrats prestige, money, and power. In exchange, the priests and aristocrats pledged their loyalty to the pharaoh. While rival cults disliked having to compete for state patronage, they all agreed that the worst outcome would be for the pharaoh to reserve the patronage for his own god and put the local cults out of business. And so they agreed to the arrangement.

The woke patronage network functions in much the same way. Patronage in wokeness takes several forms, the cheapest of which is recognition, or the state's acknowledgment that certain identities are deserving of respect and deference. Bearers of clean identities look to the state for such recognition, typically in the form of a holiday, a public display, or a committee or hearing on matters of importance to woke identities. From there, they seek out more significant forms of patronage, including financial and political investments. Examples may include academic chairs or departments at colleges and universities, along with monetary compensation covering expenses like medical procedures and the restoration of property.

…

This arrangement is merely an updated version of the Egyptian patronage system Voegelin described: The different identities that populate the city receive state patronage as they supervise the diversity, equity, and inclusion of clean identities in the public sphere. Thus when Ibram Kendi — a historian and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research — suggests establishing a department of anti-racism at the federal level, he is merely applying the logic of municipal governments on a larger scale.

To gain further leverage over the state, the woke frequently court influence in the corporate world. Such efforts date at least back to 2017, when Pepsi hoped to capitalize on Black Lives Matter protests by launching an advertisement featuring a short narrative of a self-satisfied consumer, played by supermodel Kendall Jenner, emerging from her private world to join a broader movement of individuals living out their own authentic identities. The participants depicted in the ad are unified in this endeavor through their attachment to global corporate brands — in this case, Pepsi — that support them in their efforts to win over the state's coercive power to work the will of the diverse identities united under wokeness.

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Consultants like DiAngelo provide prestige for elite organizations seeking to adorn themselves with examples of their continued commitment to the moral issues of the day — in exchange for a fee, of course. Yet questions remain as to the efficacy of these arrangements. As Bonny Brooks argues in Arc Digital, "activism is now firmly near the top of many big-brand marketing agendas" because it "is a lot simpler to appropriate images of protest to sell soda than to ensure there are no exploitative practices in your supply chain." Helen Lewis of the Atlantic concurs, defining the "iron law of woke capitalism" to be that "[b]rands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival."

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Some universities are looking to ground higher education entirely in the tenets of wokeness. The University of Tulsa, for example, has recently sought to re-orient the university around the twin pillars of business and social justice while cutting the traditional core curriculum to the bone. Among those angry at the decision are many of the students. Meanwhile, Ivy League institutions have owned up to their history of systemic racism by making the appropriate hiring and funding decisions — all while vigorously defending themselves from lawsuits made on behalf of Asian Americans claiming systemic exclusion in their present-day admissions processes.

Wokeness is the opiate of the elites. None of the patronage directly benefits struggling communities; it simply moves funds from state institutions, global corporations, and universities to diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants. These consultants, in turn, serve as moral and spiritual alibis, helping to rehabilitate institutions' public image whenever issues of prejudice emerge. Paradigmatic cases can be found, as Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, at global corporations like Alphabet, which generously donates to social-justice organizations while opening an artificial-intelligence research center in China — despite the latter's horrifying record of human-rights abuses (often in service to these very corporations). Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, state entities, corporations, and academic institutions offer patronage to the woke gods in exchange for their loyalty. And like the priests in those old Egyptian temples, the consultants grant prestige and temporary absolution while keeping the money.

…

If states and public entities are increasingly patronizing woke identities and causes, are they also establishing wokeness as a government-sanctioned religion? In some respects, they surely are.

The Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman has set the standard for what qualifies as an unconstitutional establishment of religion in America since 1971. The Lemon test consists of three dictates: Laws must have a secular purpose, they must not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and they must not promote excessive government entanglement in religious matters.

If wokeness is indeed a religion, then efforts to establish its tenets through legal and regulatory frameworks clearly violate the Lemon test. State-sanctioned endorsements of woke identities advance the woke faith, as do municipal commissions tasked with promoting identity-based equity initiatives. Distribution of state money to woke identity groups and causes fosters government entanglement in religion. The hiring of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators at public universities to oversee the representation of clean identities is akin to those universities hiring priests or rabbis to oversee their adherence to Catholicism or Judaism. In short, if the Supreme Court were to recognize wokeness as a religion, these state-sponsored patronage efforts would have to end.

This conclusion, of course, hinges on whether wokeness constitutes a religion for First Amendment purposes. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has never quite articulated a concrete definition of the term as used in the Constitution. Its earliest attempts included an 1890 description of religion as "one's views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character, and of obedience to his will" — a standard that confined religion to traditional monotheistic beliefs. The Court eventually abandoned the use of a belief in a creator as the hallmark of religion, declaring in the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins that the government may not "aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs." While this clarifies that a religion need not involve a creator, it offers little in the way of a distinction between religion and non-religious belief systems.

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Such vague descriptions may not offer much to guide us, but given what the Court has deemed a religion in past cases, the legal classification of wokeness as a religion likely rests on firm ground. In the Torcaso case, for instance, the Court explicitly recognized both ethical culture and secular humanism — philosophies premised on non-spiritual moral traditions and the rejection of religious dogma — as being "[a]mong religions in this country." Even atheism qualifies for constitutional protection — at least under the amendment's Free Exercise Clause, which draws from the same mention of the term "religion" as the Establishment Clause. The bar for what legally qualifies as a religion is thus quite low. Given the deeply held and undoubtedly sincere nature of woke adherents' beliefs, along with the tenets of wokeness described above (the belief in the divinity of identity, the concept of the woke faith community, the Gnostic understanding of the world, notions of fate and the afterlife, and the moral code grounded in the struggle against oppression), one would be hard pressed to explain how wokeness is less deserving of the status than belief systems explicitly grounded in secularism.

…

If wokeness becomes a legally recognized religion in the United States, efforts by adherents to secure state patronage and enlist public entities in their struggle would violate constitutionally protected natural rights. Historically, such measures have provoked an organized political and legal response among disadvantaged faiths. And that is precisely where we may be headed.

Adherents to wokeness might object by noting that they oppose laws viewed as the product of church-state collusion — including laws that coerce prayer and scripture reading in schools, those that ban the teaching of evolution in schools, and those that mandate days of rest on the Sabbath — as well as displays of religious symbols on state property. This objection is not so much wrong as it is decades out of date.

…

With the decline of the old Judeo-Christian consensus, the woke have sought to establish themselves in the spaces left open by the success of secularization. But as their faith coalesces and their successes build, they are beginning to grow out of those spaces. It seems that at the very moment of its overcoming, the struggle is struggling with itself.

#national affairs #james m patterson

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antifaintl · 6 years ago

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2017: A (Partial) Timeline Of Bigoted Violence

In 2018, we began trying to monitor news reports concerning significantly-violent hate crimes. Here is a chronological list of the 100+ violent hate crimes we documented in 2017 (the dates link to the news source of each incident): January 2017: Over 40 Jewish centers in the U.S. receive bomb threats. January 1, 2017: 19-year-old Nathan Richardson encounters 67-year-old jogger Wenqing Xu and beats him to death in an unprovoked, random attack. After committing the murder, Richardson texted his friends that he “fucked sum chink up. Bodied him. I think pure crime scene – his head’s gone,”

January 5, 2017: Neo-nazis bomb a refugee centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, seriously injuring an immigration officer working there. January 20, 2017: A right-wing extremist shoots a protestor at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington.

January 25, 2017: An arsonist destroys the only mosque in Victoria, Texas. January 25, 2017: Neo-nazis in Gothenburg, Sweden plant a bomb at a refugee centre. It fails to detonate.

January 28, 2017: a First Nations woman walking with her sister is struck by a trailer hitch hurled from a passing vehicle. After struggling in hospital for several months, she succumbs to her injuries. January 29, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette walks into a mosque in Canada during evening prayers and opens fire, shooting 17 people and killing six of them.

January/February 2017: four men used Grindr to target gay men for assaults and robberies. Pretending to also be gay, they would arrange to come to their victims’ homes, where they would hold their victims at gunpoint while they beat them, bound them, verbally abused them with with homophobic slurs, and stole property and vehicles. February 2, 2017: ��27-year-old active white supremacist William Christopher Gibbs arrives in a Georgia hospital claiming to have accidentally poisoned himself with ricin. The extremely deadly illegal compound, most popular with terrorist groups, has been used in attempts to assassinate U.S. elected officials in the past. Gibbs’ hands and his vehicle tested positive for the presence of ricin. Gibbs was later charged with possession of ricin. February 16, 2017: Inspired by Dylann Roof’s mass shooting of black church-goers, 28-year-old neo-nazi and convicted felon Benjamin McDowell goes online seeking someone to furnish him with firearms so he can commit his own mass murder. Authorities, who had been monitoring McDowell after he threatened a synagogue, arrest McDowell after he buys a pistol from an undercover FBI agent. In 2018 McDowell pled guilty and received a ten-year prison sentence.

February 19, 2017: less than a month after a white supremacist shot seventeen people in a mosque, killing six of them, 35-year-old Florida resident Gerald Sloane Wallace calls several mosques, leaving threats to come and shoot their members.

February 21, 2017: a 24-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Chicago, IL.

February 22, 2017: Adam Purinton tells two men from India to “get out of my country” then shoots both plus a bystander, killing one.

February 26, 2017: a transgender woman is shot and killed in New Orleans, LA. February 28, 2017: a mosque in Toronto is set on fire by arsonists.

March 1, 2017: a transgender woman is stabbed to death in New Orleans, LA.

March 3, 2017: A Sikh man is shot and injured in front of his Seattle house by a white man wearing a mask, who yells at him to “go back to your country!”

March 7, 2017: After repeatedly harrassing his Hmong neighbours, 81-year-old Wisconsin man Henry Kaminiski steps out of his home and fires a pistol at neighbor Mai Houa Moua as she worked in her garden. Kaminski then fired twice more at Moua from inside his home, then fired at a deputy responding to the resulting 911 call. During his arrest, Kaminiski made several racist remarks concerning the Hmong and his belief they were “taking over.” Police also found child pornography on Kaminski’s computer.

March 12, 2017: a mosque in Ypsilanti, MI. is set on fire by arsonists. March 20, 2017: James Jackson arrives in Manhattan with a sword and stabs the first black man he sees to death. He later tells authorities he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.”

March 22, 2017: a 38-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Baltimore, MD.

March 23, 2017: Two Liverpool sisters chase a Muslim man down the street, calling him a “fucking Paki” and demanding that he go back to his country, before knocking him to the ground, kicking him in the head, and biting him in the leg so hard that he was left with permanent scarring. March 24, 2017: Yelling “I hate Muslims!” a man in Minneapolis stabbed a Somali man in an attempt to kill him. March 26, 2017: A racist mob attacks a 15-year-old Polish boy in Gloucestershire and, when a local Asian shopkeeper tries to intervene, attack him as well with crowbars and baseball bats, then attempt to run him over with a car.

March 26, 2017: Seven or more members of the Jewish Defence League assault a 54-year-old Palestinian-American college professor. The authorities lay hate crime charges against the assailants. March 31, 2017: A 17-year-old Iranian/Kurdish boy is nearly beaten to death by a mob of eight people in Croydon after he revealed to them that he was a refugee.

April, 1, 2017: Members of an extremist Hindu nationalist group physically assault people in Alwar, India who had purchased cows. One of the victims - a 55-year-old Muslim farmer - died of his injuries two days later.

April 4, 2017: a 27-year-old man breaks into the home of 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, beating her to death while calling her “Satan,” and then throwing her body out of a third-floor window. April 6, 2017: A Charlotte store is set on fire by an arsonist who leaves a warning message for the shop owner that he “did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” according to police. It was signed “White America.”

April 7, 2017: 24-year-old Scottish resident Connor Ward is arrested on terrorism charges after police accuse him of preparing a bombing campaign against mosques and Muslim centres in Scotland. Police are forced to evacuate his neighbourhood when a search of his home uncovers explosives, bomb-making materials, a cache of illegal weapons, as well as neo-nazi flags and other materials. A year later, Ward is convicted on all charges and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for six years. April 11, 2017: A 55-year-old Palestinian-American college instructor is hospitalized after being brutally assaulted while attending a Washington, D.C. protest against Israeli apartheid by a group of five Jewish Defence League members. 32-year-old Canadian Jewish Defence League member Yosef Steynovitz and 23-year-old Canadian “Proud Boy” Brandon David William Vaughan are charged with assault with significant bodily injury while armed, among other charges.

April 21, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Miami, FL.

April 30, 2017: A white man storms a pool party in San Diego and shoots four black women, two black men, and one Latino man while allowing white attendees to leave. One victim dies while the other six sustain critical injuries.

May 5, 2017: A man walking his dog on South Beach in Miami is confronted by two men who call him a “fucking faggot,” then attack him, beating him unconscious. At one point in the attack, one of the attackers shouts “all faggots need to die and we’re going to make sure they do!” May 14, 2017: Vandals spray-paint hate graffiti on the home of a black family in upstate New York before attempting to set the house on fire while the family slept. Although the family escaped unscathed, their garage burnt to the ground and their house suffered some damage. May 14, 2017: 24-year-old lesbian Lerato Moloi is found raped, beaten, and stoned to death, her body dumped in a field and burned beyond recognition. Two men are arrested. May 17, 2017: A homophobic mob break into the home of a gay couple and shoot and stab both men to death. May 17, 2017: a 34-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Fresno, CA. May 20, 2017: University of Maryland student and member of the “alt-Reich” facebook group Sean Urbanski walks up to 22-year-old Richard Collins III, who is black and who Urbanski does not know, and stabs him to death in an unprovoked attack. Urbanski is later charged with a hate crime.

May 20, 2017: A man begins screaming homophobic slurs at a lesbian couple riding the subway before attacking them both, beating one woman unconscious.

May 24, 2017: A barrage of doxxing, rape threats, and death threats received by trans comic book artist Sophie Labelle forces her to cancel an appearance and event at a Halifax book store, which also received bomb threats and threats of attacking the event. Labelle is forced into hiding.

May 25, 2017: A black woman riding the train home is subjected to extreme verbal harassment by Jeremy Christian, who admits to being a neo-nazi and tell her he will kill her. As she leaves the train, Christian hits her with a bottle, cutting her eye open. When police arrive, they refuse to arrest Christian. The next day Christian would stab three people, killing two of them. May 26, 2017: Three men intervene on a MAX train in Portland when they witness another man verbally abusing two Muslim women with an Islamophobic tirade. The Islamophobe responds by pulling out a knife and stabs the three interveners, killing two of them.

May 26, 2017: Two Muslim butchers are beaten by members of an extremist HIndu nationalist group in Malegaon, India after being accused of trading in beef.

May 27, 2017: A white man drives his pickup truck through a campsite, targeting the Native Americans camping there while yelling racial slurs at them. He intentionally drives over two Native American men, killing one and injuring the other.

May 27, 2017: A 34-year-old Anthony Hammond lets loose with a flurry of racial slurs directed at a black man in a parking lot, then pulls out a machete and stabs the man before barricading himself in his apartment for several hours, until finally surrendering to police.

May 28, 2017: Two teenagers attack a Jewish couple and their five daughters at a beach.

June 3, 2017: 38-year-old white supremacist Phillip Wade racially abuses a 57-year-old black man on an Oakley, CA. bus, then pulls a knife and stabs the man to death while the man is walking away from the confrontation. The victim is the third racialized person Wade has stabbed in the past six years and the second person he’s murdered.

June 6, 2017: A 15-year-old black boy cutting through a park on his way to see his girlfriend is hit from behind and beaten unconscious by a group of men yelling “Nigger!” and “Go back to Africa!” at him as they punched and kicked him.

June 7, 2017: a 23-year-old white man in a Chicago Starbucks spits at a black man, telling him his children are “disposable vermin” and calling a second black man a slave, then punches a black passerby, knocking him unconscious. He’s charged with a hate crime three months later.

June 10, 2017: A mob screaming transphobic insults attacks three trangender women, stabbing one and sending two to the hospital.

June 18, 2017: two men armed with baseball bats attack a group of Muslim teenagers, kidnapping a 17-year-old girl, who they beat to death, dumping her body in a pond.

June 1, 2017: A Princeton professor and racialized woman is forced to cancel a three-city lecture tour to promote her book about the Black Lives Matter movement after receiving over 50 death threats. June 19, 2017: Shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims!” 47-year-old Darren Osborne drives a courier van through a crowd of Muslims leaving a Finsbury mosque, killing one person and injuring ten others.

June 21, 2017: an Islamophobe approaches a Muslim man and woman sitting in a car stopped at a traffic light and knocks on the window. When the driver rolls down the window, the Islamophobe sprays the driver and passenger with acid, severely burning both.

June 22, 2017: Three Muslim teenaged brothers on a train out of Delhi, India are attacked by other passengers who accuse them of not being Indian nationalists, abuse them with Islamphobic slurs, and then assault them, stabbing 17-year-old Hafiz Junaid Khan to death and injuring both of his brothers. June 23, 2017: After assaulting his wife, a drunken Britain First supporter and neo-nazi Marek Zakrocki drives off in his work van after declaring he would “kill a Muslim” “for Britain.” Shortly thereafter, he tries to run down restaurant owner Kamal Ahmed outside of his establishment. Failing to kill Mr. Ahmed, Zakorcki does drive his van into the restaurant, shattering its windows. June 24, 2017: 20-year-old neo-nazi Ethan Stables is arrested near the New Empire public house in Cumbria. Having learned that the pub was hosting an LGBT event, Evans - who was known to refer to LGBT people as “degenerates” and to deny the Holocaust - had purchased a machete and researched bomb-making - told acquaintances he was planning to murder attendees and was arrested during his final reconnaissance of the pub. Stables is convicted of terrorism early in 2018.

June 27, 2017: A huge mob attacks a dairy farmer and his family in Jharkhand, India after a dead cow was rumoured to be found outside of their house. The mob tries to burn down the family’s home with them inside and beat the entire family so badly that they all require hospitalization. The father of the family is in a coma for eight days and spends two months in the hospital recovering from head injuries and various broken bones.

June 29, 2017: A 40-year-old butcher is pulled out of his car by an angry mob in Jharkhand, India and beaten to death upon suspicion that he was transporting beef.

July 2017: A 39-year-old passenger in a Lyft car begins insulting the driver’s race and religion before pulling the driver’s hair, punching him, and choking him. July 2, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Lynchburg, VA.

July 9, 2017: Britain First leader Paul Golding viciously attacks someone he befriended and had attended a “self-defence” training with earlier in the day in what the sentencing judge described as “a really nasty and vicious assault.”

July 14, 2017: Lane Davis, a 33-year-old “alt-right” racist activist and former unpaid intern for Milo Yiannopoulos, starts a fight with his own parents. After accusing both of being “leftists,” Davis grabs a kitchen knife and stabs his father to death.

July 16, 2017: A man attempts to pull the hijab off of a Muslim woman waiting for the tube in London, then hits her when she resists. He then pins her friend to the wall and spits in her face before leaving. July 16, 2017: Arsonists set a mosque in Manchester ablaze. July 18, 2017: A NASA researcher of South Asian descent has her car windshield shattered by a rock thrown through it by an assailant screaming “go back to your country!” She’s injured in the attack. July 19, 2017: Two men exit a car and attack a racialized pedestrian with their fists and an iron bar.

August 2017: a gay man has his jaw broken by a man shouting homophobic slurs and a group of people outside of a fast food outlet. August 2017: After enduring eight different racist attacks, including having the front window of their home smashed in and their car set on fire, a Pakistani family is forced to flee their Dublin home of the past ten years.

August 2, 2017: Two men chase down and beat up a 29-year-old transgender women while yelling transphobic insults at her.

August 2, 2017: Five white men attack a black couple at a KFC drive-through, using racial slurs as they assaulted them and pointing a gun at them. August 5, 2017: A mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is firebombed, narrowly missing killing & injuring dozens of members there for morning prayers. Police arrest three white Three Percent militia members who admit to the attack, stating that they wanted to “scare Muslims out of the country.”

August 6, 2017: someone lights the car of the president of a Québec City mosque on fire. His mosque is the same one where Alexandre Bissonnette had shot 17 worshippers in January. August 8, 2017: A well-known Chicago neo-nazi starts an altercation at a concert, then pulls out a smuggled knife and stabs a man and a woman at the show. August 12, 2017: A white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA. drives his car at high speed directly into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing one woman and seriously injuring 19 other people.

August 12, 2017: A self-identifed member of the white supremacist “three percenter” movement is arrested by the FBI after unsuccessfuly trying to blow up a bank in Oklahoma City with a car bombed modeled after the one used by Timothy McVeigh.

August 14, 2017: A man boards a train in New York when he notices another man glaring at him. Feeling uncomfortable, he moves to another car only to be followed by the glaring man, who kicks him in the face while screaming “death to all faggots!” before exiting the train and getting away.

August 20, 2017: A racialized man standing outside his own home is attacked by a motorist who, without any provocation, jumped out of his car and ran at him, shouting racial slurs, before physically assaulting him. The victim is seriously injured in the attack.

August 20, 2017: While waiting in line at a food truck, a 22-year-old man is subjected to homophobic abuse and demands that he “go back to your country!” before 24-year-old Gregory Brzoza beat him unconscious. The victim loses several teeth and has a broken jaw. August 23, 2017: A 37-year-old man and a 47-year-old man start a fight with a black high school student on a city bus, yelling racial epithets at him as they beat him.

August 26, 2017: Four white men attack a black couple at a recreation center in Rustenberg, South Africa, yelling racial slurs at them as they beat them. One of the accused was evading charges for a racially-motivated attack against three petrol pump attendants in 2014 when he was arrested for this assault.

August 27, 2017: yelling “ this should clean away the AIDS!” a 56-year-old man throws boiling hot water over a 21-year-old gay man before hitting him about 16 times with a metal bar.

August 28, 2017: Several white teenagers begin shouting racial epithets at a 8-year-old black boy playing in an adjacent yard before wrapping a rope around his neck and hanging him. The boy survives but has to be airlifted to medical care for the injuries he sustains.

September 2017: an extremist Islamphobe group claims responsibility for a series of hammer attacks by masked men on hijab-wearing women and racialized people in Burgundy, France that left three people injured.

September 3, 2017: Ally Steinfeld, a transgender teenager, is beaten, stabbed repeatedly, tortured, and mutilated before being murdered by a gang of assailants. Police arrest three people, with more arrests forthcoming. September 7, 2017: A swastika-adorned neo-nazi assaults a Filipino-Turkish man in a Fullerton, CA. parking lot while yelling racial slurs at him.

September 12 and 14, 2017: 23-year-old white supremacist Kenneth Gleason drove through Baton Rouge, shooting black men he passed in his vehicle before jumping out and shooting his victims again at close range. Bruce Cofield and Donald Smart are murdered. A speech made by Adolf Hitler is among items recovered by police from the racist murderer’s home. September 14, 2017: A 40-year-old man begins spitting and repeatedly punching a 37-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman on the subway in New York. When her 57-year-old mother tries to intervene, the man punches her, pulls her hair, and spits on her as well, yelling “dirty Muslims” as he escapes from the train car. September 15, 2017: A black Cornell University student returns to his residence to find five members of a white fraternity shoving and harassing his roommates. When he asks them to leave, they attack and beat him while shouting racial slurs. Two months later, one of the attackers is charged with a hate crime. September 15, 2017: A 29-year-old white supremacist covered in racist tattoos repeatedly enters a hookah lounge in Lake Forest, CA., threatening to kill the Iranian staff and patrons. September 18, 2017: two men jump out of a taxi to racially abuse a teenage boy walking with his friends. One of the men pulls out a knife and threatens to stab the teenager.

September 20, 2017: A man is charged with a hate crime after attempting to murder a Muslim woman and 12-year-old girl by deliberately driving his car into them in two separate incidents on the same day. The woman is severely injured, with broken limbs, extensive cuts and other injuries requiring skin grafts. September 24, 2017: A 58-year-old surgeon on his way to his mosque is confronted by two men who begin shouting Islamophobic insults at him and then stab him in the neck.

September 27, 2017: Police arrest six members of neo-nazi terrorist group National Action for plotting to murder a Labour MP.

October 2017: a gay teenager and her two friends are harassed and then beaten by a mob of 20-30 high school aged boys. October 2017: Two teenaged sisters - both hijab-wearing Muslims are approached by 32-year-old Christopher Beckham as they get off of their school bus. Beckham yells “Allah Akbar” and “go back to your country!” at them. When their father comes to their aid, Beckham produces a knife and tries to stab him and punch him, all while yelling Islamophobic slurs at the family.

October 6, 2017: A stranger starts an argument with a Syrian refugee outside the refugee’s home, making disparaging remarks about Muslims and refugees and then attempting to break into the home when the refugee flees inside for safety. A few hours later, a mysterious fire is started in the refugee’s family’s backyard. The fire quickly engulfs the home, completely destroying it. Although the Syrian refugee family are able to flee, they lose everything but the clothing they were wearing when they fled. October 8, 2017: A 66-year-old black man is held at gunpoint in his own garage while two white assailants shout racist epithets and beat him. The two leave only to return minutes later to shoot up the victim’s home.

October 17, 2017: 64-year-old Gerard Medvec is arrested after telling police of his plans to firebomb the home of his neighbours, who he erroneously believes are Muslim.

October 18, 2017: Three neo-nazis pull up to a Gainesville bus stop after the aborted Richard Spencer appearance at a local campus and proceed to taunt people waiting for the bus with pro-Hitler and racist verbal abuse. After someone throws something at the car, one of the neo-nazis gets out, points a handgun at the crowd, yells “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and fires at the crowd, happily missing. All three are charged with attempted homicide; one is charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a weapon. October 18, 2017: A white couple in a pickup trucks begin shouting racial slurs at a black woman in another car as well as black pedestrians. At one point, the man claims that he “we kill niggers!” Moments later, he reverses the truck at high speed, ramming the black woman’s car and totaling it before speeding away.

October 21, 2017: Two men board a train in London where they verbally abuse a gay teenager before strangling him and punching and pushing his female friend to the ground. October 22, 2017: 26-year-old white supremacist and card-carrying National Socialist Movement member Taylor Michael Wilson attempts to derail an Amtrak train and is arrested on terrorism charges after the train crew tackles him and holds him until the police arrive.

October 22, 2017: A 60-year-old black man standing outside his neice’s home is attacked by two white men who yell racial slurs at him as they beat and stab him multiple times, puncturing his lung and lacerating his kidney.

October 22, 2017: After a string of attacks by vandals, an interracial couple and their young son are forced to leave Belfast when their car is firebombed and completely destroyed in a racist attack.

October 28, 2017: Hours after a “white lives matter” rally 50 miles away, 20 white supremacists enter a Tennessee restaurant and immediately begin arguing with an interracial couple eating dinner. When the white woman in the couple argues back, one of the men in the white supremacist group punches her in the face, splitting open her forehead.

October 29, 2017: A 26-year-old lesbian is confronting in a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant by a mob of at least five people, who begin taunting her and her girlfriend and homophobic slurs before assaulting her. The attack leaves her with broken teeth and a permanent injury to her left eye. November 1, 2017: 47-year-old Scott Ostrem, best known by his neighbors for his frequent racist tirades, shoots two Latino men and a Latina woman to death in an unprovoked mass shooting in a Colorado Wal-Mart.

November 1, 2017: an immigrant family’s restaurant is completely gutted in an arson attack a few weeks after the restaurant was hit by vandals. The arsonist spray-painted the words “GO BACK” on the restaurant before burning it down. November 2, 2017: a 52-year-old man murders his 14-year-old son after a lengthy, loud, and heated argument about the son being gay.

November 6, 2017: A black woman driving out of a parking lot is accosted by a man on the street. When she exits her vehicle to find out why he’s trying to get her attention, he calls her “a black bitch” and punches her repeatedly in the face, dropping her to the ground and breaking her nose. November 6, 2017: Two adult women in a London KFC begin throwing food at a 15-year-old girl eating in the restaurant with her friends. As she stood up to turn around and face her attackers, they throw a hot drink in her face, pull her to the ground by her hair, and begin kicking and punching her while yelling anti-Asian racial slurs at her. The two women break the girl’s arm before fleeing.

November 7, 2017: A mob of youths kick down the door of a racialized family and later that night attack another racialized family’s home with a barrage of bricks. November 11, 2017: A group of men confront a man walking home and ask him if he’s gay. When he confirms that he is, they beat him to the ground.

November 12, 2017: A Liverpool-area home is firebombed at 4AM while the Syrian refugee family of two parents and three toddlers slept. No one is injured, but the family is forced to find a new home because of the extensive damage. November 13, 2017: A white man on public transit in San Francisco repeatedly tells a fellow passenger that he hates him, calls him a “Chinese nigger,” and punches him several times.

December 1, 2017: FBI arrest Bernandino Bolatete for possession of an unregistered silencer after several weeks of investigation during which Bolatete described in great detail his plans to commit a mass shooting at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida.

December 2, 2017: A 41-year-old man enters a Jewish seniors’ residence where he hits an 84-year-old Jewish man with a fire extinguisher while yelling anti-semitic slurs, threatening to kill him before robbing him.

December 3, 2017: after an altercation in a parking lot, 38-year-old Jeffrey Peters follows an African American driver home. Once at the man’s home, Peters pulls out a loaded handgun, yells racial epithets, and threatens to shoot him.

December 3, 2017: A gay man standing outside a London nightclub is attacked by two men yelling homophobic slurs, injuring him so severely that he requires reconstructive surgery afterwards. December 3, 2017: A gay married couple & their friend are drinking in a Provincetown, MA. bar when 49-year-old Scott Rego walks up to the group, smashing one of them in the head with a beer bottle, then kicking him on the floor and assaulting the two other men while yelling homophobic slurs at them. A civil complaint is filed against Rego four months later for attacking the victims because of their sexual orientation.

December 4, 2017: An 18-year-old Muslim woman on a train is approached by a man that tells her he is going to kill her and all Muslims before he begins slapping her and trying to force her head to his crotch. At the time, the man was awaiting trial after assaulting a 10-year-old Filipina girl on a train seven months previously.

December 6, 2017: A 50-year-old Muslim man Rajasthan, India is lured to a remote location by 37-year-old Islamophobe Shambulal Regar. While Regar’s 14-year-old Regar nephew filmed, Regar severely beat his victim, then poured kerosene on him and burnt him to death. Regar had previously posted videos condemning romantic relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women. December 7, 2017: A Colombian immigrant is hospitalized after stepping between his 13-year-old son and a baseball-bat wielding attacker. The victim, his son, his wife, and a family friend were walking across a parking lot while shopping when a man jumped out of a white BMW with the baseball bat, screaming about how the frightened family were “ISIS” and “terrorists” before swinging at the 13-year-old boy and repeatedly striking the father with it instead. December 7, 2017: A 48-year-old Muslim man is hacked and burned to death in a murder recorded by the perpetrator and posted on YouTube as a warning to Muslim men against marrying HIndu women.

December 9, 2017: After retired veteran Kevyn Fowler moves to a predominantly white Jacksonville, AR suburb, his dog is poisoned and his truck and trailer are stolen. Then on December 9th, someone sets Fowler’s garage on fire after spray-painting “MOVE NIGGER.” Fowler is African-American.

December 12, 2017: 21-year-old white supremacist William “Bill” Edward Atchison walks into a high school in New Mexico and shoots two Latino students, killing them, before turning the gun on himself. It’s later revealed that Atchison was heavily-involved in the “alt-right” and was known to police.

December 16, 2017: On his way to practice, Manchester City winger Raheem Sterling is subjected to racist insults by an unidentified man who goes on to kick Sterling. December 17, 2018: A 52-year-old neo-nazi who had previously been convicted of murdering a man who had called Adolf Hitler a criminal detonates a nail bomb on the platform of an S-bahn train station in Hamburg, Germany, injuring one commuter.

December 22, 2017: After convincing their daughter to break up with her 17-year-old neo-nazi boyfriend, Scott Fricker and Buckley Kuhn-Fricker are shot to death in their home by the neo-nazi. December 22, 2017: A 45-year-old man leaving a gay club in Ohio is immediately assaulted by an assailant who fractures his skull, breaks his nose, and leaves him with a black eye and concussion after screaming homophobic slurs at him and stealing his phone. December 25, 2018: A 31-year-old trans woman is attacked from behind by a 40-year-old man in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, who hits her with a chair while yelling transphobic slurs at her. December 27, 2017: A 51-year-old Muslim woman in a Brooklyn Panera Bread is accosted by a mob of teenagers, who call her a terrorist, spit on her, and then begin punching her. December 31, 2017: Responding to a noise complaint, police in Colorado encounter a man who, after barricading himself into his apartment, engages them in a firefight, killing one sheriff’s deputy and wounding four others. 37-year-old Matthew Riehl was a self-described “libertarian” who frequently shared Islamophobic and alt-right posts on social media. 2017 = twenty-one shootings, fifteen arsons, sixteen stabbings, seventeen mob beatings, over 41 bomb threats, one bombing, three thwarted/failed bombings, one thwarted train derailment, a foiled political assassination, an acid attack, a hanging, and several other miscellaneous assaults by bigots, Islamophobes, nazis and racists which took the lives of forty-nine people and seriously injured eighty-four others in the countries we looked at (Canada, France, Honduras, India, Ireland, Malta, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the US). And those are just the ones that we found media reports for. Here’s hoping in 2018 we’re all more effective at undermining bigoted extremism and the horrific violence that comes with it.

#antifa international #fascism #terrorist #terrorism #homophobia #transphobia #violence #antifa #antifascist #antifascism #antiracist #antiracism #extreme right

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bumblee-stumblee · 2 years ago

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A “Trans Teen” Was Removed From Her Parent’s Care. Then She Was Sexually Abused.

Genevieve Gluck

This article was originally published by Reduxx.

Michele and Roger Blair first reported the disappearance of their teen daughter, Sage Lily Blair, to the Appomattox, Virginia Sheriff’s Office on August 25, 2021. (I've decided to include the link as proof this is a factual event)

Sage, 14 years old at the time, had run away from home after experiencing intense bullying at her school stemming from a newly-adopted transgender identity. Sage, a female, had begun identifying as a boy.

Michele and Roger would soon discover that the public high school Sage had attended was secretly encouraging her “social transition,” and had been deliberately withholding information from her family. Sage had begun calling herself “Draco” while at school, and using masculine pronouns.

Sage’s parents first became aware of their daughter’s decision to identify as transgender when a teacher notified them of an incident report involving sexual harassment in the boy’s washroom and on the bus. Sage had tried to use the boy’s washroom as part of her “social transition,” and had faced a rape threat as a result.

But, according to her parents, Sage’s insistence she was transgender appeared to come from a dark place.

Michele, Sage’s mother, told Reduxx that she believes that her daughter was groomed online by adults who used the concept of a gender identity to get close to her, promising that they would be her new “family.” She says Sage had met the adults, who were posing as children, via Instagram and Snapchat.

Just over a week after running away from home, Sage was located by the FBI.

She had been sexually exploited by an adult man she had met over social media and who believed her to be 16. A Virginia man had picked her up and transported her to Washington, DC. When she arrived in DC, the two men took her to Maryland, telling her she’d be going to stay with their family. Upon arrival, Sage was sexually abused repeatedly.

On September 2, 2021, Sage was sent to a hospital for a rape exam, a process which, according to Michele, went well into the night and lasted until the early hours of the morning. The FBI instructed her parents to pick her up the following day at the Waxter Children’s Center, a girls’ detention facility in Laurel, Maryland.

But when Michele and Roger arrived at the detention center where their daughter was being held, they were told they would not be allowed to see their child.

“They [the state authorities] would not even let me talk, hug, or see her the day after she went through the rape exam,” Michele told Reduxx, and added that the experience was, “heartbreaking, to say the least.”

Instead, they were required to appear in court that same afternoon, as they were being investigated for child abuse over alleged “misgendering.”

Michele and Roger would later discover that the investigation had been requested by the public defender, who had contacted two school counselors to testify against them. The counselors would argue that Sage should not be returned to her home due to a lack of a sufficiently “gender affirming” environment.

“Upon my arrival I was told my granddaughter would not be allowed to return to Virginia,” Michele had stated in May. “Sage was now being represented by a juvenile attorney and my husband and I were going to be investigated for ‘abuse’ because my husband and I called her Sage and not Draco.”

Michele provided Reduxx with a number of documents related to the ordeal, some of which attempt to paint their lack of “gender affirmation” as child abuse.

“Sage now identified as a boy and the judge demanded we use the ‘he/him’ pronouns and call her Draco. Sage was being represented by an attorney whose actions from the beginning were unethical and unprofessional,” Michele explained.

Michele believes the juvenile defense attorney representing Sage in the abuse claim had convinced her daughter to assert that she had been mistreated by her parents. Sage would later tell her mother that the lawyer had coached her to say that her parents were abusive because they wouldn’t accept her as a transgender boy.

Pending the outcome of the investigation, Sage was initially held in juvenile detention. During a second hearing, Michele pleaded for her daughter to be placed in a more comfortable environment. Instead, the state transferred Sage to the boy’s ward of a Children’s Home in Maryland on September 6.

The only girl in a male unit, Sage was again sexually abused by boys in the Children’s Home and was relocated to a private room within the boys’ section.

It would take more than two months, and over a dozen court appointments, before Michele and Roger Blair would be cleared of the abuse allegations against them. The Blairs provided Reduxx with multiple documents substantiating that no abuse or abusive intent had been determined.

Despite granting Michele and Roger’s petition for custody, the state of Maryland did not immediately relinquish parental rights to Sage’s family.

Instead, the now 15-year-old girl, who had begun calling herself “Justin” instead of “Draco,” was sent to public school in Maryland and was required to wear a GPS tracking device.

On November 9, a Maryland judge finally ruled for the state to release Sage back to her family in Virginia. However, this decision was immediately appealed by the juvenile attorney representing the girl for the state who wanted Sage placed in a foster home, again on the basis of protecting her “gender identity,” bolstered by a claim of ostensibly abusive “misgendering.”

Three days later, Sage was reported missing for a second time.

“Sage had been sent by another predator from Maryland to Dallas, Texas,” Michele recounted. “This man held her there in a locked room and used her for pornography, sold her body for money, starved her, beat her, and drugged her.”

Local authorities, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and the FBI were all notified that the teen was missing. However, Michele said the authorities in Baltimore refused to approve a request from Texas police to track Sage’s phone on the basis that she wasn’t linked with any crime.

Ultimately, it was a tip from one of Sage’s Instagram friends led to her recovery. Using a photo sent to him by the teen, a Texas Marshall was able to ascertain her whereabouts.

The Blairs were finally reunited with Sage in Dallas on January 24, 2022.

Little more than two weeks later, Michele took her daughter to North Springs Behavioral Healthcare Center, a facility that specializes in the treatment of psychological distress and trauma in children and teens. Michele says that while an inpatient at the Center, counselors continued to try and “affirm” Sage’s “gender” despite the fact she said she no longer identified as a boy. Michele made 8-hour drives to visit her daughter every Saturday, though was only allowed to be with her for 2 hours per week.

On July 25, Sage was discharged from the rehabilitation clinic and at long last returned home.

Sage no longer identifies as transgender, and is to be happy and healthy with her family. Michele proudly showed Reduxx a photo of Sage having her ears pierced at her local mall for her birthday last week.

A recent photo of Sage, shared with consent from her mother.

“Sage is the apple of my eye. It has been a rollercoaster, but she is home,” Michele says. “What happened to her hasn’t really changed our love, but it has changed our relationship because we are getting to know each other on a different level because of the trauma.”

Michele says Sage had tried going to school, but the endeavor was too stressful.

“She loves running. Running is her coping mechanism. She had joined cross-country and she loved it, but, sadly, when she was running the trail she’d sometimes see men and that was too much of a trigger for her. So she quit.” Her last day of attempting to go to school, Michele says Sage couldn’t get out of the car — so she took her daughter home.

Michele explained to Reduxx that the county is processing paperwork in order to get Sage a home tutor so she can continue her studies in 10th grade.

Getting emotional, Michele describes that Sage has been struggling with her mental health.

“She has panic attacks and nightmares about this man. She struggles to breathe. In the middle of the night she will crawl into bed with me, which she hasn’t done since she was a little girl. It has been really hard. But she is strong.”

A 37-year-old man has been arrested and detained in Baltimore in relation to the case of Sage’s sexual abuse. According to Michele, Kenneth Edward Fisher is one of three predators who are awaiting a hearing on charges related to child sex trafficking. The names of the other two men have not yet been released.

As other youth were involved in the case, publicly-available information has been limited in order to protect the minor victims.

Michele and Sage are set to travel to Baltimore next week for the beginning of the trial. Lawyers with the Office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City and the Rebuild, Overcome, and Rise (ROAR) Center at University of Maryland are both involved in the case.

“The lawyers said we could [appear] over Zoom, but it was Sage who actually said she wanted to go. She said ‘I feel like I have to go.’ I asked her if she was sure, and she told me ‘I don’t want it to happen to any other kids, what happened to me.'”

Michele is hoping that the trial will be a turning point in Sage’s healing. She knows the road to recovery will be a long one, but has optimism that her daughter will make it through.

“I am an adult and can barely handle this anxiety, let alone a child. But we are getting through it, by the grace of God … It’s going to be okay. She’s home. I love her. And life goes on, one day at a time.”

_________________________________________

30 Comments

10 hr ago

“… while an inpatient at the Center, counselors continued to try and “affirm” Sage’s “gender” despite the fact she said she no longer identified as a boy.” It appears as though misgendering is enough to deprive parents of their children but not enough to deprive public institutions of access to other people’s children.

___________

Dave Taylor

10 hr ago

Appalling. This is a scandal. The state fixates on the imaginary crime of 'Misgendering' while hardly bothering about actual physical and sexual child abuse done by male predators. Where is proper Safeguarding? The only good thing here, is that Sage appears to be coping as well as anybody could hope for, after such trauma

#gender transition #trans youth #radblr #radfem #feminist #radfems #feminism #trans #radfems please interact #gender critical #transgender #radical feminist

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How Many Republicans Are In The United States

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-are-in-the-united-states/

How Many Republicans Are In The United States

Polling Data Shows Republican Party Affiliation Is Down As Independents Leaning Toward The Democratic Party Surge

Democrats have a nine-percentage-point affiliation advantage over Republicans at the moment.

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The GOP is losing its grip, according to the latest Gallup poll.

The number of Americans identifying as Republicans or as independents who lean toward the GOP dropped to 40% in the first quarter of 2021, compared with the number of Democrats or independents leaning toward the Democratic party hitting 49%. And that nine-percentage-point lead is the greatest Democratic advantage that Gallup has measured since the fourth quarter of 2012, when former President Barack Obama was re-elected.

Gallup routinely measures U.S. adults’ party identification and the political leanings of independents. The latest poll surveyed a random sample of 3,960 U.S. adults by phone between January and March of 2021. And while Democratic Party affiliation actually dropped by one point from the fourth quarter of 2020, to 30% — where it has hovered for most of the past eight years — the number of Americans identifying as independent rose to 44% from 38% last quarter. And this growing number of independents came at the expense of the Republican party, as 19% of independents said they lean Democrat, compared with 15% leaning Republican. Most of the remaining 11% of independents didn’t swing either way.

And several events have happened during those three months that could position the Democratic Party more favorably in voters’ eyes, the Gallup report noted.

Opinion:

A Different America: How Republicans Hold Near Total Control In 23 Us States

In those states, Republicans hold the governorship and the legislature, giving them the power to take aim at abortion access, trans rights, voting and gun safety

Last modified on Tue 15 Jun 2021 14.38 BST

Democrats across the US cheered last month, as Texas legislators staged a walkout from the statehouse to block the passage of a Republican bill that would enact a number of restrictions on voting access.

But the victory seemed short-lived, as the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, quickly announced he planned to call a special session to get the legislation passed.

The walkout and the probably only temporary relief it provides for Democrats demonstrated the immense legislative power that Republicans have in dozens of states across the country and the ability that gives them to pass a hard-right agenda on a vast range of issues from abortion to the ability to vote.

In 23 US states, Republicans hold the governorship and the legislature, giving the party near total control to advance its policies. This year, Republicans have used that power to aggressively push their conservative social agenda – taking aim at abortion access, transgender rights and gun safety, as well as voting laws.

During the Texas legislative session, which concluded late last month, Republicans approved bills to allow permitless carry of firearms, ban abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and increase criminal penalties for protesters who block intersections.

For The First Time There Are Fewer Registered Republicans Than Independents

For the first time in history, there are more registered independents in the United States than there are registered Republicans.

It may not be for the reason you think, though.

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New data from Ballot Access News, which tracks registrations in the 31 states that require voters to register by party, shows that independents account for 29.09 percent of voters in them, compared with 28.87 percent for Republicans. As recently as 2004, Republicans outpaced independents by nearly 10 percentage points.

There are still way more registered Democrats; 39.66 percent of voters are registered with that party.

This marks the first time since party registration began in the early 1900s that the number of registered independents in the United States has surpassed members of either major political party, according to Ballot Access News.

Here’s the data going back to 2004:

But before anybody chalks this up as having to do with the current occupant of the White House, it’s worth parsing the trends.

While independents have surpassed Republicans, there actually hasn’t been a huge drop in GOP party registration since President Trump took office. Since October 2016, GOP registration has dropped by half a percentage point. The number of registered Democrats declined by nearly a full point over the same span. Independents have benefited from both drops.

Republican Lawmakers Push To Cast Vaccine Refusal As A Civil Rights Issue

Bills in several statehouses seek to block employers from demanding Covid-19 immunization, even though few do

Last modified on Fri 16 Jul 2021 19.48 BST

State Republican lawmakers across the United States are pushing forward bills that prohibit vaccine mandates in an attempt to give the refusal to have a Covid-19 vaccine the same sort of legal protections as those often surrounding issues of gender, religion and race.

Many Republican states are introducing bills that outlaw vaccine mandates within state offices, schools and workplaces, even though vaccine mandates are not commonplace among employers. They also come as the vaccine rollout in the US has slowed markedly, even though the more contagious Delta variant is spreading rapidly, especially among unvaccinated people.

Covid-19 vaccines are life-saving medications whose side effects are generally mild. Independent expert panels have repeatedly found the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risk of potential Covid-19 infection. More than 185 million Americans have received at least one vaccine dose.

“It’s sort of a solution looking for a problem,” said Lowell Pearson, a managing partner at Husch Blackwell, a firm that has been tracking the bills. “We’re not seeing really any broad sense that employers are requiring vaccines in office settings, in manufacturing settings and other places like that.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Us House Votes To Strip Republican Of Key Posts

The US House of Representatives has voted to expel a Republican congresswoman from two committees over incendiary remarks she made before being elected last November.

Marjorie Taylor Greene had promoted baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and endorsed violence against Democrats.

Before the vote, she said she regretted her views, which included claims that school shootings and 9/11 were staged.

Eleven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the motion by 230-199.

The Republican dilemma, embodied in one politician

It means the representative – who was elected in November, representing a district in the southern state of Georgia – cannot take up her place on the education and budget committees.

This would limit her ability to shape policy as most legislation goes through a committee before reaching the House floor. Committee positions can determine the influence of individual lawmakers in their party.

It is highly unusual for one party to intervene in another party’s House committee assignments.

On Friday, Mrs Greene said that she woke up “laughing” at the situation.

“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats are for giving some one like me free time,” she tweeted, referencing the 11 Republicans who also voted to remove her.

At a news conference in Washington hours later, Mrs Greene said that Democrats had “stripped my district of their voice” by removing her from the committees.

Why Do I Put My Life On The Line Pandemic Trauma Haunts Health Workers

Many health workers feel disillusioned and underappreciated.

Republican state Sen. Ralph Alvarado of Kentucky, a 50-year-old physician, said instead of shaming people who are reluctant to get vaccinated, it’s crucial to understand their concerns. He said he spends a lot of time dispelling myths about vaccines among his constituents, patients and community.

“As a doctor, I remind my colleagues that when we prescribe or recommend a course of action for somebody, no matter what the disease or prevention is, if people become resistant or hesitant, our medical code of ethics doesn’t say to humiliate,” he said. “You reassure and educate them.”

He added that a lot of people are fearful when politics is involved, because “people pick sides instead of picking the message.”

Public health experts also have stressed the need to focus outreach efforts on science. An analysis published in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed health journal, stated that when “science and values, not politics, inform public health,” it “unlocks potential for higher vaccine coverage.”

The de Beaumont Foundation, a Maryland-based charitable foundation focused on health solutions, held a two-hour session with a focus group in March that found messaging helps to build trust. The group consisted of almost 20 people who identified as conservative Republicans who supported Trump.

List Of Current Mayors Of The Top 100 Cities In The United States

Municipal partisanship in 2021

This page lists the current mayors of the 100 largest U.S. cities by population.

As of 2013, an estimated 62,186,079 citizens lived in these cities, accounting for 19.67 percent of the nation’s total population.

In most of the nation’s largest cities, mayoral elections are officially nonpartisan, though many officeholders and candidates are affiliated with political parties. Ballotpedia used one or more of the following sources to identify each officeholder’s partisan affiliation: direct communication from the officeholder, current or previous candidacy for partisan office, or identification of partisan affiliation by multiple media outlets. As of August 2021, the partisan breakdown of the mayors of the 100 largest U.S. cities was 63 Democrats, 26 Republicans, four independents, and six nonpartisans. The affiliation of one mayor was unknown.

Of these cities, there are 47 strong mayor governments, 46 council-manager governments, six hybrid governments, and one city commission.

At the start of 2021…

HIGHLIGHTS

Based on 2013 population estimates, 76% of the population of the top 100 cities lived in cities with Democratic mayors, and 15% lived in cities with Republican mayors.

Allen Joines , mayor of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had been in office the longest; he first took office in 2001.

This page includes:

Select a topic from the dropdown below to learn more.Submit

100 Largest Cities By Population Rank Strong mayor No

Census Data May Blunt Expected Republican Election Gains In 2022

FILE – This April 5, 2020, photo shows an envelope containing a 2020 census letter mailed to a U.S. resident in Detroit.

WASHINGTON – The release of detailed local data from the U.S. census this week demonstrated that the country is diversifying and urbanizing more quickly than many had believed, and those results have real consequences for what Congress will look like throughout the coming decade.

In general, the news was good for the Democratic Party. It suggests that some of the anticipated losses in the 2022 elections may be mitigated slightly by population growth in large metropolitan areas, which tend to vote for Democrats, and a decline in rural populations, which tend to favor the Republican Party.

In his analysis for The Cook Political Report, David Wasserman wrote that “although Republicans hold more sway in redistricting, Democrats have to be pretty happy with today’s results.”

Drawing new congressional maps

The decennial count of the American people is used for many purposes, but one of the most visible is the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. While every state’s allotment of senators is fixed at two, the size of their respective House delegations varies with population.

Republicans favored to take House

GOP advantage blunted

Inevitable lawsuits

Wasserman also pointed out that the data may also make it more difficult for Republicans to defend especially aggressive redistricting in court.

Map: Republicans To Have Full Control Of 23 States Democrats 15

In 2021, Republicans will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 23 states. Democrats will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 15 states.

Population of the 24 fully R-controlled states: 134,035,267Population of the 15 fully D-controlled states: 120,326,393

Republicans have full control of the legislative branch in 30 states. Democrats have full control of the legislative branch in 18 states.

Population of the 30 fully R-controlled legislature states: 185,164,412Population of the 18 fully D-controlled legislature states: 133,888,565

This week, Andrew Cuomo’s star went down in flames. While the smoke clears, let’s take a moment to sit back and reminisce about the governor’s long history with ethical and legal violations.

Cuomo’s controversies regarding sexual harassment and nursing homes deaths were far from his first abuses of power. In fact, his administration has a long history of it, ranging from interfering with ethics commissions, to financial corruption.

In July 2013, Cuomo formed the Moreland Commission to investigate corruption in New York’s government. At first it was a success, giving Cuomo good PR. Yet as it went on there were rumors that, contrary to his claim that “Anything they want to look at they can look at,” Cuomo was interfering with the Commission’s investigations. There was friction within the Commission, itself with two factions forming: “’Team Independence’ and ‘Team We-Have-a-Boss’.”

Are There More Democrats Than Republicans In The United States

I have been thinking about the Democratic Party and whether or not its members are more numerous than the opposing faction.

Evidence to suggest this is the case:

This party is expected to win the popular vote for president seven out of eight times since 1992. Please don’t say “this hasn’t happened yet”. If this bothers you, say 6 out of 7.

The party has received 51.9 percent of the votes cast in presidential elections from 1992 to 2016 for it or its opponent, the Republican Party. This shows that 2012 was the mean election in popular vote as of 2016.

Party registration in states that register by party says this same thing.

Trump’s approval has not gone above 50 percent ever as president on 538.

A plurality of Americans consistently supported impeachment by 2 to 5 points while it was happening.

This suggests that the partisan lean the American electorate is about D+4. I believe that it might be closer to D+5 now for various reasons and the fact that 2012 was the mean result. This can get a little bit fuzzy because of independents.

Active Oldest Votes

If we look at opinion polling, Gallup has collated party affiliation polls back to 2004. The most recent poll at the time of writing gives a D+11 advantage. Looking just at the net Republican/Democrat advantage, ignoring Independents, we can create the graph below – with positive percentages representing a Democrat lead, and negative percentages representing a Republican lead.

To give a theoretical perspective on this:

Democrats Think Many Republicans Sincere And Point To Policy

Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers. More than four in ten Democratic voters felt that most Republican voters had the country’s best interests at heart . And many tried their best to answer from the other’s perspective. A 45-year-old male voter from Ohio imagined that as a Republican, he was motivated by Republicans’ “harsh stance on immigration; standing up for the 2nd Amendment; promised tax cuts.” A 30-year-old woman from Colorado felt that Republican votes reflected the desires to “stop abortion… stop gay marriage from ruining our country… and give us our coal jobs back.”

Other Democrats felt that their opponents were mostly motivated by the GOP’s “opposition to Obamacare,” “lower taxes” and to support a party that “reduced unemployment.”

Scholarly Views On The Genetics And Psychology Of Politics

In Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences three political scientists provide psychological and biological explanation of how a person’s genetic makeup predisposes them to be liberal or conservative. They conclude:

If you accept that your political views are imbued less with majestic rationality than primal biology, that they bubble up from within rather than get passed down from on high, and if you recognize that predispositions affect how people perceive, process, and experience the world, you will have learned something valuable….

Democrats Return The Favor: Republicans Uninformed Or Self

The 429 Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Democrats inferred that Republicans must be “VERY ill-informed,” or that “Fox news told me to vote for Republicans.” Or that Republicans are “uneducated and misguided people guided by what the media is feeding them.”

Many also attributed votes to individual self-interest – whereas GOP voters feel Democrats want “free stuff,” many Democrats believe Republicans think that “I got mine and don’t want the libs to take it away,” or that “some day I will be rich and then I can get the benefits that rich people get now.”

Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side. Rather than really try to take the position of their opponents, they said things like, “I like a dictatorial system of Government, I’m a racist, I hate non-whites.”

Vaccination Outreach Shifts As Demand Drops In Some States

Some states are hitting a hesitancy wall.

Not all Republican men are so staunchly resistant.

At 70 years old, longtime Georgia state Rep. Tommy Benton said it would be foolish for him and others in his age group to turn down a vaccine. Benton, who doesn’t have underlying health conditions, didn’t want to catch COVID-19 or transmit it to his grandkids or peers, he said.

“It doesn’t matter how healthy you are. At…65 or above, you might end up getting sick with this disease and it’ll be more than your 65-or-above system can handle,” Benton said.

Wyoming state Rep. Daniel Zwonitzer, 41, who lives in the most vaccine-hesitant state in the country, said he took a vaccine for the safety of others, particularly for the older staff, legislators and volunteers in the Wyoming legislature. While Zwonitzer believes in freedom and liberty, he said, he also believes in public health. Zwonitzer does not have any preexisting health conditions, he noted.

He said a few of his Republican colleagues think COVID-19 and vaccines against it are a hoax, but he disagreed, pointing out that one of his fellow Republicans died from the disease.

Some Republican men and health officials cited the politicization of mask-wearing and shutdowns under former President Donald Trump’s administration, and its downplaying of the seriousness of the pandemic, as causes for the vaccine hesitancy among conservatives.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, “This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.”

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, “I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much.” The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, “i really am going to have a hard time doing this” but then offered that Republicans “are morally right as in values, … going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, … going to create jobs.”

The Republican Party General Policy And Political Values

The Republican Party is often referred to as the GOP. This abbreviation stands for Grand Old Party. Its logo is an elephant. The Republican Party is known to support right-leaning ideologies of conservatism, social conservatism, and economic libertarianism, among other -isms. Thus, Republicans broadly advocate for traditional values, a low degree of government interference, and large support of the private sector.

One main standpoint of the Republican Party platform is a strong focus on the family and individual freedom. Generally, the Republican Party therefore often tends to promote states’ and local rights. That means that they often wish for federal regulations to play a lesser role in policymaking. Furthermore, the GOP has a pro-business-oriented platform. Thus, the party advocates for businesses to exist in a free market instead of being impacted by tight government regulations.

The Democratic Party General Policy And Political Values

The Democratic Party generally represents left-leaning, liberal and progressive ideological values, thus advocating for a strong government to regulate business and support for the citizens of the United States. Thus, one of the key values emphasized by Democrats is social responsibility. Overall, Democrats believe that a prominent and powerful government can ensure welfare and equality for all. Much like the Republican Party, political opinions within the Democratic Party stretch across a wide spectrum, as both parties are, to a large degree, decentralized. However, from a general point of view, Democrats tend to support heavy taxation of high-income households. In comparison to Denmark, where taxes are generally high, the Democratic taxation policy may not seem excessive, but on a U.S. taxation scale these tax percentages are in the heavy end.

Theres Never Been A Better Time For Civic Engagement

You’ve cast your vote. Now what? Join 10 million other Americans using GovTrack to learn about and contact your representative and senators and track what Congress is doing each day.

And starting in 2019 we’ll be tracking Congress’s oversight investigations of the executive branch.

You’re more than a vote, so support GovTrack today with a tip of any amount:

Or keep using GovTrack for free! Our public interest mission means we will never put our service behind a paywall.

Govtrackus Is Taking A New Focus On Civic Education

Help us develop the tools to bring real-time legislative data into the classroom.

If you’ve visited a bill page on GovTrack.us recently, you may have noticed a new “study guide” tab located just below the bill title. This is part of a new project to develop better tools for bringing real-time legislative data into the classroom. We hope to enable educators to build lesson plans centered around any bill or vote in Congress, even those as recent as yesterday.

We’re looking for feedback from educators about how GovTrack can be used and improved for your classroom. If you teach United States government and would like to speak with us about bringing legislative data into your classroom, please reach out!

Has Marjorie Taylor Greene Really Left Qanon Behind

Analysis by Alistair Coleman, BBC Monitoring

Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that she stopped believing in the QAnon conspiracy in 2018

However, she continued to allude to ideas pushed by QAnon believers.

In a 2019 video she claimed that then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was being played by a body double.

The idea stemmed from the macabre conspiracy theory that Ginsburg’s death – which actually did occur, later, in September 2020 – was somehow being covered up.

Odd as it sounds, in feverish QAnon groups where the rumour was born, whispers about imposters and political “body doubles” are fairly common.

In December 2020, she insisted in a now-deleted social media post that the QAnon community was “exposing truth”.

And somewhat prophetically, in a February 2019 video post she called for people to flood the US Capitol building to demonstrate against Democrats. The month before, she “liked” a post saying that it would be quicker to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “with a bullet to the head”.

She refused to address these issues when questioned Friday. Mrs Greene may have left overt support for QAnon behind, but it appears she’s still paying attention to what’s being said in conspiracy-minded groups.

The Philosophy Behind Democratic Economic Policy

Democrats gear their economic policies to benefit low-income and middle-income families. They argue that reducing income inequality is the best way to foster economic growth. Low-income families are more likely to spend any extra money on necessities instead of saving or investing it. That directly increases demand and spurs economic growth. Democrats also support a Keynesian economic theory, which says that the government should spend its way out of a recession.

One dollar spent on increased food stamp benefits generates $1.73 in economic output.??

President Franklin D. Roosevelt first outlined the Economic Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. It included taxes on war profiteering and price controls on food costs. President Harry Truman’s 1949 Fair Deal proposed an increase in the minimum wage, civil rights legislation, and national health care. President Barack Obama expanded Medicaid with the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The Philosophy Behind Republican Economic Policy

Republicans advocate supply-side economics that primarily benefits businesses and investors. This theory states that tax cuts on businesses allow them to hire more workers, in turn increasing demand and growth. In theory, the increased revenue from a stronger economy offsets the initial revenue loss over time.

Republicans advocate the right to pursue prosperity without government interference. They argue this is achieved by self-discipline, enterprise, saving, and investing.

Republicans’ business-friendly approach leads most people to believe that they are better for the economy. A closer look reveals that Democrats are, in many respects, actually better.

% Of Republicans View Trump As True Us President

Reuters

A combination picture shows U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaking during the first 2020 presidential campaign debate, held on the campus of the Cleveland Clinic at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., September 29, 2020. Picture taken September 29, 2020. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

WASHINGTON, May 24 – A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The May 17-19 national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared to 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults believe the Nov. 3 election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from Nov. 13-17 which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

A Democrat, Biden won by more than seven million votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters’ Jan. 6 deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Voter Registration And State Political Control

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

The state Democratic or Republican Party controls the governorship, the state legislative houses, and U.S. Senate representation. Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral, i.e., it has only one legislative house and is officially non-partisan, though party affiliation still has an unofficial influence on the legislative process.

The simplest measure of party strength in a state voting population is the affiliation totals from voter registration for the 30 states and the District of Columbia as of 2019 that allow registered voters to indicate a party preference when registering to vote. 20 states do not include party preference with voter registration: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. The party affiliations in the party control table are obtained from state party registration figures where indicated. Only Wyoming has a majority of registered voters identifying themselves as Republicans; two states have a majority of registered voters identifying themselves as Democrats: Maryland and Kentucky .

The Party Thats Actually Best For The Economy

Many analyses look at which party is best for the economy. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Democratic presidents since World War II have performed much better than Republicans. On average, Democratic presidents grew the economy 4.4% each year versus 2.5% for Republicans.

A study by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that the economy performs better when the president is a Democrat. They report that “by many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large.” Between Truman and Obama, growth was 1.8% higher under Democrats than Republicans.

A Hudson Institute study found that the six years with the best growth were evenly split between Republican and Democrat presidents.

Most of these evaluations measure growth during the president’s term in office. But no president has control over the growth added during his first year. The budget for that fiscal year was already set by the previous president, so you should compare the gross domestic product at the end of the president’s last budget to the end of his predecessor’s last budget.

For Obama, that would be the fiscal year from October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2018. That’s FY 2010 through FY 2017. During that time, GDP increased from $15.6 trillion to $17.7 trillion, or by 14%. That’s 1.7% a year.

The chart below ranks the presidents since 1929 on the average annual increase in GDP.

President

1.4%

A president would have better growth if he had no recession.

Contrast With Color Usage In Other Countries

The recent association of colors in American politics lies contrary to the long-standing conventions of political color in most other countries whereby red symbols ” rel=”nofollow”>red flag or red star) are associated with left-wing politics. Indeed, as late as the 1990s, Democrats were often represented by red and Republicans by blue. According to The Washington Post, journalist Tim Russert coined these terms during his televised coverage of the 2000 presidential election. The 2000 election was not the first during which the news media used colored maps to depict voter preferences in the various states, but it was the first time a standard color scheme took hold. In previous elections, the color assignments or even the actual colors used were often different.

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