#Right Wing Extremism

[shamebats]

Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.

This is such a wild story like holy shit dude

[stephen-barry]

[usindistress]

Why can't our kids read when we keep redirecting all our money into the military and billionaires' bank accounts!?

While more funding doesn't always necessarily result in better test scores, lack of funding ALWAYS leads to lower educational outcomes.

Kentucky ranks 44th.

Rand sends his kids to DC private schools.

Elect people who respect public education.

[kenrakenokwaho]

Romania won, today, in the hybrid war launched by Russia during presidential elections. The Constitutional Court annulled the first round, and the process, which was vitiated from the very beginning, will be restarted from step one.

Everything after the president in office, Klaus Iohannis, listened to the people, and declassified all the documents about Călin Georgescu's Russian-supported campaign with shady financing and TikTok schemes.

The risk of having a pro-Russian president was too high to let things slide. We couldn't be another victim of Putin's meddling. The people who voted for Călin Georgescu scream that it's unfair, that their choice is being overlooked, but they forget that they aren't the majority. They are 2 million out of 19. Their self-proclaimed "Apostle" isn't what he says he is.

If the national institutions – having information on him from all the secret services – took CG seriously, we wouldn’t have reached this point.

The Sun will shine on us again!

[agentfascinateur]

The Rafah coverup preparations:

Getting rid of the witnesses..."democratic" "allies", undemocratic accomplices.

[luulapants]

I've been trying to come up with a moral or a headline to wrap around this story, but I just gotta say it.

One of my cousins fell in with a bad crowd in his 30s. Violent, racist, sexist shitbags that call themselves a club but operate like a cult with fucked up initiation rituals and constant monitoring to make sure everyone is toeing the ideological line. He did and said a lot of fucked up stuff, because that's required by groups like this, because it's how they make sure you get exiled by everyone else in your life.

But his dad, my uncle, he was a stubborn old bastard who had seen some shit, and he wasn't going to lose his son. He decided to get him out, no matter how long it took. He told his son that he didn't approve of his actions or beliefs, but he never tried to argue, never bought into the debate. He made sure my cousin knew he was loved and would have help to get out when he was ready. Sure enough, my cousin got himself in legal trouble, called his dad, and said, "Get me out."

My uncle's number one requirement was therapy. He found someone who specialized in cult survivors, and he drove his adult son to every session. They did family counseling. He helped him make the life changes he needed to stay away. My uncle was fully committed to getting his son back with love and attention and patience and without an ounce of judgment.

The first family gathering my cousin came to after years on the outs, he would start to say something fucked about vaccines or the government, then something amazing would happen: he'd stop himself. He'd say something like, "Sorry, that's just something someone told me, but that doesn't mean it's right." The whole family agreed with each other that we were not to scold or shame him for saying those things. We could correct him if he didn't correct himself, but we had to do it gently and with love.

My uncle died, and my cousin backslid pretty hard. He had a lot of other bad shit going on in his life, and he'd lost his main pillar of support. He felt alone. We found out at the funeral that he was back in his gang, and the family knew what my uncle would want us to do. We showered him in love and we made him feel less alone. At one point, someone said, "I'm so happy you're here," and he burst into tears.

Me and this cousin were never close before. He's a lot older than me - he was friends with my brother (who died), not me. I didn't even have his number until the funeral, but now we're texting regularly. He left the gang again. He's back in therapy. He's ready to do the hard work. Every conversation ends with 'I love you.'

I guess - you can cut off everyone in your life who falls into hateful ideology, that's a choice you can make. It doesn't reduce the number of extremists in the world, though. It also doesn't feel anywhere near as good as helping to save them.

[victusinveritas]

[nando161mando]

And the few trans people that identify as and surround themselves with nazis and right wingers, typically are predators, and don't care about that because that is how their own "friends" see them as. And of course, they believe throwing everyone else to the Leopards to assure their own safety.

[blackflash9]

Beware Project 2025: A Disaster in the Making

This is Project 2025, and America's future hinges on the people's vote this November. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. WAKE UP AND GO VOTE PEOPLE!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Richard Luscombe at The Guardian:

The Proud Boys have lost control of their own name after the far-right extremist group subjected a Black church in Washington DC to a “hateful and overtly racist” attack during the violent final days of Donald Trump’s first presidency. The ruling Monday by Judge Tanya Jones Bosier of Washington DC’s superior court grants the church – the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal church – power over how the Proud Boys moniker is used. Bosier’s decision opens a pathway to seizing proceeds from the sale of any merchandise featuring the white supremacist group’s name, logos and insignia, too. Lawyers for the church sought the ruling to satisfy a $2.8m judgment stemming from the December 2020 attack during a rally by Trump supporters who falsely claimed that victory was stolen from him when he lost the presidential election that year to Joe Biden. Several Proud Boys members scaled a wall at the church and embarked on a rampage of vandalism that included burning a Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner. The mob included Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, a planner of the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack who was subsequently sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. But he was among 1,500 people pardoned and freed when Trump returned to office in January after defeating Kamala Harris in November’s election. In a June 2023 ruling, DC superior court judge Neal Kravitz said Tarrio and fellow Proud Boys members John Turano, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Jeremy Bertino had “acted with an evil, discriminatory motive based on race and that their conduct was reprehensible to an extreme degree” when they attacked the church.

It was one of a number of violent incidents that took place in the Washington DC area between Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and the deadly January 6 attack by his supporters trying to keep him in office. Tarrio did not take part in the Capitol insurrection because he had been arrested for stealing a BLM flag in an separate assault on the Asbury United Methodist Church, one of four churches attacked by the Proud Boys on the same night. He watched the riot he had helped organize from a hotel room in Baltimore.

Here is some poetic justice, on Black History Month no less: Far-right domestic terrorist group Proud Boys lost their own naming rights to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in DC, which was one of the churches vandalized by the far-right group.

See Also:

Daily Kos: You’ll never guess who now controls the Proud Boys brand

Washingtonian: A Historic DC Black Church Now Owns the Proud Boys’ Name

[thashining]

abelouise

This black warehouse is a brand new ICE detention camp just erected just 20 minutes north of Austin, TX. I'm sharing the video so you can get a sense of its scale. Calling the detention camps "camps" and not "centers" because they are destabilizing, not centering. (Also: its rapid construction proves that the US could build shelters to house and feed to every houseless person in this nation in just a few weeks. And no, we don’t want the filthy paws of private prison owners in our shelters. Neither do we want them on our immigrant siblings or our incarcerated siblings. But I do notice the federal capacity this reveals.) NOTE: This video was removed from Fb and from the 20 shares from my page, within 10 hours. Please share widely! 2*O*20*O Algreg St., Pflugerville TX

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada is in deep crisis. It’s unfashionable in centrist circles to say so, but it’s true. The country is literally on fire and facing extraordinary and growing threats from climate change. It is staring down rising extremism, creeping toxic polarization, and low trust. Wealth inequality is on the rise. Its federal system is showing cracks, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Alberta and the national government. Oligopolies and monopolies run wild, exploiting consumers.

There are plenty of other problems too. But of the lot, the confluence of a few major challenges scream, House of cards coming down! Those are the country’s housing crisis, consumer debt, and high — and potentially rising — interest rates. Taken together, they paint a picture of working people staring down lives they can’t afford in the day-to-day. This hellish scenario persists, no matter how hard people work, and no matter how rigidly they follow the rules of the game — rules they were told are fair and just.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[contemplatingoutlander]

Yoel Roth, PhD used to be in charge of the trust and safety team at Twitter. This is a must-read article to better understand how the far right is attacking anyone who wants to guard against disinformation being shared on social media. Consequently, the link above is a gift 🎁 link, so anyone can read the entire article, even if they do not subscribe to the NY Times.

Below are some excerpts:

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next. Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move. This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online. Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

I encourage you to use the gift link above and read the entire article. It is worth your time.

[agentfascinateur]

"Nothing anti-Semitic about opposing genocide"

- Lela Tolajian

To us, progressive Jews, it appears elected officials who proudly stood by Donald Trump after he refused to condemn neo-Nazis and dined with anti-Semites value our voices only when they can tokenise a select few to fulfil their political goals. Conflating anti-Semitism with criticism of a modern apartheid state is dangerous historical revisionism.