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eretzyisrael · 3 years ago

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What We Can Do About It

Last week I explained How They Did It, how the enemies of Israel – the Arabs, the Soviets, the international Left, and others – turned much of the West against us. What can we do about it?

I concentrated on the ‘softer’ aspects of cognitive warfare, such as the infiltration of higher education and international organizations like NGOs and UN agencies, corporations, the use of social media, the exploitation of minorities with grievances, and the support of public antisemites (e.g., Ilhan Omar). But we should keep in mind that more kinetic actions can also have primarily cognitive objectives. The PLO’s European terrorism during the 1970s paved the way for its conversion from a gang of despicable terrorists into a member of the UN, and for murderer and thief Yasser Arafat to become a “statesman.” The 9/11 attacks against the US changed the media portrayal of its Arab and Muslim citizens from “billionaires, bombers, and belly dancers” to hardworking citizens who are targets for islamophobic hatred (this is not the case with Jews, despite the fact that Jews are far more likely to be the victims of hate crimes today).

Terrorism works on various levels, but on the deepest, visceral one it creates paralyzing fear, which the mind – still subconsciously – tries to rationalize away by distancing itself from the victims and identifying with the terrorists. “Don’t kill me, I am on your side!” the terrorized mind shouts. “I’m one of the good ones!” (e.g, a “Jew for Palestine”).

The counterattack has to be planned, coordinated, and specifically targeted in all of the arenas, soft and hard, in which cognitive war is being waged against us. This is something the State of Israel has never come close to doing. Our efforts at public diplomacy have often been most charitably described as a bad joke, like the campaign to advertise Israel as a destination for gay tourism(“Come to Israel! We have nice beaches and we won’t hang you!”) At best we are reactive, responding to vicious accusations of war crimes, apartheid, and other depravities, usually long after the damage has been done. And we often ignore the cognitive implications of our actions, or the lack thereof.

It won’t be easy. Organized support for anti-Israel organizations (including those connected with terrorism) has been going on for decades, with millions of dollars annually flowing from sources like the George Soros organizationsand the European Union. Social media, especially, is constantly changing and new battlefields appear almost daily. Everywhere you look (e.g., Wikipedia) there is anti-Israel bias. And for every pro-Israel activist there are ten, or a hundred, attacking us.

An effective cognitive counterattack must have two parts: how we speak to the world, and – most important – how we act. Let me take the second part first.

There are basic human instincts that precede the ideas expressed in the UN charter by hundreds of thousands of years. Our actions must affect those instincts in a way that will cause others to respect us, and our enemies to fear us. I am not suggesting that we follow the example of the PLO and hijack planes in Europe, but our response to terrorism and threats from enemy countries (e.g., Iran) can be designed to have the appropriate effect. Humans are attracted to strength. They want to be on the side that’s stronger. They talk about the importance of moral and legal principles, but they bet on the winner. Our actions should radiate power and control, and even ruthlessness.

For example, no terrorist should survive his attack. Israeli security forces and the individuals involved have been sharply criticized, both by Israelis and others, for the “Bus 300 affair” in 1984, when two captured terrorists were executed in the field after interrogation. My contention is that this action sent exactly the right message, both to our enemies – “don’t try this or you will die” – and to the rest of the world – “Israel does not tolerate terrorism against her citizens.”

Our pusillanimous responses to Hamas, which has on numerous occasions killed Israelis and which today holds two Israeli citizens and the bodies of two soldiers hostage, is supposed to be justified for practical reasons, but is a total failure from the standpoint of cognitive warfare. When Israel bombs an unoccupied Hamas installation after arson balloons or even rockets from Gaza have burned crops or damaged buildings, the message that is sent is that we are too weak to protect ourselves. When our citizens are held captive while we supply electricity and water to the Gaza Strip, the message is that Hamas is in control, not Israel. I understand the limitations of our power, as viewed by the IDF, but I believe that they are not weighing the cognitive aspects of the question heavily enough.

Recently, the IDF demolished the home of a terrorist murderer, a citizen of the PA who was also an American citizen, despite a request from the US State Department to desist. This was the correct action from the cognitive point of view, sending the message that Israel is a sovereign state which controls Judea/Samaria, and which does not tolerate terrorism. On the other hand, the continued presence of the illegal Bedouin settlement of Khan al-Ahmar as a result of pressure from the EU and the UN tells the world that Israel does not control the land.

Our greatest enemy is Iran, whose regime has explicitly threatened to destroy us on numerous occasions and is developing nuclear weapons. There are obviously multiple considerations that play into choosing the best response, from a pre-emptive strike on her nuclear installations to a continuation of the campaign of sabotage that Israel has been waging for the last few years. Cognitively, the best approach is the one that publicly demonstrates that Israel has the power to destroy the installations, regardless of the distance or their fortification. This could be a massive aerial attack, or it could be covert action that is made public after the fact. The worst case is that we refrain from taking action because of pressure from the US.

In the soft realm, one priority is to put an end to Israel’s self-imposed cognitive failures. There is no reason that Israelis should be allowed to act as paid agents of the EU or the international Left, as is the case with B’Tselem and numerous other anti-state organizatons. There is a weakly enforced law that requires Israeli NGOs that receive half of their funding from foreign governments to report that, on penalty of a relatively small fine; and even that was opposed by the Left and the Arab parties in the Knesset. It is absurd that these groups should be allowed to operate in Israel. All foreign funding – private or governmental – for political NGOs should be forbidden, period. Representatives of foreign NGOs hostile to Israel should not be allowed into the country.

Speaking of Arab parties, there is a Basic Law that says that in order to run for election to the Knesset, a candidate or list must not “[negate] the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” This law is interpreted loosely by the Supreme Court, so that Arabs who do precisely that can sit in the Knesset. That must end.

Israel has military censorship, which sometimes makes us look foolish when foreign publications are revealing details that Israelis are not allowed to read or hear from their own media, but at the same time, the Ha’aretz newspaper is allowed to attack the state, day in and day out, often using material from the foreign-funded NGOs. Foreign propaganda outlets make good use of it, saying “even Israelis admit…” This is unacceptable; it borders on treason, and it must stop.

There is a place for traditional hasbara, explanation, or presentation of the news from the viewpoint of the state. I am not sure why everyone is entitled to an opinion and a platform from which to broadcast it, while the state is not. Why not a government TV/radio/Internet news outlet, staffed with professionals who could respond immediately and accurately to false accusations? Doing this properly, so that it would be both authoritative and not boring, would be expensive and require high quality personnel that would not be easy to find; but it is worth doing.

Much of what I have suggested will be criticized because “it violates human rights” or it is “antidemocratic,” or similar things. I don’t disagree. But the idea that Israel has to be a paragon of human rights and democracy is wrong. It is an expression of the antisemitic idea that Jews must always be held to the highest of standards – indeed, to a standard that is continually raised so as to always be out of reach. Israel is not a Platonic ideal state; it is not even the United States. It is a tiny nation with no strategic depth that is surrounded by enemies who themselves violate every standard of civilized behavior. National survival is more important than human rights – especially when those defining the concept of human rights are indifferent (or worse) to our survival.

Abu Yehuda

#Information War #media #terrorism #war

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ms-demeanor · 5 years ago

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thank you for posting more about how much you hate that idiot fucking book I fucking live for this

I have, no joke, probably read Atlas Shrugged a hundred times. I’m on my twelfth copy. I won one of those copies for entering one of the Ayn Rand scholarship essay contests. I once helped a communist friend of mine write an objectivist essay in order to apply for financial aid because “I don’t think like those people, you do”

(full disclosure y’all, I was a libertarian raised by libertarians and i stayed that way until my mid twenties)

I don’t know that I hate it so much as I’m completely fascinated by it.

I actually consider it a REALLY interesting piece of dystopian literature that I enjoy as a dystopia but it is so hyperbolic that it almost reaches the level of magic realism.

Atlas Shrugged (along with most of Rand’s other work) is so fundamentally broken in its assumptions about what motivates people to do what they do that it has always struck me as a weird dreamy fantasy novel. Like, imagine describing the construction of New York’s skyscrapers in a Lana Del Rey music video but all the characters are Fae and have impenetrable social rules about what is acceptable behavior.

And I know I’m in the minority here but I genuinely enjoy her prose, with the obvious caveats that the John Galt speech is terrible and the clear power exchange fetish works better if it’s addressed as a fetish instead of a weird recurring rape fantasy.

I don’t want to make excuses for Rand; her philosophy is ghoulish and her real-life attitudes about imperialism and capitalism and, just like, human rights and interpersonal relationships are repugnant. But if you want to get some insight into *why* she’s like this I’d recommend reading We the Living; it may not be accurate and when it was published it was controversial and frequently considered anticommunist propaganda (how fucking strange is it that a book published in the united states would be controversial for being anticommunist; that really hammers home how successful mccarthyism was) but I get the sense that it’s very much what *she* believed to be true in her experience and since I didn’t grow up in Soviet Russia and defect to the US I can’t exactly say she wasn’t, to a certain extent, justified in her views.

But, god, the way you see that exploded out in later work is just farcical. It’s so dramatic and overwrought - it’s not enough that politicians make mistakes or are self-interested, no, they’re moochers who are out to hasten the end of the world, bloodsucking parasites looking to enslave anybody with the audacity to be productive. It’s not enough that Lillian Rearden married for money, no, she’s out to destroy the soul of the productive man, only capable of measuring her worth by how far she’s able to make her husband fall. It’s not enough that Jim Taggart is an inept company president put in place by nepotism instead of skill, he’s also working to tear down everything his sister built because he wants her reputation but also wants to destroy her for having the gall to accomplish the things that built that reputation.

It’s fascinating. It’s bizarre. It’s looking through a glass darkly, examining the private fears of petty, bitter people. It’s not true, but there’s a truthiness to it to the people who buy into it; they haven’t experienced the world the way that Rand has written it but that’s how they believe the world works and they’re taking her writing as the evidence for it.

AND WHAT DRIVES ME UP THE WALL IS THAT IT’S SO CLOSE TO BEING RADICAL.

Like, okay, look at The Fountainhead - the climax of the book is about a dude who’s frustrated that his art is being perverted by bureaucracy and who wants equal access to fair housing. Crooked contractors and bloated budgets fueled by favoritism and scope creep are all legitimate problems with state building projects and the idea of working on one of those and wanting to blow it up is SUPER relatable. Yeah, dudes, I don’t want the DeVos family getting any more contracts from the government, I don’t want contractors who have worked with Trump bidding on housing projects. That DOES seem fucked up.

But I mean come on, you’ve got a journalist right there in your storyline; the way you make a hero isn’t to blow up a housing project it’s to report on the corruption. But the journalist is one of the craven lesser men Dominique fucks to get back at Roark to punish him for working with statists. So an exposé is out and an explosion is in.

And I know that seems radical but the thing is it’s not a call to fix a corrupt system, it’s not looking to replace a flawed method with a better method - it’s saying “my way or not at all” and that’s just. Petty. Petulant and wasteful.

Childish.

Same for Galt’s Gulch and the “Strike of the Mind” - in Galt’s Gulch there’s a fucking *doctor* who bitches that he was made to heal people who he thought didn’t contribute to enough to society. Dude. DUDE. Keep your mobile xray technology, and your cure for strokes; I’d prefer a doctor who isn’t basically a eugenicist.

FUCK.

It’s so frustrating that she creates this world where everything can be abundant and everything can be accessible and instead of going “luxury gay space communist post-scarcity society” she goes “what if everything COULD be free but instead we had the gold standard and let children with the “wrong” parents starve to death?”

(uh, in case it’s not clear: I’ve had something of a strong ideological shift away from the libertarian party)

And oh god the way she writes and thinks about women.

You know what, I’ve had arguments with some people about the “I’m not like other girls” trope and if/how it exists and Ayn Rand’s protagonists are the perfect example. Dominique only hosts tea parties in order to crush the soul of the man who won’t live up to her exacting standards, not because she likes them or wants friends or anything. Dagny has a long straight neck and an imperious profile and the short hair of an American woman; she saw a bunch of socialists once and put her middle finger up at them. She didn’t want to come out in society at a ball (and be flirted with by boring boys like some kind of silly GIRL), she wanted to go back to the trains (and also maybe get fucked rough against a wall by a man who knew what she deserved and was bold enough to give it to her) like a serious person. Ayn Rand is the queen of Not Like Those Other Girls.

Goddamnit.

Also everybody talks about how awful the John Galt Speech is but the John Galt torture scene? Hot. Great. 10/10 whump. Please skip the rest of the book and instead read about Galt’s friends/admirers rescuing him and tenderly wrapping his shaking shoulders before they carry him to safety, silently brimming with emotion and pride at how well he resisted the torture. (I maintain that if Rand had stuck to just writing actual porn she’d be much better thought-on and more widely beloved because her fetishy stuff only sucks in context; pull it out of her screeds against altruism and you’ve got something that it at least five orders of magnitude better than 50 Shades)

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engmjr419 · 4 years ago

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A Spectrum of Scares: The Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and mid-20th century paranoia

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

- Marsha P. Johnson, A Black Transgender Drag Queen

“A Promotion We Can Do Without” from the Miami Herald, 1954. It accompanies an article about police being “soft” on “perverts” (the typical term for a homosexual in this period) in Miami leading to moral failure. The first line of the paragraph in the top left reads, “Sex perversion is a growing public problem”. Source.

The history of the LGBT+ community in America is a textbook of struggle, just as Marx claims history to be patterns of class struggle. The lesbian is told she needs a man, the homosexual is blamed for moral failure, the bisexual is called confused, and the transgender called mentally ill. They are constantly alleged to be corruptors, perverts, and conspirators trying to undermine the “normal” straight society, in other wards they are the “other”. In the McCarthy era, we were alleged to be Communists; but then again, who wasn’t?

The year is around 1948, the second World War had only ended 3 years ago, and America is feeling powerful. They’ve come out the victor with their allies and defeated the Nazi Party. However, their society is now forever tinged with this xenophobic culture, powered by anti-German, Russian, and Japanese propaganda, that paints them broadly as, President Donald J. Trump tweeted barely a week ago, the “Red Wave”. As Communist government expands in Eastern Europe, the communist, to the American, becomes a boogeyman, a coverall for any ill moral, counterculture, or otherwise “bad” action that anybody does. Furthermore, the Cold War pushes this even further as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union boil to a tipping point awakening anti-communist hysteria from the 1930s. Simply put, The Soviet Union and the US were goading each other constantly. Thus, begins McCarthyism and the second Red Scare (the first being in the late 1910s during World War 1).

The communist, the so called “Red Menace” becomes the anti-capitalist, the socialist, the critic, the questioner, the democrat, the minority, and, most important to us, the homosexual.

Amidst the McCarthy investigations and hearings, the societal panic, and the illusionary massive plan of the communists to uproot American Society (though we were literally pointing nuclear missiles at eachother), the second Red Scare was used to discriminate further against the “other”. All areas of minority were targeted for being Communist, some directly by McCarthy, from Black Americans, to the non-Christian, to the LGBT community. The figure of the Communist and the “other” became one in the same.

A newspaper headline from 1961 stating the “Reds” blackmail Homosexuals into being Communist spies. The paragraph above it reads, “The F.B.I. knew those two code experts were fruity fellows but nothing was done about it until the boys has already minced off to Moscow.” Their homosexuality is summarized as “perverted pursuits in hotel rooms”. Source

This resulted in the Lavender Scare, a mass investigation and eviction of LGBT, primarily gay people, from United States Government due to fear of them being Communist infiltrators along with public beliefs of the gay person. McCarthy himself declared the “homosexual” to be a threat to the American lifestyle, as he thought they could be easily blackmailed by the communist into revealing state secrets or be “Corrosive” to their coworkers moralities. The Lavender Scare is the people’s moral fears over the homosexual lifestyle colliding with Mycarterism-era conspiracy fueled paranoia.

A 1950s Newspaper article warning Americans “DON’T Patronize Reds” in the entertainment industry. The last line reads, “every time you permit REDS to come into your Living Room VIA YOUR TV SET you are helping MOSCOW and the INTERNATIONLISTS to destroy America!!!” Source.

During the late 1940s and stretching into the late 1950s, a “Red Scare” occurs, a conspiracy theory where the American people believed that Communists had infiltrated their society with the goal to bring down democracy. People believed “Reds” had infiltrated government, Hollywood, TV, schools, and any other public place with an express hope of “corrupting” the populace. The era overall is called the “McCarthy Era” after Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing republican who in 1950 rose to prominence by declaring there was “Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army” (Miller Center). In his speech, titled “Enemies Within” he declares:

The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous…Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity or morality. He called this “soulful ravings” and “sloppy sentimentality”

He points the finger at the end, claiming:

I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

He later cut this list down to 57, in an address to President Truman, “Despite this State Department black-out, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department”. Two of these cases specifically targeted homosexuals.

This speech polarized the nation, creating parties who both believed and dismissed his allegations. McCarthy in the early 1950s would comb over nearly all government departments, questioning countless witnesses (Who a large majority of the time were only accused of being Communist), and in 1954 it all cultivated in its peak, the McCarthy Hearings. The McCarthy Hearings were 36 straight days of televised investigative hearings ran by McCarthy, however this turned public opinion against McCarthy after seeing ludicrous claims by the Senator against trusted people, along with a well written criticism by Edward R. Murrow (Achter). However, the Communist fear would never truly fade, nor the effects this conspiracy theory created.

A McCarthy era flyer, urging the viewer to report any “suspected Communist Activity” to presumably the police or the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) which were a committee entirely focused on monitoring Communist activity within the United States. Source.

Countless numbers of individuals were fired, blacklisted, ridiculed, and years of trust swept away from a mere accusation. “Hundreds of elementary and high school teachers were investigated and lost their jobs, sometimes as a result of being named by proliferating "anti-subversive" groups and individuals” (Billington). The McCarthy era wreaked havoc on American society, enabling an easy accusation to sling around by anybody with a near 100% guarantee it would stick even without any solid evidence.

In one instance, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney blame Hollywood Labor conflicts over unionization as “Communist Infiltration”, Walter R. Disney states, “Well, it proved itself so with time, and I definitely feel it was a Communist group trying to take over my artists and they did take them over” ,along with, “I even went through the same smear in South America, through some Commie periodicals in South America, and generally throughout the world all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures”.

A 1947 comic by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society warning about Communist Infiltration. It puts forward a story of Communist heads step by step breaking down American society, through class conflict, division, corrosion of morals, race war, and media until they manage to elect a Communist president, leading to food rationing, book burning, and the murder of Catholics. One panel reads “And here goes the greatest trash ever written – THE BIBLE!” linking Communism to comical levels of Atheism (and thus amorality). Source.

The McCarthy Red Scare has all the key points of a conspiracy theory, as described by Hofstadter in Harper’s Magazine 1964 edition. He paints the Conspiracy finger-pointer as such,

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point”

McCarthy and other believers of this “Red Menace” saw the complete downfall of the United States in the future, the upheaval of society, and the destruction of freedom. In the comic book shown above, Americans saw Communists breaking apart American society step by step, inciting race wars, media races, and snapping of moral coils to push America into Communism, which to the American was presented as a removal of all freedom. Hofstadter stakes, on the actions of the perceived conspirator, “He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.”

From a 1949 trial of the American Communist Party Leaders on a charge of conspiracy, the Government states against the Communist Party through John F. X. McGohey,

“In each of these schools it is reiterated constantly that the students are being trained as professional revolutionaries. Marxism, they are taught, is not merely dogma, it is a guide to action. . . . At the proper time, they are taught—the proper time being a time of national crisis, unrest, disorder brought about by a severe depression or war”, and further in, “They teach that this revolution cannot be without violence, for to be successful the entire apparatus of the Government must be smashed”

In a 1947 accusation of John Howard Lawson, an organizer of the Screen Writers Guild and leader of Hollywood’s Communist Party in the 1930s, John Charles Moffitt declares to the HUAC that Lawson instructed:

It is your duty to further the class struggle by your performance.

He said: If you are nothing more than an extra wearing white flannels on a country club veranda do your best to appear decadent, do your best to appear to be a snob; do your best to create class antagonism.

He said: If you are an extra on a tenement street do your best to look downtrodden, do your best to look a victim of existing society.

They believed “there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy to undermine free capitalism”, that government had been “infiltrated by Communists that American policy has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests”, and that “the country is infused with a network of Communist agents…that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans” (Hofstadter). To summarize, the continued existence of the United States, at least to them, rested on unearthing and outing the “Reds”.

Several News Headlines of the era, all talking about the organized purging of gay men and women from Government, ranging from calling them Homosexuals to Deviates to “Sex Perverts”. One reads ““sexual perverts have infiltrated our Government in recent years” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”” Source.

As is the case with Conspiracy Theories, those who believe in them find it far too easy to associate the conspirators with the “other” of society. Jewish people were blamed for the Black Death, and thought to be in Anti-Catholic organizations, African Americans celebrities are associated with the Illuminati, and Gay men and women were thought to be communists or simply painted as such to be ousted. This was the Lavender Scare.

In this era of McCarthyism, thousands of gay employees, or just suspected gay employees, of state and federal governments were investigated, questioned, outed, and fired (Adkins). This was amid the wave of congressional investigations for communists, “bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation”, painting the homosexual red and claiming them to be Communists, Communist sympathizers, or blackmailed to reveal state secrets. This was in addition to the major societal view of the time, calling homosexuals “sex perverts” or “deviants”, being listed as a mental illness in the official psychological database, and being jailed for even looking “non-conforming to one’s birth sex” in parts of the country.

Even before McCarthy’s claim to Communist Conspirators, the homosexual was being persecuted in this era. This was because World War 2 created an unexpected side effect, a rising community of LGBT (and thus societal visibility) due to many homosexual people finding themselves in the same army bunker.

“In 1947 the U.S. Park Police initiated in the city a "Sex Perversion Elimination Program," targeting gay men for arrest and intimidation.” Only a year later, Congress passes the act “for the treatment of sexual psychopaths”, facilitating the arrest, punishment, and jailing of people acting on same-sex desire, labeling them mentally ill. Judith Adkins summarizes the view of the time, “Homosexuality was perceived as a lurking subversive threat at a time when the country was coping with tremendous social change as well as rising anxiety about another lurking subversive threat: Communism.”

A 1950 report by an investigative committee of Government, concluding that homosexuals were unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government due to “security” reasons. Source.

McCarthy blamed the homosexual figure claiming, “the government had been infiltrated by homosexuals, and that they posed a threat equally as grave to national security”. In his address on February 20th, 9 days after his President Truman address, McCarthy linked homosexuality and Communism citing two cases of Homosexual men in Government, stating “practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way” and implied “that the men in these two cases were susceptible to Communist recruitment because as homosexuals they had what he called "peculiar mental twists” (Adkins). The pressure from McCarthy and other republicans caused the State Department to have fired 91 homosexuals as “security risks”. Later the US Senate, led by the “Hoey Committee”, investigated employed homosexuals “and other sex perverts” within the government:

Although they could not uncover a single example of a homosexual American citizen who had betrayed secrets as a result of blackmail, they wrote a highly circulated and influential report that asserted that gay men and lesbians exhibited weak moral character and had a “corrosive influence” on their fellow employees. “One homosexual can pollute a government office,” the Senate report concluded (Johnson).

The rhetoric the believers pushed directly linked the two, assumptions about Communists mirrored the societal beliefs about homosexuals. “Both were thought to be morally weak or psychologically disturbed, both were seen as godless, both purportedly undermined the traditional family, both were assumed to recruit, and both were shadowy figures with a secret subculture” (Adkins). However, there was one key difference that pushed the Lavender Scare further. They weren’t finding Communists, but they were finding Homosexuals. It is important to recall then, the two were the same figure to America.

In a particularly distressing action, President Eisenhower, backed by the 1950s Congressional investigations and the Hoey Committee’s report, created an executive order in 1953 that specifically banned homosexual men and women from working all jobs within the US Government. “That order explicitly added sexuality to the criteria used to determine suitability for federal employment. With the stroke of a pen, the President effectively banned gay men and lesbians from all jobs in the U.S. government—the country's largest employer” (Adkins). Private businesses followed suite, enacting their own discriminatory probing, hiring, and firing practices specifically targeting LGBT individuals.

It echoes the “Paranoid style” of Conspiracy theory that Hofstadter stated, “Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.” The goal was to eliminate the homosexual from government, and in a way, they succeeded at least for a few decades. In particular, the homosexual of this represented a sexual freedom that the straight individual was not allowed, they were the sexual deviant, the pervert, they offered the populace “an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns” (Hofstadter). Primarily, how society was changing, in terms of the sexual discussion and sexuality (as a whole) was developing as the LGBT community in America truly began to grow.

LGBT+ were massively fired and thrown out of government, outed against their will, and forced to deal with the consequences. “Not only were LGBT federal employees fired, but many others were also simply fired for “guilt of association” in knowing someone who was LGBT” (Gleason). This ruined Queer lives, not only for the loss of a job, but also being thrown into the public eye, into a society that was aggressively anti-LGBT led to many people dying, either by suicide or by murder. They faced Stigma from the federal government, along with the larger society, “many of the federal investigations and resulting firings lead to dismissed employees’ suicides — most of which were later covered up by the federal interrogators.” The Lavender Scare did not gain massive public knowledge however, this anonymity managed to save many by not outing them on a major scale which certainly would have resulted in massive suicides and death.

The Mattachine Society marching for a “National Gay Task Force”. The Mattachine Society is held as one of America’s first “homophile” acceptance societies, pushing for acceptance and change within American Society. Source.

Investigations continued in through the 50s, though this is not to say there was no fightback. Brave sorts such as Frank Kamney stepped up, taking his case of dismissal to the Supreme court. Even though he lost, he started a wave where a few federal courts began agreeing with him in the late 1960s leading to more right for LGBT people within Government. In 1950 the Mattachine Society was founded (later investigated themselves for assumed Communist behavior) by Kamney, and later in 1955 the Daughters of Bilitis was created, both LGBT civil and political rights groups. As I stated before, LGBT communities can be found in struggle.

While it is not the revolution McCarthy and others were fearing from Communists, it is still a revolution of the rights of the LGBT individual. It is the beginning of a change in American Society, the Lavender Scare created from fear a public outcry for homosexual acceptance.

The Lavender Scare officially ends in 1975, for civil servants, after the Civil Service Commissions announced that gay people could no longer be legally fired or barred from federal government jobs based purely off their sexuality. However, it left behind a trail of discrimination and queer lives ruined by McCarthyism, public paranoia, and Cold War-era fear.

The anonymity, as “the Lavender Scare featured no public naming of names and no dramatic spectacles in which the accused testified”, I stated before saved the lives of countless LGBT People. However, it also made them into vague concepts. The full tragedy of this event is lost except the whispers found in transcripts of Committee hearings, mementos, private diaries, and unpublished records. We only have the outlines of these discriminated people, shaped in government papers.

A PSA from the Mattachine Society in 1960, stating that “Homosexuals are Different, but we believe they have the right to be.” The final line reads “Mattachine defends the rights of homosexuals and tries to create a climate of understanding and acceptance.” This stands in the face of the Lavender Scare, a push for acceptance where the Government offered none. Source.

The McCarthy era stands as one of the largest instances of a Conspiracy Theory taking over the American populace. “The Red Menace” was this constant specter haunting the American lifestyle, it was the boogeyman, the big threat to the Nuclear Family standing in as the face of the possible Nuclear War. However, it also became anybody who was othered by society, the African American, the critic, the curious, and the homosexual. The Lavender Scare was a massive event of LGBT discrimination within American Government. It is a vital event to understand to understand the history of struggle that LGBT people have had in America. However, a person can live their entire life without knowing about it, even when they know of the Red Scare.

It is a silent history, a color that blends into the background of the Spectrum of Scares America witnessed in that era. However, it shows itself plain in LGBT history, as both a low point for Queer lives and a high point for LGBT Rights, as the Mattachine Society was founded during it. While the Stonewall Riots would appear around a decade later, the Lavender Scare is part of the foundation for LGBT rights in America.

Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, on his podcast InfoWars, claiming that the Government has produced a “Gay bomb” that infuses chemicals into the water to induce homosexuality in people. This quote “turning the friggin frogs gay” has become a meme amongst LGBT people, due to the absurdity of it. Source.

It is interesting to see the echoes of the Lavender Scare though, as a Conspiracy Theory, in modern day America. People believe LGBT+ people have a central agenda, labeled the “LGBT Agenda”, that they have a centralized goal as a community beyond equal human rights. Right Wing Republicans such as Mike Pence, who endorses Conversion Therapy, and Alex Jones, who is known to believe that the government has produced chemicals to turn people gay (among other Conspiracy theories), echo McCarthy’s absurd accusations that Homosexuals posed a threat to national security and reports that they “pollute a government office”.

Minorities seem have this inability to escape being the conspirators in Conspiracy theories. It always appears that they are the target, the revolutionary, the “Red Menace”. Conspiracy Theories offer people a different way to look and perceive the world, however that also offers ideal situations for racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism to thrive as it is easy to pin the charge onto the minority class. After all, who would benefit more from societal upheaval? Certainly not the white, straight man.

Achter, Paul J. “McCarthyism.” Britannica, August 16th, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/McCarthyism

Adkins, Judith. ““These People Are Frightened to Death” : Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare” Prologue Magazines, Vol 48, No. 2, 2016. National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

Johnson, David K. “The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government” The University of Chicago Press, 2004. OutHistory, http://outhistory.org/items/show/1425

McCarthy, Joseph R. “Enemies from Within”. 1950. History Matters, historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6456/

Miller Center, “McCarthyism and the Red Scare.” University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare

Congress, House, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, 80th Congress, 1st Session, October 1947 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947). History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6441

“Communists are second to none in our devotion to our people and to our country”: Prosecution and Defense Statements, 1949 Trial of American Communist Party Leaders. History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6446

“We Must Keep the Labor Unions Clean”: “Friendly” HUAC Witnesses Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney Blame Hollywood Labor Conflicts on Communist Infiltration. History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458

#Lavender Scare #lgbt history #red scare

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thetwoguineabook · 8 years ago

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Historical notes - the Cambridge Spy Ring

I’ve mentioned before my fascination with the Cambridge Five, in particular Guy Burgess, and that they’re one of the primary reasons why my vague idea for a WW2 AU coalesced into a spy story. But while they were undoubtedly some of the most influential spies of the early years of the Cold War, they seem to remain relatively obscure outside of Britain.

While usually referred to as ‘Five’, there were really four crucial members of the ring, with various others accused of being ‘the fifth man’ from time to time. Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were all British men from upper-middle class backgrounds who were contemporaries at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in the early 1930s.

At the time fascism was ascendant across Europe, and even among those not filled with the immense political certitude of the undergraduate it could seem that communism was the only alternative viable and powerful enough to withstand it. Many figures of the British establishment, up to and including the then Prince of Wales who would ultimately (briefly) be Edward VIII, were extremely sympathetic to the Nazi party, and it must have seemed perfectly plausible that fascism might take root in Britain as it had elsewhere. All four men were student communists and expressed their views very loudly whilst at university, and although the exact point at which they were recruited is still debated, it is likely this which attracted the attention of the NKVD.

However such was (and still is, to a huge extent) British society that spending three years loudly agitating on behalf of a foreign dictatorship wasn’t something that would keep you out of important government jobs as long as you said you were sorry and you came from the appropriate class and educational background. By the time war broke out all four men had taken up roles in the establishment- Maclean in the Foreign Office, Blunt in MI5, Philby in MI6 and Burgess in the BBC, with a side role in MI6 propaganda. They, along with John Cairncross, a GCHQ employee at Bletchley Park who was likely recruited by Blunt, passed along to the Soviets a great deal of information that the British had decrypted from German radio transmissions, warning them ahead of time of the Nazi invasion, enabling the USSR to root out German spies, and decisively influencing the outcome of the Battle of Kursk, where the Soviets seized the military initiative and began to drive the Germans back on the Eastern Front.

Towards the end of the war Maclean was posted to the British embassy in Washington DC, with a role in overseeing joint US/UK/Canadian atomic energy development- the information he passed on to the Soviets from here, along with other agents directly involved in the Manhattan Project, enabled them to track the development of the US atomic arsenal and its deployment capabilities, hence why the USSR was not remotely shocked by the atomic bombing of Japan and why they began sabre-rattling in occupied Germany with such a degree of confidence. In 1945 Philby, who by that point had become the head of the anti-Soviet section of MI6 (yes, really), engineered the ‘disappearance’ in Istanbul of Soviet diplomat and NKVD agent who sought to defect, promising information on three Soviet agents working in Britain (most likely Maclean, Burgess and Philby himself).

The pressures of spying began to tell in the wake of the war; all four of them had developed drinking problems even beyond the kind that was expected for men of that sort of rank and social class. Blunt had maintained his career as an art historian even whilst working for MI5, and stepped back into his role as a professor and Surveyor of the King's Pictures (although the latter role still gave him a great deal of intelligence access). Burgess lost a number of Foreign Office jobs due to drunken behaviour (although he kept getting new ones, naturally), and Maclean started getting into fights whilst posted in Cairo, until his wife claimed he was very ill and needed to return to London.

Their downfall came at the hands of the American VENONA decryption project, which cracked Soviet transmissions due to mistakes made in their encryption process. In 1949 they discovered references to a Soviet agent named ‘Homer’ and decrypted a transmission he had sent from the US in 1945. At this point Philby was in Washington, ostensibly with the British embassy but truthfully as a liaison between MI6 and the CIA, and was able to deduce that ‘Homer’ was in fact Maclean. While the confirmation of Maclean’s identity was delayed partly by Philby’s efforts and partly by the British embassy’s insistence that any agent in their midst must be amongst the ‘downstairs’ staff rather than the nice, reputable diplomats, by 1951 the Americans were on the brink of unmasking him.

Fearful that Maclean would crack under interrogation and unmask all of them, Philby had Burgess whisk him out of the UK and to Moscow. The case created a great stir as it seemed Burgess and Maclean had simply vanished- Maclean’s wife coolly maintained the ruse for several years before leaving for the USSR herself with their children. Amongst the intelligence community, however, it was clear that they had defected, and although he maintained his ignorance Philby’s career never recovered, and he was hounded by accusations of being ‘the third man’ until he too defected in 1963. Blunt made a secret confession to MI5 the following year, but continued to live his life quite normally until Margaret Thatcher named him as a spy in Parliament in 1979.

The story of the spy ring is interesting to me for several reasons- not just as the most painful possible skewer of the British class system, but as a study in what people will really do for ideology, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. There’s a great gap between involving oneself in radical student politics and deliberately seeking out high-level government positions in order to commit sustained acts of treason in service of those politics for decades and decades. I think it’s reasonable to assume that perhaps at first they didn’t realise what they were getting into, and by the time they did they were far too deep to get out again, but Philby in particular maintained his genteel English façade for many years, all the while arranging for the deaths of a great many British and American agents at the hands of the Soviets.

It’s also interesting as Blunt and Burgess were both openly- and in Burgess’s case, quite infamously- gay. While Maclean did marry and had several children he also reputedly slept with Burgess at Cambridge, and their defection certainly had an impact in terms of connecting homosexuality, communism and potential espionage in the minds of both US and UK intelligence. It’s not impossible that things might have gone differently for Alan Turing, for example, had Maclean and Burgess gone undetected for a few years more. As far as I’m aware Philby was their Token Straight Friend, though- he even had an affair with Maclean’s wife!

#historical notes #fic: blackbird

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ceasarslegion · 8 years ago

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Why You ALL Need to Read the Clown Service Novel Series Right Now

I hear a lot of complaints about novels with POC, LGBT+, and mentally ill characters either singling them out as tokens, or the whole book just being about the fact that they're not white, neurotypical, or cishet. Well, sit down and let me tell you about an amazing series where all your dreams will come true. Written by Guy Adams, The Clown Service is often referred to as "the spy thriller that Douglas Adams never wrote," because, plot and tone-wise, it's this weird mix of Mission Impossible and Monty Python. The story follows Toby Greene, a man who was alienated from the rest of the agency and demoted to the paranormal investigations unit, Section 37, nicknamed "The Clown Service," due to them being widely regarded as a joke. Obviously, it's not, and Toby goes on some WILD and convoluted adventures with his new colleagues, in everything from Soviet zombies to ghost assassins, but I'll let you guys read more into that. I'm just gonna list a FEW things included in them: -It was outright said that Toby suffers from PTSD and anxiety, and no one tells him to "just suck it up" when it affects his performance. The only person who did was his previous boss, and it was pretty obvious that Adams wanted him to come off as REALLY dickish. Also, no one makes it their mission to pry him about what the trauma was, because that's none of their business. -There's a woman named Tamar, who's not only badass as all fuck, but there was no gross trope of reducing her to a doting love interest when the softer side of her was revealed. She's basically their heavy-lifter. -In fact, unnecessary romantic subplots are nowhere in sight. -There's an old lady named April who's easily the most competant spy in the Section, who almost compromised a mission because she wanted to punch a racist cab driver in the face. -A pair of their clients is a gay couple. Nowhere is it called into question, and no one calls it out. Everyone just treats them like normal dudes in need of some help with paranormal shit. It's the sort of casual representation that most of us can only dream of seeing in mainstream media. -Although the first book deals a lot with the Soviet villain fighting British intelligence trope, it makes an important statement that just because one Russian dude is running around killing people, doesn't mean they're all automatically evil. It's a simple but effective metaphor. -Seriously, these books are FULL of anti-racism. Adams doesn't give a shit about racist jerks. Their covert tech guy, Oman, is of direct Arab descent, and when a gross old lady was trying to tell him to go back to his own country, he yelled back "I was BORN here!!" and Shining, Toby's superior, made this offhand comment about some people having smaller brains. I think. It's been a while since I read the first one, so I know there was an insult along those lines, but don't directly quote me on that. After that fun interaction, Oman develops as a really cool character who ends up saving their asses on multiple occasions. -Toby has a horrible relationship with his emotionally abusive father, but rather than have him give in and do everything his father asks for the sake of a "better" relationship, as so many authors unfortunately do, Toby cuts him out of his life for the sake of his own mental health, and found family becomes a huge part of the characters' dynamic. Shining is definitely more of a father-figure to Toby than his biological dad, and Tamar becomes more of an aggressive older sister to him. April is basically his cool aunt in this analogy. -Rather than reducing the Soviet villain to some one-dimensional puppet of Communist propaganda, you get to read his ENTIRE story at the end, from the moment he was born to the events of the first book. You find out his personal motivations, and why he did what he did. Adams leaves it off there, open-ended enough to form your own opinions. Seriously, you gotta read this shit.

#long post #the clown service #books #novels #rec #shut up dami

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republicstandard · 6 years ago

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Gay Pied Pipers of “Polymorphous Perversity” Penetrate Schools

What do gay and transgender activists penetrating Britain’s schools have in common with the Jesuits?

Jesuits were said to take the attitude, “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.” Jesuit co-founder St Francis Xavier tweaked the axiom to: “Give me the child until he is seven and I care not who has him thereafter.”

Atheist missionary and pulpit thumper Richard Dawkins plumbs the potential of the Jesuitical proposition and points to “the useful gullibility of the child mind,” in The God Delusion. The Jesuit boast “is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed,” he agrees.

Gay activists have discovered the same truth. By fusing this Ignatian truism with the Freudian dogma of “polymorphous perversity,” the Pied Pipers of Stonewall are wreaking revenge on heterosexual conformity and leading our children into the Weser-like waters of sexual and moral morass, where they will drown like the mass of mesmerized rats, as in the dark legend of the Rat-Catcher of Hameln.

The bullying barrage of militant gay and transgender ideological activism would embarrass Soviet propaganda commissars for strategy and residents of Sodom and Gomorrah for shamelessness. Gayducation is now a non-negotiable item of the curriculum in British schools and who in Stonewall gives a fig if half of British children are leaving primary school unable to read and write properly?

The sexualization of our children is now a national pandemic, spreading like swine flu. Drop in at one of the Kama Sutra sessions offered by a local primary school in London and listen to 5-year-old children shouting “penis” and “vagina” like communist slogans and waving around Play-Doh models of lumpy genitalia they’ve made. Talk to Muslim academic Dr. Kate Godfrey-Faussett, a psychologist and Dialectical Behavior Therapist, who receives complaints from parents all over Britain about the pornification of the school curricula.

The pansexual proselytizers want our kids to be sexualized from Kindergarten. Lynnette Smith of Big Talk Education wants lessons to start “in nursery.” Five-year-olds at a London primary school are being taught about pornography, a BBC documentary reveals. Mick Manning and Brita Granström’s textbook How did I Begin? graphically explains procreation to 5+ years kids: “As they cuddled, your dad’s penis moved gently inside your mum’s vagina and the sperms flowed out.”

The eroticizers of education want to quarantine parents from the poison injected into their children. A 2010 Ofsted report found that schools rarely consult parents about sex education, even though the guidance encourages them to do so. Now that Ofsted has stepped up its inquisition against conservative schools, its recent report on sex education doesn’t mention consulting parents at all.

The golden coupling between sex and marriage is never mentioned. Only two commandments of safe sex and consent guide the discourse. “Making love is like skipping. You can’t do it all day long,” says the illustrated text Where did I come from? by Peter Mayle for 7+ years children. The Living and Growing DVD for 5-13-year-olds shows a group of little boys a public toilet where there’s a condom machine. “They have even got different flavors,” says a child in the film. Sex is as amoral and recreational as sit-ups and as multi-flavored as ice cream.

The goal is to brainwash kids into an anti-traditional family and promiscuously pansexual worldview. Seven-year-old children learn that anal intercourse is “sexual intercourse where a man puts his penis into another person’s anus” and oral sex is “using the mouth and tongue to lick, kiss or suck a partner’s genitals.” Subjects for discussion include homosexuality, bisexuality, abortion, rape, incest, sex abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and Aids.

Heather, who runs her own workshops in schools in East London, helps teens to discover sadomasochism. “Maybe you read a really hot bit of erotica while looking up Dominance and Submission. Maybe you saw some awesome strap-on porn or just found some cool looking sex toys you’d like to use,” she writes on her website, urging the child to share the discovery with their partner.

Apart from pushing its gay agenda pretending it is “creating an inclusive school environment,” Stonewall brainwashes toddlers with transgenderism: “Babies are given a gender when they are born. Trans is a word that describes people who feel the gender they were given as a baby doesn’t match the gender they feel themselves to be,” its literature advocates, thus reframing gender dysphoria as a chic identity badge.

Drag queens are brought into taxpayer-funded nursery schools to read nursery rhymes and sing songs so 2-year-olds can learn about gay and transgender issues. The Drag Queen Story Times website says it aims “to capture the imagination and fun of the gender fluidity of childhood while giving children a glamorous, positive unabashedly queer role model.” Transgender lifestyles and same-sex relationships should be “promoted” to children as young as two to reduce hate crime, says the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

Except for very few Catholic, Jewish and Muslim schools, faith schools are falling like ninepins before Aphrodite’s chariot, with the Church of England going out its way to garland the new cult of gayducation. Anglican bishop Stephen Cottrell tells the House of Lords that the “Church of England works closely with Stonewall,” while Catholic bishop Philip Egan attacks Stonewall for burying Britain’s “Christian patrimony” and proposing “Orwellian changes to our language” and “draconian restrictions on religious expression.”

Egan is right. Gayducation is unrelentingly absolutist. According to Shraga Stern, thousands of Charedi Jews will leave Britain unless ministers back down from forcing faith schools to teach children about gay and transgender relationships after the Education Department forcibly introduced “homosexuality, same-sex relationships and gender reassignment” lessons in classrooms. On Thursday, the head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman said that all children must learn about same-sex couples regardless of their religious background.

Confused parents are asking two questions. First, how did we begin sexualizing our children—not just providing them biological instruction about human reproduction, but eroticizing them into accepting deviant sexualities? Why is this junk touted as scientific?

Remember Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis? He designed the scaffolding for sexualization children. Children are “polymorphously perverse” he said. Before a child is educated in the conventions of civilized society, it will turn to bodily parts for sexual gratification and will not obey adult rules that determine perverse behavior. But traditional education will suppress the polymorphous possibilities for sexual gratification in the child, said Freud.

Sexologist Alfred Kinsey took this further claiming that even the tiniest of infants have the “capacity” for orgasm. Hence, sexual satisfaction is a childhood goal to be pursued. Kinsey’s theory of early childhood sexual development became the standard for sex education in schools. A scandal broke when Kinsey and his associates were accused of masturbating thousands of little children for scientific data to confirm Kinsey’s theory. Kinsey also claimed that 10-47% of Americans are gay. His two “findings” paved the way for gayducation.

Second, parents are asking why Pied Pipers of polymorphous perversity are not tolerant of real diversity. Why the bigotry and totalitarianism? Why are gay and transgender evangelists desperate and determined to convert innocent and impressionable minds to their cult of Eros (even though they hate “conversion therapy”)?

The gay liberation movement began with a libertarian argument. Leave us to do our thing. Western society then gave LGBTI+ folk freedom to do their thing. That wasn’t enough. The plea for tolerance became a demand for equality (and same-sex marriage). Equality implies that people are equal before the law. It doesn’t go far enough and sanctify certain practices as morally good. To achieve this goal, you’ve got to aggressively and subversively push for normalization—starting with the most malleable minds.

Children are powerless and offer the least resistance. Once you’ve have brainwashed them—you’ve got them for life. This is the goal of the sex education industry—as it milks the government (and taxpayer) for millions of pounds. “I have come to indoctrinate your children into my LGBTQ agenda (and I’m not a bit sorry),” says children’s author and activist S. Bear Bergman.

There will be pockets of resistance opposing your project for normalization and moral canonization. You’ve got to eliminate them by orchestrating a coup d’état and establishing totalitarian control. Even the tiniest resistance poses a threat. Why? Because the struggle between light and darkness is unequal (as the soaring prologue to the gospel of John poetically and philosophically portrays).

For darkness to triumph, it must be complete and total. “The light of a single candle, somewhere in the universe, defeats it; there is now light where formerly there was none,” writes Michael Walsh. “Either there is Light or there is not; there can be no synthesis.” The tiniest flicker of candlelight is sufficient to expose and unsettle the hegemony of darkness.

From September 2020, the state wants to make Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) and teaching LGBT+ concepts compulsory in all primary and secondary schools. StopRSE is resisting the darkness of polymorphous perversity. Parents of all faiths and none are lighting candles to help save our children. The debate on the new RSE will take place on Monday 25 February at 4.30 pm. You can sign the petition to Parliament demanding you choose what your child learns.

Parents of Hamelin! Your taxes are paying for the Pied Pipers of polymorphous perversity to lure your children into Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace). It’s time you sang to the state-funded Piped Pipers: “We don’t need no gayducation. Hey! Stonewall, leave our kids alone.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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The World Cup started this week. Potentially thousands of fans and athletes who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer have arrived in Russia. As a gay woman and activist, I’m worried sick about what might happen.

I left the Soviet Union 29 years ago because of its discrimination against Jews. Ten years ago, I founded RUSA LGBT, a network for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ immigrants living in the US. I work all the time with people whose lives have been threatened because of their sexual orientation. So despite FIFA’s promise that they stand against “non-discrimination, gender equality and racism,” I’m very concerned that the World Cup-governing organization has failed to explicitly call for protection of LGBTIQ attending the World Cup. As if this wasn’t bad enough, FIFA awarded the following World Cup to Qatar, where homosexuality is prohibited by law.

In 2013, when Putin first made illegal the promotion of “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors, commonly called the “anti-gay” law, there were calls for the boycotts of Russian vodka, Russian gasoline, Russian artists visiting the US, and attendance of the Sochi Olympics. As Soviet immigrants, we knew that our calls for boycott were unlikely to succeed. But we also knew it was our best chance to shine a spotlight on human rights violations happening in the shadows in Russia.

Now, as the world gathers to watch the FIFA World Cup hosted by Russia, I’m both angered and resigned to the fact that commentators, athletes, and politicians are paying so much less attention to these LGBTIQ abuses. It’s not because these issues have gone away. It’s because so many other human rights abuses have festered under Russia in the years following the Sochi Olympics that we’re fighting for attention. But that does not make the relative silence on Russia’s abysmal track record on LGBTIQ rights okay.

In the absence of laws protecting LGBTIQ people, fans and players are vulnerable to intolerance or violence at the hands of other fans, paramilitary organizations, and police. The government plans to deploy Cossacks, an ultraconservative paramilitary group openly hostile to LGBTIQ rights, to guard World Cup games in the city of Rostov-on-Don. A Cossack spokesperson told Radio Free Europe affiliate Current Time that they would report gay men kissing in public to police. “To us, values mean the (Christian) Orthodox faith and the family come first,” he said.

As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, these kinds of statements fill me with fear. Since the passage of the “anti-gay” law, life has become difficult and dangerous for gay Russians. Putin’s regime barely stopped short of enacting legislatures that would have allowed the state to remove kids from LGBTIQ families, impose fines for public displays of “homosexual behavior” and detain young people for “coming out.”

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were often subject to discrimination in their everyday life before Putin’s law, but afterward, the legitimization of anti-gay attitudes spurred a wave of violence and even murder of LGBTIQ people in Russia. Several post-Soviet countries, including Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, followed in Russia’s footsteps and enacted similar laws. Last year, in Chechnya, dozens of gay men were captured, tortured, and even killed by police. We’ve also heard reports of family “honor” killings of gay women. It is heartbreaking that this is happening in this day and age.

During the Sochi Olympics, Soviet immigrants and activists like myself aimed to bring the ensuing anti-gay treatment to the forefront of the Western media attention.

The visibility campaign succeeded — now the world at large is aware of “anti-gay” law in Russia. But the cries of our community did not produce meaningful protection. A number of LGBTIQ Russians subjected to continued violence and discrimination left and continue to leave Russia seeking refuge. Our fears that the crackdown on gay rights was merely a trial balloon aimed to see how far Putin could go without meaningful opposition from the West have proven to be true.

In 2014, Russia violated international agreements by annexing Crimea with barely a slap on the wrist from the West. Russia continues to support separatists in Ukraine where thousands of people already lost their lives and almost 2 million were displaced. Putin’s suppression of the opposition resulted in the murders of prominent journalists and politicians and the jailing of the vocal opponents.

With everything that’s going on, it’s no surprise that we’re hearing less about LGBTIQ rights in Russia. We should remember that in light of Chechen gay purges and government’s denials of it, an entire LGBTIQ community feels even more vulnerable than they did before the Sochi Olympics.

International sport bodies like FIFA and IOC should not award their major events to the countries with major human rights violations. Unfortunately, these organizations are allegedly corrupt, and the end of one scandal is usually followed by another scandal. At the end of the day, hosting choices, according to some reports, are usually granted to the highest bidder.

Likewise, there has been little willingness to support and protect LGBTIQ people by the World Cup’s corporate sponsors like Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Adidas, and others. These brands have no problem marching in Pride events all over the world, but they will not stand up for LGBTIQ rights in the countries hosting their sponsored events, where it actually matters. These corporate sponsors must not just look out for their commercial interests.

When Vox reached out to these brands, Budweiser said in a statement: “Our Dream is to bring people together for a better world and we believe in the power of football as one way to unite us. Integrity and ethics are part of our core values and we have zero tolerance for hate and discrimination of any kind.”

A spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “We believe that through our partnership and continued involvement with FIFA we can help foster optimism and unity, while making a positive difference in the communities we serve. The Coca-Cola Company strives for diversity, inclusion and equality in our business, and we support these rights throughout society as well.”

Finally, Adidas said in a statement, “We condemn laws that could lead to discrimination toward our employees, business partners, athletes and anybody in adidas LGBTQ family.”

But without real actions, such as threatening to pull sponsorship unless Russia makes unequivocal nondiscrimination statements to protect LGBTIQ fans, their words ring hollow to me.

FIFA has recently announced a reporting mechanism that enables fans to complain directly and anonymously to FIFA about inappropriate behaviors, including the violations of LGBTIQ rights. Those that feel discrimination is taking place can go here to file a complaint.

We know from history that appeasement never works. It does not work in business, it does not work in politics, it does not work in the arts, and it does not work in sports. We have to increase the pressure on Putin’s regime, and we have to continue to highlight these grave human rights offenses. Every person, corporation, and government should do what they can. Let us all say “nyet” to Putin and to dictators everywhere.

LGBTIQ soccer fans who think they were subject to discrimination, violence, or accused of “homosexual propaganda” during the World Cup should call the hotline set up by the “Coming Out” LGBT group at +7 (953) 170 97 71 or email [email protected]. There are lawyers and psychologists ready to help.

Yelena Goltsman is a Kiev, Ukraine-born human rights and LGBTIQ activist. She is the founder and co-president of RUSA LGBT, an organization she formed in 2008 to establish a social network for the Russian-speaking LGBTIQ community in the United States and to increase acceptance and inclusion of LGBTIQ people in the world’s Russian-speaking community.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> This World Cup, let’s talk about Russia’s LGBTIQ rights record

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

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POLITICO Playbook: GAME DAY in Alabama

Good Tuesday morning. Hanukkah begins tonight. IT IS ELECTION DAY IN ALABAMA, and voters will choose between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. REPUBLICANS’ GOAL: Pass the tax bill before the new senator gets seated. Moore or Jones will be seated after Dec. 20, we hear.

NEW: WE HEAR if everything goes according to plan, the Senate could vote on the negotiated tax plan next Monday or Tuesday, and the House would then vote Tuesday or Wednesday. The negotiated House-Senate tax plan is scheduled to be filed this Friday. This timeframe is designed to give adequate time to deal with government funding, which expires next Friday, and a deal to boost spending caps. Of course, a million things can go wrong between now and then. But this is what’s being discussed at the top levels of Republican leadership.

Story Continued Below

GAME DAY IN ALABAMA — “Moore, wife blast Washington establishment and media in final appeal,” by Alex Isenstadt and Gabe Debenedetti in Midland City, Alabama: “A defiant Roy Moore returned to the campaign trail Monday evening, delivering a thundering speech at an election eve rally in which he implored Alabamians to ignore outsiders who he said were bent on stopping him in the Senate special election. ‘We dare to defend our rights and we will defend our rights,’ Moore, who has been abandoned by much of the Republican Party establishment, told an audience of several hundred packed into a barn. ‘We’re up to our neck in people that don’t want change in Washington, D.C., they want to keep their power, keep it the same, keep their positions, and we’ve got to change that.’

“The 24-minute speech served as the capstone of a campaign that has thrust the special election into a spiraling national dialogue over sexual harassment. Moore, a twice-removed controversial former state Supreme Court justice, has faced allegations that he preyed on teenage girls as a man in his 30s. As he has done in the past, Moore denied the allegations against him — this time, calling them ‘disgusting’ and reiterating his belief that they emerged just weeks before the election in an attempt to defeat him. He cast the accusations as part of a broader, establishment-led effort to destroy him and to undermine his character. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, he argued, wanted him in the Senate.

“Moore also pointed out that both parties had spent millions against him, first in the Republican primary and then in Tuesday’s general election, when he faces Democrat Doug Jones. Yet the ‘verdict’ of the race, he said, wasn’t up to the Washington political class or the members of the national media who were also in attendance. ‘If you don’t believe in my character,’ he added, ‘don’t vote for me.’” http://politi.co/2knnQpA

DANIEL STRAUSS: “Alabama Senate election: 5 things to watch”: http://politi.co/2BdLNdv

— LESSONS LEARNED: “Pollsters dodge Alabama prediction game,” by Steven Shepard: “Who’s leading in Tuesday’s special Senate election in Alabama? The race is so peculiar and has so many variables that some pollsters are reluctant to say. Rather than put out a single result that could be viewed as a projection in the race between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore, several polling outfits have simply released a number of different turnout models that explain how the composition of the electorate could swing the election. It’s an approach that they say best reflects the tremendous uncertainty surrounding a historically unusual, off-year, mid-December special election in a racially polarized state — where one candidate is an accused child molester.” http://politi.co/2ALGvTY

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ON THE GROUND — @daveweigel: “Roy Moore’s wife Kayla: ‘Fake news will tell you that we don’t care for Jews. One of our attorneys is a Jew!’ #ALsen”. 36-second video http://bit.ly/2AOtLvU … @Bencjacobs: “Among those spotted at the Roy Moore event tonight: Steve Bannon sipping Red Bull, Louie Gohmert, Paul Nehlen and Sheriff David Clarke”.

— MYSTERY SOLVED: “Secret super PAC backing Jones in Alabama exposed,” by Gabe Debenedetti in Birmingham, Alabama: “A mystery super PAC backing Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama is controlled by a pair of groups closely aligned with the national Democratic Party, even as the candidate strives to dissociate himself from Washington interests. Highway 31, which dropped more than $4.1 million in support of Jones and against Roy Moore ahead of Tuesday’s Senate special election, is a joint project of two of the largest national Democratic super PACs — Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA Action — along with a group of Alabama Democrats, multiple senior officials familiar with the arrangement told POLITICO. Highway 31 was created in November, [FEC] filings show. …

“The groups have collected checks from a gamut of top Democratic donors, led by longtime party contributors like George Soros, Jim Simons, Haim Saban and Fred Eychaner. While both Jones and Moore have gotten support from other outside groups in recent weeks, Highway 31 is by far the biggest-spending.” http://politi.co/2iRTlYy

FOR THOSE SEEKING STEVE BANNON’S BACKING, from Bloomberg’s Josh Green: “Bannon worked to create a counter-narrative that ultimately would change many Republicans’ perception of the [Roy Moore] scandal. A former filmmaker, he’s long been captivated by the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker, and the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein for their power to shape public sentiment. Earlier this year, Bannon told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer his 2012 anti-Obama film ‘The Hope and the Change,’ had consciously mimicked Riefenstahl’s infamous, ‘Triumph of the Will.’ Her film, he added, ‘seared into me’ that unhappy voters could be influenced if they felt they were being conned.

“‘Riefenstahl and Eisenstein both created an image of their nation that coalesced in the minds of citizens and shaped public opinion through narratives, which is essentially what Bannon is doing in politics,’ says Nadia Szold, a filmmaker and documentarian who has studied Bannon’s films and discussed his influences with him. ‘They all evoke emotions like nostalgia, patriotism or paranoia that strengthen a collective sentiment.’” https://bloom.bg/2BEIdKc

CRUNCH TIME ON TAXES — “GOP lawmakers struggle to close gaps in tax plan,” by Bernie Becker, Aaron Lorenzo and Seung Min Kim: “Top congressional Republicans, racing to hammer out a final tax agreement by the end of the week, have yet to make any breakthroughs on a range of key issues. House and Senate negotiators bounced proposals back and forth over the weekend, but said Monday that they still had to find compromises on where to set the corporate tax rate, how to treat millions of businesses that aren’t set up as corporations and how much of a deduction to allow for state and local taxes.

“‘We speak of little else these days,’ said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). On the House side, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) deflected questions about a slew of potential trouble spots, also including the estate tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax and the fate of an existing law barring churches and other tax-exempt groups from openly politicking. Asked Monday what differences the House and Senate had resolved, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) responded: ‘Well, nothing really.

“‘I don’t think you can say at this point anything is really nailed down,’ added Thune, a member of GOP leadership and the tax conference committee working to settle the chambers’ differences. ‘But I think the way it’s shaping up right now, I feel like we’re getting pretty close, and every time that we have an exchange of offers the differences are narrowing.’” http://politi.co/2C5UDrt

— THEIR GOAL is to have a tax bill on the president’s desk by Dec. 20, but time is quickly slipping away.

COMING ATTRACTIONS? — “Looming pension shortfalls to complicate next shutdown fight,” by Elana Schor: “The next potential sleeper cause of a government shutdown? Pensions. Congress barely averted a shutdown last year amid a fight over miners’ health care. Now the looming collapse of pension plans for the miners — as well as thousands of Teamster truck drivers and food service workers — is fueling another, even more expensive, round of brinkmanship.

“Key Democrats are vowing to fight for a fix as part of any forthcoming deal to fund the government. And they warn that if Congress doesn’t step in soon to forestall the insolvency of several key pension plans — including the massive Central States plan, which covers an estimated 400,000 union workers and retirees — taxpayers risk ending up on the hook for an even bigger multi-billion-dollar rescue for the government’s pension guarantee agency. But it’s far from clear the workers will get their rescue. Conservative Republicans will be loath to provide anything that looks like a bailout, particularly for union workers. And one of the Senate’s leading Democratic advocates for relief, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is one of the GOP’s top targets ahead of his reelection next year.” http://politi.co/2BgBdCJ

****** A message from the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates: UAE airlines bought $42 billion in US-made commercial aircraft at the 2017 Dubai Airshow. That’s economic growth and jobs for Americans. The UAE-US commercial aviation relationship is a win-win deal. http://politi.co/2AtLDMj ******

INSIDE BLAKE FARENTHOLD’S OFFICE — “Texas Congressman Runs What Former Aides Call a Hostile Workplace,” by NYT’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg: “Throughout the Capitol, House aides have described office cultures where sexually explicit conversations are routine, pickup lines are part of daily life, hiring can be based on looks, tolerance is expected and intolerance of such behavior is career-ending. In Farenthold’s case, legal documents and interviews with former aides suggest an atmosphere in which the congressman set the tone for off-color jokes and inappropriate banter, which flourished among his underlings. … [Elizabeth] Peace and another former aide to Mr. Farenthold, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harming that aide’s reputation, described an atmosphere in his Washington office that was freewheeling, yet also filled with anxiety. The congressman, they said, was volatile.

“When he was angry, they added, Mr. Farenthold would berate them, sometimes sweeping his arm across his desk, knocking its contents to the floor, and threatening to fire people. … The refrigerator in the ‘bullpen’ — the open area where aides worked — was filled with beer, and sometimes happy hour would begin at 4:30 p.m., which his aides called ‘beer-thirty.’ Ms. Peace said women would discuss which male lobbyists had texted them pictures of their genitals, and both men and women would talk about strip clubs and whether certain Fox News anchors had breast implants.” http://nyti.ms/2AbYDoX

— “#MeToo spotlight increasingly pointed at past Trump conduct,” by AP’s Jonathan Lemire: “The president’s advisers were stunned Sunday when one of the highest-ranking women in the Trump administration [Nikki Haley] broke with the White House line and said the accusers’ voices ‘should be heard.’ … Haley’s comments infuriated the president, according to two people who are familiar with his views but who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.” http://bit.ly/2BU2OWE

HAPPENING TOMORROW — HOUSE MINORITY LEADER NANCY PELOSI is hosting a meeting tomorrow to “discuss sexual harassment prevention policies and the ME TOO Congress Act legislation.” California Rep. Jackie Speier and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Charlotte Burrows and Chai Feldblum will speak.

WAR REPORT — “White House hides troop numbers in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,” by Yahoo News’ Olivier Knox: “The White House left out the number of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria from a semi-annual accounting it provided to Congress on Monday. In a previous report, sent to Congress in June, the administration had said how many Americans are in those war zones.

“The omissions reflect President Trump’s eagerness to keep secret the size of U.S. deployments in some global hot spots under the theory that the numbers, no matter how vague, might give extremists and other enemies a strategic advantage, a senior administration official told Yahoo News. Military, congressional and even some other administration officials privately dispute that notion and say some transparency is necessary for informed debate about America’s use of force. It is unclear whether the administration detailed the figures to Congress in a classified addendum to the letter.” https://yhoo.it/2AMdcjY

— “DOJ seeks emergency halt to transgender troop deadline,” by Jacqueline Klimas: “The Trump administration on Monday night requested an emergency stay to a court decision that would require the Defense Department to begin accepting transgender recruits on Jan. 1. The action came hours after the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the military must begin accepting transgender recruits on New Year’s Day — the latest action to stall President Donald Trump’s proposed ban. The Justice Department then turned to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying the Pentagon will still be reviewing the policy until February but needs a stay now.” http://politi.co/2AMdBmu

IN THE MIDDLE EAST — “Hezbollah Leader Calls for Arab Countries to Stop Seeking New Ties With Israel,” by NYT’s Nada Homsi in Beirut: “The leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah called on Monday for Arab countries to support the Palestinian cause and abandon their pursuit of normalizing relations with Israel.

“Speaking via a video feed at a rally in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, that was organized to protest President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, called on Arab and Muslim countries to evict Israeli embassies and cut diplomatic ties with Israel.

“‘Today we are witnessing a true intifada,’ or uprising, Mr. Nasrallah told the crowd, speaking of protests that have spread throughout the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Muslims and Christians are all united to defend their holy sites in Jerusalem.’ The rally drew thousands of protesters and was the largest yet in Lebanon in response to Mr. Trump’s Jerusalem declaration last week, which upset a decades-old diplomatic status quo.” http://nyti.ms/2Bfjhs0

PUTIN’S MIDDLE EAST PLAY, by NYT’s Neil MacFarquhar in Moscow and Anne Bernard in Beirut: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia undertook a whirlwind tour to his new allies in the Middle East on Monday, underscoring the extension of Russia’s influence in the region and the continuing shrinkage of the United States’ role.

“Mr. Putin touched down in rapid succession in Syria and Egypt, where he met briefly with their leaders, and landed in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, later in the day. His excursion came as anger at the United States was running high over President Trump’s unilateral decision to recognize Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam, as the capital of Israel. That decision has helped isolate the United States and Israel, angering allies in Europe and the Arab world while helping to convince the Arab public that the United States is solidly anti-Muslim.” http://nyti.ms/2AwVDaU

SPICER RETURNS — “Spicer writing book about White House tenure,” by Brent D. Griffiths: “Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced Monday night that he is writing a book about his brief run behind the podium, taking readers ‘behind the scenes of his turbulent tenure.’ ‘I’ve decided that it is incumbent on me to set the record straight,’ Spicer told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday night.

“‘I looked back at the coverage of the campaign, the transition and the first six, seven months of this White House and realized that the stories that are being told are not an accurate represent[ation] of what President Trump went through to get the nomination, to transition to the White House and then his first six months in office.’ His book titled ‘The Briefing’ will be published by Regnery Publishing, which calls itself ‘the leader in conservative books,’ in July.” http://politi.co/2kqbdu1

TRUMP’S TUESDAY — The president will sign the National Defense Authorization Act. He will also meet with Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan and U.S. Ambassador to Japan William Hagerty. VP MIKE PENCE speaks to the Values Action Team on Capitol Hill, and has lunch with Senate Republicans.

THE JUICE …

— SNEAK PEEK: REP. PATRICK MCHENRY (R-N.C.), the party’s chief deputy whip, will announce a $1 million transfer to the NRCC at this morning’s House Republican Conference meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, according to a source familiar with his plans. McHenry has transferred nearly $1.85 million to the party committee this year. McHenry has raised roughly $5 million for his House GOP colleagues and roughly $7.5 million overall.

— JEH JOHNSON, former DHS secretary and current partner at Paul Weiss, is joining the board of directors of Lockheed Martin. Directors make roughly $300,000 in equity and cash.

— SENATE LEADERSHIP FUND, a super-PAC closely aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, held a private political discussion and appreciation reception Monday night. SLF President and CEO Steven Law noted in his remarks that 2017 was a record fundraising year for the group. SPOTTED: McConnell, Karl Rove, NRSC Chairman Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Republican Sens. Steve Daines (Mont.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Todd Young (Ind.) and Tim Scott (S.C.).

— OUT AND ABOUT IN NYC — Last night in TriBeCa Dan Senor hosted a private screening for the premiere of the second season of the Israeli thriller “Fauda,” followed by a panel discussion with co-creator Avi Issacharoff and lead members of the cast, including Lior Raz (Doron) and Shadi Mari (Walid). Trailer for the second season http://bit.ly/2B8xWEQ

SPOTTED: Alexandra Pelosi, Bret Stephens, Jon Lerner, Bari Weiss, Cy Vance, Ben Wallace, Jamie Gangel, Dan Silva, Gabe Sherman, Campbell Brown, Michael Aronov, Greg Zuckerman, Abe Greenwald, Noah Rothman, Banks Tarver, Dan Selig, David Bushman, Jay Lefkowitz, Ethan Bronner, Josh Block, Matthew Hiltzik, Mosheh Oinounou, Reihan and Kathryn Salam, Rich Lowry, Richard Cohen, Sewell Chan, Sohrab Ahmari, Stu Loeser and Roger Bennett. (NOTE from Jake: If you don’t watch Fauda, you should. It’s one of the best shows on television. Season one is on Netflix.)

LATE NIGHT BEST — After taking last week off because of his son Billy’s second open heart surgery, which was successful, JIMMY KIMMEL made a tearful return to his show last night and made the case for CHIP funding. 5-min. video http://bit.ly/2BDPYjc

PHOTO DU JOUR: President Donald Trump holds an astronaut toy after a signing ceremony for Space Policy Directive 1, with the aim of returning Americans to the moon, at the White House on Dec. 11. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

ISAAC DOVERE talks with DAVID PETRAEUS for the latest OFF MESSAGE podcast — “David Petraeus Would Still Work for Trump, Under ‘Certain Conditions’: Life is good for the former CIA director and four-star general. But he’s keeping his options open”: Isaac talks to retired four star general and CIA director, who offers his battlefield advice in response to Trump’s saying he’s winning the war against ISIS and that previous administrations weren’t letting troops win: “Be first with the truth.” “There are other presidents who have also made some declarations that they undoubtedly wished that they hadn’t made,” he said.

He’s not on Twitter, but he sees the tweets. “What you should follow more is the troops, the money and the substance of policies, which we can overlook if we get too mesmerized by reading tweets,” he says. What he sees: “more continuity than you might have expected,” though he worries about Trump’s “occasional ambivalence about what does ‘America First’ mean relative to the traditional role of the United States in the post-World War II era and particularly, in the post-Cold War era.” http://politi.co/2jRI0Zj

BLAKE HOUNSHELL in POLITICO Magazine, “Paul Manafort’s Dirty Secret: He’s a Terrible Propagandist: If bad editing’s a crime, lock him up”: “We must first indict Manafort for letting [Oleg] Voloshin’s proposed headline [in the Kyiv Post] stand. Typically, authors don’t write their own, but sometimes an editor will accept a suggestion out of sheer inertia or a lack of creativity. (It’s fine to offer a good one when you file your draft — just don’t insist on it or editors will consider you gauche and difficult to work with.)

“In this case, Voloshin had come up with a real stinker: ‘European integration unknown soldier.’ A bad headline can be fatal even to a good piece of writing. Manafort should have proposed his own. In this age of social media-fueled narcissism, it’s usually best to go with a first-person hed when you have the opportunity. I might have suggested something a bit more web-friendly, such as, ‘I Know Paul Manafort. He’s No Russian Stooge.’” http://politi.co/2BfMGSW

FOR YOUR RADAR — “Fearing the Worst, China Plans Refugee Camps on North Korean Border,” by NYT’s Jane Perlez in Beijing: “A Chinese county along the border with North Korea is constructing refugee camps intended to house thousands of migrants fleeing a possible crisis on the Korean Peninsula, according to an internal document that appears to have been leaked from China’s main state-owned telecommunications company. Three villages in Changbai County and two cities in the northeastern border province of Jilin, have been designated for the camps, according to the document from China Mobile. … The camps are an unusual, albeit tacit, admission by China that instability in North Korea is increasingly likely, and that refugees could swarm across the Tumen River, a narrow ribbon of water that divides the two countries.” http://nyti.ms/2Bae5W2

— “North Korea’s prisons are as bad as Nazi camps, says judge who survived Auschwitz,” by WaPo’s Anna Fifield in Tokyo: “North Korea’s political prisons are just as bad as — and perhaps even worse than — the Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust, a renowned judge and Auschwitz survivor has concluded after hearing from former North Korean prisoners and guards. Thomas Buergenthal, who served on the International Court of Justice, is one of three jurists who have concluded that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should be tried for crimes against humanity for the way his regime uses brutal political prisons to control the population.” http://wapo.st/2l2lYGM

****** A message from the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates: Boeing is the preferred supplier for UAE commercial aviation requirements. Over the past 10 years, UAE customers have ordered $150 billion in Boeing planes, supporting 781,000 jobs in the US and injecting billions of dollars into the US economy. In 2016, the US had a $19 billion trade surplus with the UAE, America’s third largest trade surplus globally. http://politi.co/2AtLDMj ******

MEDIAWATCH — “New Yorker fires Ryan Lizza over alleged ‘improper sexual conduct,’” by Michael Calderone: “The New Yorker magazine announced Monday it had fired Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza following an allegation of sexual misconduct. … In a statement, Lizza said the magazine made ‘a terrible mistake’ and rejected its characterization of his relationship. ‘I am dismayed that The New Yorker has decided to characterize a respectful relationship with a woman I dated as somehow inappropriate,’ he said. … Douglas Wigdor, an attorney representing the unnamed woman who accused Lizza of misconduct, disputed that characterization. … Lizza also is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University, where he taught this past fall. A university spokesperson said that classes had already concluded for the fall semester and that Lizza was not previously scheduled to teach in the spring.” http://politi.co/2z2LgsV

— “Comcast Says No Longer Reviewing Deal for 21st Century Fox Assets,” by WSJ’s Joe Flint: “Comcast Corp. said it is no longer pursuing an acquisition of several key media and entertainment assets from 21st Century Fox, leaving Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in position to finalize a deal with Walt Disney Co. The Philadelphia-based cable and programming giant had approached 21st Century Fox about assets that included its international properties, movie and television studios, and some U.S. cable networks, The Wall Street Journal had previously reported, citing people familiar with the matter.” http://on.wsj.com/2z37VFu

— Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter-Poza is joining Daily Kos as its first-ever judicial affairs editor. She previously was a fellow at the Center for American Progress and is currently a contributor to the Pacific Standard.

SPOTTED: on the 2 p.m. Acela from New York Penn Station to D.C.: Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) … Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) waiting to catch a flight on Monday to Phoenix from DCA, where he “stopped to have a word with former Rep. Sue Myrick [R-N.C.] on the concourse,” per our tipster. … Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) in first class on the 3:17 p.m. Delta flight from Atlanta to DCA. Reps. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) and Tom Graves (R-Ga.) were in coach.

HOLIDAY PARTY CIRCUIT — SPOTTED at AEI’s annual holiday party last night: Arthur Brooks, Danielle Pletka, Michael Barone, Tim Carney, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Teller, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, Andrew Bremberg, Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), Jim Banks (R-Ind.), and Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.), Scott Parkinson, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Carl Cannon, Mona Charen, Daniel Halper, Julia Ioffe, Greg Ip, Chris Isham, Eliana Johnson, Matt Lewis, Shawn McCoy, John Parkinson, Abby Phillip, Josh and Ali Rogin, Phil Rucker, Meridith McGraw, Margy Slattery, Byron York, Mike Stone, Elias Groll, Halley Toosi, Mallory Shelbourne, Ryan Nabil, Maddy Weast, Steve Guest, Jenna Lifhits, Marcus Weisgerber and Oriana Pawlyk.

— HOUSE MAJORITY WHIP STEVE SCALISE (R-La.) held a Cajun Christmas party in Eastern Market last night. Pool report: “Guests dined on traditional Cajun cuisine as the Capitol Hillbillies played. Scalise joined them to play his washboard, known as the ‘Zydeco Lightning.’” Pic http://bit.ly/2knsGTS

SPOTTED: Speaker Paul Ryan, Brett Horton, Chris Bond, Lauren Fine, Kelley Hudak, Bill Hughes, Matt Bravo, Ben Napier, Bart Reising, Drew Ferguson, Reps. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Bob Latta (R-Ohio), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), John Faso (R-N.Y.), Scott Taylor (R-Va.), Randy Weber (R-Texas), Brian Babin (R-Texas), Will Hurd (R-Texas), John Shimkus (R-Ill.), Erik Paulsen (R-Minn.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Jason Lewis (R-Minn.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and members of Scalise’s medical team, including Dr. Jack Sava and Dr. Rob Golden.

— Pool report: German “Ambassador Peter Wittig, Huberta von Voss-Wittig, and Liz Mohn … hosted the fourth annual Neue Stimmen concert Monday evening at the Ambassador’s Residence. Four soloists from the Neue Stimmen competition performed pieces from Faust and The Barber of Seville, among others, along with a medley of Christmas standards.”

SPOTTED: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Samuel Alito and Martha-Ann Alito, national security adviser HR McMaster and Kathleen McMaster, DNI Dan Coats and Marsha Coats, Jane Harman, Barbara Allbritton, Alexandra de Borchgrave, Calvin Cafritz and Jane Cafritz, Amb. Rafat Mahmood and Shaista Mahmood, Sally Quinn, David Ignatius, Ben Chang, John Arundel, Sandra Pandit, Lee Merritt and Julie Folger, Annie Totah, John and JoAnn Mason, Karl Matthias Klause.

TRANSITION — KELLEY MCCORMICK has been hired as SVP of corporate communications at Under Armour, where she will start on Jan 8. She most recently has been a managing director at SKDKnickerbocker.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Lanny Davis, co-founder and partner of Trident DMG and co-founder and partner of Davis Goldberg & Galper PLLC, is 72. How he got his start in politics: “In the Vietnam War era in the mid-1960s, I realized that politics meant life or death unless America elected someone to get America out of Vietnam. So I knocked on doors for Sen. Gene McCarthy in the 1968 New Hampshire primary – and haven’t missed knocking on doors in a Democratic New Hampshire presidential primary since then.” Read his Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2BWRWYq

BIRTHDAYS: Jesse Ferguson is 37 … David Pasch, HHS digital director and Mets fanatic, is 29 (hat tips: Charmaine Yoest and Brian Jack) … Allan Karl (h/t little bro Jonathan) … Maggie Rodriguez … Broderick Johnson, partner at Bryan Cave and Obama alum (h/t Jon Haber) … Jeff Goldstein, MBA/MPA concurrent degree candidate at Dartmouth Tuck and Harvard Kennedy School (h/t Katie Glueck) … Politico’s Taylor Miller Thomas … Andrew Platt, Maryland State Delegate … Katy Bachman … ABC News’ Becky Perlow … Nora Boustany … Peter Fenn … former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) is 66 … former Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wis.) is 68 … AP science writer Seth Borenstein … Bret Wincup, director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise … Jeff Burton, founder of Burton Strategy Group and Cantor/NRCC alum, is 43 … Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) is 56 … Liz Brim … Alexander Levine …

… Sarah Horowitz, senior media strategist at Raffetto Herman Strategic Communications … Jenna Kruse, VP of research at EMILY’s List … BBC’s Reeta Chakrabarti … Politico Europe’s Esther King … Nick Pearson of Google (h/t Riva Sciuto) … David Mays … Bush WH alum Rebecca Neale, now at the Paulson Institute … Jamie Brown Hantman … Danny Russel, diplomat in residence and senior fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute … Dwight Fettig … Jen Richer … Bob Wood … Ed Espinoza … Caroline Whitehouse, senior account executive at Edelman … Carolyn Castore … Dawn Laguens … Tina Henry … Tanner Hishta … Bush 43 alum Angela Hernandez … Kelly O’Brien … Maren Hesla … Peter Bock …Diane Welsh … David Sandretti, Obama USDA alum … Dan Schooff … Dawn Laguens … Madeline Sasse … Tony Winnicker (h/ts Teresa Vilmain)

****** A message from the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates: UAE airlines have received or have on order more than 800 Boeing aircraft. Emirates is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 777s and has 40 Boeing 787-10s currently on order. Flydubai operates an all-Boeing fleet of planes and has a total of 361 Boeing 737s on order. Etihad operates 24 Boeing 777s with 25 more on order, and has an additional $8.7 billion order for Boeing 787-10s. UAE airlines now serve 11 US gateway cities from Dubai and Abu Dhabi with more than 250 weekly nonstop flights. http://politi.co/2AtLDMj ******

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