#but we are deep in trump country and so the fact that so many white ppl WERE there and listening to black speakers

[odinsblog]

One About The Atmosphere: Want to change minds? Stop trying. Change the atmosphere instead.

Donald Trump in 2016 greets a screaming horde of ecstatic white christian nationalists

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection.

This is the sort of dude I’d hang out with at a party, if there were a party we were both at, but not one with whom I’d maintain a relationship if we both graduated and then moved to different places—which I know for a fact, because that’s what happened. We drifted.

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook.

Minivan was no longer a pre-med student at a small northern liberal arts college. He was a doctor—a general care practitioner, if memory serves—in a smallish plains state town, very much like many other towns in the great plains or elsewhere in the country, I imagine.

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats.

Minivan was absolutely enraged about everything the Demonrats did. He also was out of his mind angry about Killary, and Obummer, the leaders of the Demonrats—or at least they were the front for the real leader of the Demonrats, who even back then I believe was George Soros.

What did the Demonrats do? Oh my heck, what *didn’t* they do? Mostly they hated America and American security and American economic strength, it seems. They engaged in corruption and bowed to foreign powers a lot. They shredded the dignity of the presidency, that’s for sure.

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else.

There was a lot of linking to sites I’d never heard of, like Breitbart and Newsmax, and of course plenty of Fox News. There were a lot of memes. There were a lot of conspiracy theories (a big birther, was Minivan).

Some of his posts contained subtle bigotry. Most of the rest contained not-subtle bigotry. Several of them contained slogans and statements that were, very simply, neo Nazi and white supremacist memes and shibboleths.

There was a lot of commentary accompanying these posts from Minivan, who was saying shocking stuff for a small-town family doctor … the sorts of things that it seemed to me would make people not want to use this person as a doctor, or or sit next to that person on a bus.

I hadn’t heard of Alex Jones, yet, but Minivan sounded a lot like Alex Jones, word for word and beat for beat. He’d even start his posts like a right-wing radio host: Sorry folks, but you can’t even make stuff like this up—ironically, accompanying things that had been made up.

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth.

But the intention was that I’d change his mind, with facts presented logically, delivered calmly and patiently.

This was my belief.

What happened confounded me, but perhaps you can predict it.

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I'd never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time.

All of it was larded with grievance, a sense that people like him had never wronged anybody, and everybody else had done nothing but wrong people like him.

The bigotry and authoritarianism grew.

And all the time, on Facebook, he and his family kept smiling their perfect smiles.

I’ll admit that over time my interactions stopped being polite and bloodless, and I’m not particularly sorry for it. I told him some things about himself he seemed not to know, but which I thought really ought to be said.

I have a bit of a penchant for sarcasm, which you may have noticed.

I employed this skill, and you can feel how you want to about sarcasm, but I think it helped convey the correct posture to take toward someone who says the sorts of things Minivan was saying.

The correct posture being "you have proved yourself to be a person who should not be taken seriously, and your positions do not deserve even a modicum of respect."

I found this a more healthy message to convey about Minivan to anybody watching, and I still do.

Eventually he blocked me, and he was out of my life forever. It was the right choice, and I'm very glad he did that.

I’ve pondered the incident since, as it’s become more and more relevant to “the way things are.”

A few things had become clear over time.

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance.

More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

Further still: Minivan *learned* from me. The effect of telling him he was using one or another logical fallacy was not to sharpen his reasoning, but to teach him about the existence of logical fallacies, which let him (incorrectly) accuse others of those same logical fallacies.

So Minivan was deploying the language of logic, in ways that betrayed a total lack of understanding about what those fallacies were, granted, but in ways that likely made him seem more knowledgeable and reasonable to a casual or sympathetic observer.

He learned to ape our phrases and arguments, in much the way he’d learned to ape the style of Alex Jones and all the various Breitbart and Newsmax contributors he used to inform himself.

And these days it occurs to me: I hear a lot about "groomers."

We were not changing him by engaging with him thoughtfully.

We certainly weren’t changing him by engaging with him in kind.

Rather: we were making him better at what he was doing, and we were validating his world view—to himself and others—as one that merited engagement.

And week after week on Facebook, Minivan kept smiling and smiling and getting angrier and angrier, at us and Obummer and all the other Demonrats and liberals and every member of every minority group who dared to fail to ceaselessly assure him that he was right about everything.

I don’t miss Minivan's black-hole-sun smile. I think of it as my first hint of MAGA: politically overrepresented, socially coddled people, often living outwardly happy privileged lives, while seething inwardly that other people might be getting anything, anything at all.

Indeed, soon enough, another figure would come on the scene, whose behavior matched that of Minivan almost exactly, a perfect avatar for this spirit of aggrieved bigotry and supremacy that seemed to be moving through my former friend.

And sure enough, as I saw, there were millions and millions of smiling seething people who loved him.

And that guy became president.

Nobody believed he would. And then he did.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier.

He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance.

It's an invitation they leapt at, to which they cling even now.

It's a constituency immune to proof, angered by equality, cheered by cruelty, who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning within which they have demand to be seated, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And afterward, a huge number of those shocked by this development decided the proper reaction was to accommodate it, in the name of unity—a belief, it seems, grounded in the idea that what you choose to get along with isn’t as important as getting along no matter what.

I’ll finish with the question that all of Minivan’s former friends would eventually ask, whenever they gathered together long enough for the subject to arise.

"What the hell happened to Minivan?"

Here’s the answer, I think: nothing.

Nothing happened to Minivan. Nothing at all.

He was always that guy, and he always thought the things he thought.

What changed was that he was given a lot of language with which to express those ideas, and access to enough other people who thought that way too, that it created a critical mass of permission.

The permission allowed him to change his attitudes and actions, and created a lot of other people willing to accommodate and normalize his antisocial anti-reality behavior, rather than reject it out of hand.

In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn't behave like Minivan later would.

You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

Which is what you'd be.

I think it just wasn't possible for Minivan to be what he later became, because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to the possibility.

But then the atmosphere changed.

If we want to change it back, it's worth thinking about how atmospheres change.

(source)

[reddstiches]

I normally don't state my opinion in text posts, but I want to ask something.

When it comes to politics (US, unfortunately, I am American), I see a bunch of people stating they'll they won't vote for Kamala due to the Palestinian genocide. Okay, I understand. I've been in this fight for over a decade, educating on the Palestinian's plight that has been happening since the 1940s. The prisoners, the Great March of Return, etc. (I've also been knee deep in educating about the ulterior motives of the "War on Terror" and how it was a step by step plan by Western countries to destabilize the Middle East for Big Oil but that's a whole different post)

What is your plan? How are you going to overthrow the Militarized American Government? What steps are you going to take to change how it works?

Not to be a bitch, but if you don't vote, Trump will become president and the Palestinians will be genocided regardless. In fact, it would be at a faster rate due to him and his constituents. There wouldn't even be talks of a ceasefire or any aid. All aid would cease, and the Trump administration would expedite the process of turning Gaza into a parking lot. (Trump's words, not mine)

Plus, Americans would also suffer. Leftists like myself know that a Kamala presidency is just stalling for time, a band aid on an already corrupt deal, but we don't want to fall full tilt into fascism. We are so close to 1930s Germany on the far-right that it is frightening, staring down the barrel of a gun. (In fact it would be worse due to the US having the biggest and most advanced military in the world + nukes.)

In 2016, many voted 3rd party or didn't vote at all due to Hillary Clinton being the democratic primary and not Bernie Sanders.

In 2016 I begged and pleaded for people to vote blue (as a band aid) I knew as poli-sci student that a Trump presidency would overturn Roe V Wade due to the status of the Supreme Court at the time. All he had to do was stack it. I knew hate crimes would rise as he gave a voice to racists and bigots. I knew he would go after the LGBTQ+, marginalized communities, and asylum seekers. He campaigned on hate, and it killed millions of Americans in the pandemic. I mourned for the progress (as little as it was) we had made as a country as it was announced he won.

Because of moralist inaction in 2016, my neices and myself now have to fight for rights our grandmothers won. Because of inaction, our country was set back decades.

So what is your plan? What revolution are you going to put in place from your living room?

The government would slaughter its own citizens to uphold the status quo. There has to be a plan. (See BLM protests 2020 and Free Palestine protests 2023-2024)

The White Christian Nationalists are united in their beliefs of stripping the little rights away that we do have. They don't care about you and your beliefs.

You are so focused on moral grandstanding that real-life consequences are beyond you.

You all are so focused on doing no wrong, that you forget to do what is right.

Sometimes you have to play the long game. Because we are losing battles, yes, but that doesn't mean we lose the war.

I refuse to let it all burn to make a point. I care about my fellow Americans, my fellow LGBTQ+ brothers, and sisters trapped in the South, women dying in hospital parking lots, and POC being racially targeted, the refugees just looking for a new life.

I refuse to let a Trump presidency implement the last few steps of Project 2025. If I can stall and help build a community to support my countrymen (gender neutral) I will.

I will begrudgingly vote for Kamala Harris and continue to fight.

[its-suanneschafer-author]

Continuing my review and summarizing of Project 2025, the GOP 2024 platform, and Trump’s Agenda 47.

1) Trump denies knowledge of Project 2025, a radical conservative Christian manifesto, yet many of his present and former advisors wrote the 900 page document which is a blueprint for the new GOP president starting from day one with massive, sweeping actions that will not only paralyze the government but will ensure chaos for years to come. It is the most detailed look at a future Trump presidency. Trump’s name is mentioned 268 times in the document, so it was certainly written with him in mind. Trump instituted 64% of the policy recommendations that were put out in the 2016 conservative mandate, a blueprint for the Trump administration and which was as right-wing and conservative as the current Project 2025.

2) Agenda 47 collects formal policies Trump plans to put into effect, many of which rely on executive orders and significant expansion of his executive powers. In 2023, Trump campaign officials stated that Project 2025 aligns well with Agenda 47.

These policies include:

A) restriction of Chinese ownership of US infrastructure

B) End the “Biden war” on US energy by eliminating every regulation that hampers domestic production, getting out of the Paris Agreement, and giving fast approval to every oil infrastructure project that comes before his administration 

C) Baseline tariffs on most foreign goods, revoking Chinese Most Favored Nation trade status

D) Decrease trade deficits

E) Not bailing out failing banks, slashing regulations, and repealing Biden’s tax hikes to reduce inflation

F) The Trump Reciprocal Trade Act will tariff other countries’ imports at the same rate they tariff our exports. NB: The costs of these tariffs will be passed on to consumers and will cause more harm than good

G) Gut Biden’s Green New Deal policies and electric cars initiative, and terminate all emission regulations on cars, fossil fuels, etc

H) Dept of Education

1—Cut federal funding for any school or program teaching critical race theory or gender ideology by removing the radicals who have infiltrated the Dept of Education. 

2—Keep men out of women’s sports. 

3—Create a new way to certify teachers based on their patriotism and give preferential treatment to schools that abolish teacher tenure, abolish DEI, and adopt direct election of school principals by parents. 

4—Pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that engage in “equity” by taxing up to the entire amount of their endowment

5—Restore parental rights to control their child’s education; allow parents to hire and fire principals and teachers.

6—Bring back school prayer NB: This includes reading the Bible but doesn’t include any teachings of other religions

7—Allow teachers to carry concealed weapons at school 

8—Immediate expulsion and sentencing to reform school of any student who harms another student or a teacher or use or possession of drugs at school

9—The US government will issue bachelor’s degrees to those who did not finish their degrees by creating a new educational institution aimed at competing with schools already in existence. NB: This is from the man who owes fines from the failure of his own for-profit college.

I) Reinterpret presidential powers so that he has greater control of the government in the White House

(the unitary executive theory).

1—Dismantle the “deep state” and revamp every aspect of the US government. NB: These policies could upset the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government and provoke a constitutional showdown by usurping congressional authority and cutting out any program he doesn’t like or whose proponents have angered him. This is a fascist plan

2—Prevent World War III and end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NB: The fact that he has buddied up to Putin makes this highly unlikely.

3—Overhaul the entire US defense and intelligence bureaucracies

4—Ask Europe to refund the money we spend to rebuild the stockpiles we sent to Ukraine. NB: Good luck with that

J) Keep Medicare and Social Security intact. NB: Every single congressional Republican—and 43 Senate Republicans—sided with Big Pharma over the American people and blocked an amendment that would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 for millions of Americans on private insurance. Thus, Big Pharma and the rich get richer at the cost of the health and lives of the poor. In March 2024, the Republican Study committee which represents 100% of House Republican leadership and 80% of their members proposed yet another budget that would cut the following by $4.5 trillion over 1-0 years: Medicare (transition Medicare to a premium support system that would raise premiums for many seniors), Social Security ($1.5 trillion in cuts) , the Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Initiative and increase prescription drugs (removing $35 insulin), energy and housing costs while raising the retirements age plus forcing $5.5. trillion in tax cuts for the very rich.

K) Immigration policy

1—Ban birthright citizenship 

2—End welfare for illegal immigants

3—Massive deportation of immigrants

L) Inflation

1—Build “Freedom Cities” on undeveloped federal land to lower cost of buying a home

2—Build vertical takeoff and landing vehicles

M) Shatter the left-wing censorship regime

L) Law enforcement

1—Increase investment in police personnel, stop illegal drugs

2—Death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers

3—Overhaul federal standards on disciplining minors

4—Concealed carry reciprocity

M) DEI

1—Abandon DEI, terminate any offices, staff, and initiatives connected to DEI

2—Focus on anti-white racism rather than discrimination against people of color

N) Transgender and LBGQI+ rights: Terminate all gender affirming care at any age and terminating federal funding for any hospital or healthcare provider that participates in it

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 20, 2023

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement. 

More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

No. You are anti science.

Ok so let me start this off by saying one thing very clearly. Far leftists are 100% anti science. They will deny facts right in front of their faces so long as it goes against their narrative, because they only thing they are even good at doing is gaslighting. And most of the time they are not even good at that.

What do I mean? Ok, so what have I seen or heard from Leftists (IE: People that worship the fact they are on the left) are as follows. And while not a comprehensive list, it's enough.

1-"All vaccines are safe and can't harm you"

2-"There is no differences between the sexes"

3-"There are no differences between physical races/ethnicities"

4-"Cat's can be vegan"

5-"Solar and Wind are actually better for the environment than anything else"

6-"Hormone blockers don't have side effects"

7-"Cow farts are killing the planet"

8-"The US and every 'White' Country are responsible for most/all the pollution on earth"

And I could go on. But let's address these shall we?

Vaccines are not a one size fits all. They never have been. Far leftists went from "I won't ever take Trumps vaccine" to "If you don't take Biden's vaccine you deserve to never get healthcare again and or deserve to be put into a wood chipper. Also we don't care if you are immunocompromised the "Vaccine" is perfectly safe. St. Faccui said it was safe for absolutely everyone." I'm sorry if you are like this, you are not "Pro Science". And on ONE person is "The Science". And if you believe otherwise you are a lunatic. Also, adverse reactions are a thing. No matter how rare they are some can lead to life long issues. And some can lead to death. That's just a fact.

There are a NUMBER of Differences between the sexes. And while I could write a BOOK worth of how, I'll stick with a few things. Immune Strength, Quick twitch muscle fiber, reproductive organs, hormonal influence on the body, fat retention, muscle building capacity, speed of development, etc, etc. *The list is long*

OK so this one is one of the dumbest ones I've heard, but let me explain something simple. Between melanin and MANY other variants genetically, we ARE different. Scandinavians are often extremely tall, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese people tend to be very small. Then there is Sickle cell disease which is ALMOST exclusive to people with darker skin, more often much darker skinned people. WE HAVE DIFFERENCES. And the reason people are often scared to talk about this is because they are afraid that if they do talk about these things that it will lead to bigotry and racism. Except by pretending that all people from all places in the world are EXACTLY the same you are in fact denying science.

I'm not even going to go deep into this. SOME ANIMALS ARE JUST CARNIVORS! Cat's are one such animal. Stop being stupid because YOU chose something for your own life.

OK so I could BOOK this one as well but let me just say a few things. Battery tech has almost not advanced at all in the past 20 years. Every step we have made has been very.....minimal. However Solar panels only last between 5-8 years more often than not, and the amount of resources they take to make needs YEARS to offset how much carbon used to make them. This not also including the destruction of entire ecosystems due to the mining for the resources in 3rd world counties, which have also managed to pollute water reservoirs. No telling the amount of kids that die in the slave labor needed to mine all of this stuff. Or the long term effects on the natives of those lands. Same with wind. Except with wind, they need petrol to work. Specifically the lubes that keep the turbines working. And they don't last very long either. And when they break, much like solar panels, they can't be recycled. And the production of those needs 8-10 years to offset what it costed to produce them. Not to also discuss the amount of land decimated to put up both of them. Specifically bad with wind turbines that tend to kill avian life at a high rate, and when put into the water or on the water, they screw with the sonar of animals in the water that use sonar. Which has sadly killed a number of whales.

Hormone blockers actually have a metric shit ton of side effects. Though I guess you can more say effects. One of which, which is actually REALLY scary for younger people is Osteoporosis. Which is REALLY rare in people under 50. As often you develop it as you age. Except people that take blockers for long enough stop developing. That's the entire point in some cases. And here is what many of you LUNATICS don't seem to get. YOUR BODY needs he hormones it produces for you to develop properly. Your body does not just "Rebound" when you stop taking them. And when you take cross sex hormones, your body does not just "start development again", It has to actively fight it's own hormone production as well as your genetics meaning that there can be many medical side effects in general that can occur. But talking just about blockers your body does not just restart. Your hormones dictate a number of things. Brain development, bone development, immune health, height and weight determinates, as well as most of all your internals. If you pause your development, your body does not just pick up where it left off. If you take blockers for 2 years, you lose 2 years or almost 2 years of development. Many doctors have actually backed up all of this. Denying this makes YOU anti science.

This one is me just taking the piss as it were. Cows live off of what ever diet they have access to. However I have heard people, in no small numbers, say that we should reduce the number of cows. Not that we should change their diets. But that we should just CULL them. Despite the argument being "What they are being fed is producing more methane than usual. So it's fun to consistently hear from leftist that we should just kill a lot of animals.

China, India, and Africa have been not only not reducing their emissions. They have actually switched to using a lot of coal. And their emissions have only spiked over the last several years. It's not even remotely close. Meanwhile the US, UK, and most other Euro nations, have greatly done a lot to reduce emissions over time. If you think "The West" is the issue when it comes to your climate alarmism, then you are SORELY mistaken.

[mightyflamethrower]

Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.

The President further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.

Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe—variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.

They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.

Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the President of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter U.S. policy to suit his payers. Those two crimes—bribery and treason—are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.

In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of Donald Trump.

But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.

So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?

Answer—only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection—and thus becomes expendable.

Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.

From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”

When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?

Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,”  “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?

Not at all.

Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”

The country then wasted another year.

The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Donald Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens—given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent—to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.

On that accusation Trump was impeached.

Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.

Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.

And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and Rep. Adam Schiff.

The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Joe Biden, who had actually committed them.

Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.

The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.

Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.

The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Donald Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.

No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.

For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.

[arpov-blog-blog]

For the Good of the Country, It's Time for Some Pundits to Retire

Why calls for Biden to step down now from pundits are counter-productive.

Ron Filipkowski MeidasTouch Network

The political punditry class, largely ensconced in their New York City and DC enclaves, continues to demonstrate that they are out of step with the issues that concern most Americans. 

Many of them have been at it for decades. 

While experience and expertise is often valuable, so is the ability to understand the mood and concerns of different segments of the population. Rural, suburban and urban. Black, white, hispanic, asian, and the kaleidoscope of places of ethic origin that make up the most diverse nation on the planet. Gen Z, millennials, Gen X. Too often, Boomers in the wealthy, urban northeast simply fail to understand what concerns, troubles, and motivates people in the rest of the country.

Some in the elite pundit class have distant roots outside the places they have inhabited for the past several decades. But their reference points to those places stretch back to the 1970s and 80s, and the people they grew up with have either moved away like they have, or their current views passed onto the punditry class consist of a random text from a geriatric uncle or a conversation at a 50th high school reunion. 

Assessments on the tenor of the country derived from anecdotes used by the out of touch. Not useful.

The reason why I stopped watching cable news last year is because I found that I was being subjected to the opinions of the same people day after day, month after month. I watched many of these very same people when I was a political junkie in high school and college in the 1980s and 90s. They are still there, and still in Boston, NYC, and DC, while I have lived in urban, suburban and rural areas in the northeast, west coast, and deep south. 

We also have to consider the wretched performance of Donald Trump. While he certainly had more energy and vigor during the debate, he also spewed a firehose of lies, racism, and hate. He failed to answer one policy question after another. His response about climate change was to talk about hordes of mentally ill migrant criminals living amongst us. His response to every policy question was to either conjure up images of future migrant terrorist attacks or to talk about his golf game. The frustrating part was that the debate format did not permit live fact-checking from moderators, and Biden was largely incapable of doing it himself.

Did Biden fail to capitalize on Trump's psychosis, lack of knowledge about policy, and serial lies? Yes, he did. And he was rightly criticized for that. But there has been almost no reporting on the fact that Trump also failed to garner any new votes from Biden's failures because his performance only reinforced concerns those same voters have about him. 

But that story is not being told by the pundit class.

So what is the point of the 11th hour calls from the punditry class to attempt to influence a president to step down using their very public platforms? While it may not be their intent, the point is that it will only divide, dishearten, and alienate activists and donors who badly need to rally around their candidate right now. When Donald Trump was indicted and later convicted, his supporters and right-wing media circled the wagons and backed their guy stronger than ever. As reprehensible as that was given the cause, from the perspective of winning an election it was smart strategy. 

What the pundit class is doing right now is not smart strategy.

So I end where I began. It is time for many of these elitist, urban northeastern dinosaurs to retire. Or take a sabbatical to spend a few months in diners and shops on Route 66. 

Or just realize that your role in American society isn't to replace a president, no matter how much you wish you had that kind of influence."

[sublimeobservationarcade]

America’s Orange Jesus Has Clay Feet

The expression feet of clay is meant to indicate the flawed earthly nature of man. Donald J Trump has always been a most unlikely candidate for saviour and champion of any group. White America and Christian Nationalists have got behind the former president as their guy they are hoping to put back in the White House. Trump is facing multiple criminal and civil indictments in courts across the country. Only the most partisan and cultish among his supporters could fail to recognise the writing on the wall when it comes to Trump’s likely fate. It tells us that America’s orange Jesus has clay feet.

Trump’s Criminal Indictments Long Overdue

The really reprehensible fact of the matter is that Trump has got away with it for so many years prior to this impending time of judgement. It is a damning assessment of the justice system in America and conveys just how the wealthy and powerful evade their comeuppance. The rule of law seems not to apply to the politically savvy and those with deep pockets. The blatant nature of Trump’s crimes demand not only punishment but solutions for the loop holes within the system. I suspect that a key antecedent in all this is the fact Richard Nixon did not got to jail and was pardoned by Ford instead. Powerful people protecting the system and saving face at the expense of real justice. American Presidential Election In 2024 Under Orange Cloud The GOP, the Republican party, has morphed into an extremist organisation with no respect for the rule of law when it applies to them. Politicking has tipped over into insurrection and anarchy among their members and supporters. The Democrats are trying to keep the game called democracy going but their opponents no longer play by any rules. The coming 2024 presidential election has Trump the likely GOP candidate still claiming that his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden was the result of election fraud. The Big Lie has been repeatedly debunked by numerous judicial and private enquiries and investigations. There was no voter or election fraud on the scale claimed by Trump. Indeed, Trump has been indicted on criminal charges of election interference for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump is the pot calling the kettle black.

The Agent Orange In America Perhaps, we should be calling Trump ‘Agent Orange’ rather than any reference to JC because he poisons the very air everywhere he goes.  I don’t know about you but I am heartily sick of reading, talking, and writing about Trump. I sometimes try and imagine the last decade without him on the political scene. This gross champion of the ugly American. The kind of folk who are happy to win at whatever the cost and don’t care who gets hurt in the process. MAGA invokes a return to a time of celebrated white supremacy at the expense of the usual suspects and victims. The constant threats from the hard right extremists. Gun violence everywhere. These folk want to bully their way back into power. The Trump coalition of disaffected non-college educated voters, Christian Nationalists, and big business is illogical at its core. Corporate greed has made the lives of working Americans miserable. Big business has screwed ordinary Americans for years, especially through the neoliberal decades since Reagan. Jobs have gone offshore and the financialization of everything has seen the rentier economy emerge. Private equity firms have turned health into a for profit nightmare for the working poor. Neocons blaming liberals and minorities is a deflection from the actual culprits within the economy. The politics of grievance have the Trump cult members dancing to a dishonest tune. Blaming immigrants, blaming woke, and blaming diversity inclusion measures are all BS distractions from the main game. Americans are so ready to eat up the old anti-socialist line, which has been handed down intergenerationally from fathers to sons and mothers to daughters. The big myth of the individual American, the lone cowboy making his way across the west on his way to success. It is all complete BS!

Dopey working class Americans need to wake up to the reality of what Donald Trump is. A grifter and conman pretending to empathise with their values. A good salesman apes those he is targeting. Billionaires don’t really share the same grievances as the working poor – it’s a sham folks! America’s orange Jesus has clay feet. Indeed, he soon may well have an orange jumpsuit to go with his fake tan. Trump in prison for the rest of his life – I would like to see that. This may be the last hurrah for the ugly self-entitled American. Watching their hero go down for the count could be the turning point. We can only hope. “United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain on Tuesday fired back at former President Trump after he called the union leader a “dope” for endorsing President Biden. Fain doubled down on his support for Biden and drew a stark contrast between Biden’s and Trump’s track records on supporting unions and the working class when asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about Trump’s latest comments. “It’s a perfect contrast between the two candidates,” Fain said. “I mean, you have, for the first time in history, a sitting U.S. president joining working-class people, joining the workers on the picket line, standing up with them. And you had Donald Trump, who claims he supports the workers, who calls one of his business owner buddies in a non-union factory, and he goes to this non-union factory and has a rally claiming that he’s there for the union workers and the striking workers.” “It’s what Trump does best. It’s a rope-a-dope,” Fain continued. “He wants you to look over here while over here, he’s taking everything away. I mean, it’s the divide-and-conquer tactic, and that’s what’s worked for the billionaire class and the corporate class forever.” “ (https://thehill.com/business/4437518-uaw-president-fires-back-after-trump-calls-him-a-dope/) Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom. 

©WordsForWeb Read the full article

[giftofshewbread]

“Justice” :: By Rick Segoine

Published on: September 2, 2023 

How long can a civilization survive without justice?

Or a justice system that is made up of double standards?

A more pertinent question would be, how much longer can America and the entire Western system of government last under the current conditions?

It should be clear to anyone with a functioning brain and a little bit of objectivity that justice, as any decent, intelligent, and rational person would define it, no longer exists in the Western world. Not only does it not exist, justice has been squeezed inside out, flipped upside down, and radically tilted in favor of the criminals. Criminals of both the blue and especially the white-collar kind.

This backward justice has become so obvious and so blatantly shoved in our faces that, at this point, it is just expected. How pathetic.

In leftist-run cities like San Francisco, for example, bureaucrats and “law enforcement” have given the green light to looters to the point where multiple stores that sell all different types of merchandise have been forced to either close their doors for good or move to another city. It is just simple math.

This, along with ever-increasing muggings and carjackings in SF are just part of a long list of blue-collar crimes. The much bigger white-collar crimes are committed by the leftist/globalist cabal and their many cronies, who are systematically attempting to destroy every country in the entire world we grew up in so they can “build it back better.” Socially, economically, and environmentally.

It’s kind of like the night that the lights went out in Georgia, the night they hung an innocent man, but on a planetary scale.

Speaking of Georgia, as of this writing, former President Donald J. Trump will be booked, fingerprinted, and posed for a mug shot at Fulton County Jail on racketeering charges.

The harassment of Trump continues while videotape of Joe Biden bragging to the Council on Foreign Relations about his highly illegal and unconstitutional criminal misdeeds in regard to Burisma and Ukraine are ignored.

Joe gets a free pass.

Joe gets a free pass on everything, like letting our soldiers die and handing over some 80 billion dollars of high-tech military equipment to the Taliban in his misguided withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just like Barack and Hillary got one free pass after another on so many different criminal and unconstitutional acts that it would fill a book trying to list them all.

In fact, Joe and Hill and 0 each could easily fill their own books with documented misdeeds. We also know that the liberal folks they count on to buy into and support the lying and the crimes would not believe a word of it. It is highly probable that those brainwashed and befuddled lost souls would even reject live confessions.

Those who are like what the prophet Isaiah described in Isiah 5:20, saying, “Woe to them that call good evil and who call evil good.” If that is the case, true logic is nonsense to them, and any attempt at reasoning with them has no effect.

Meanwhile, people who did absolutely nothing wrong on Jan. 6th other than failing to see that they were being set up, rot away in jail to set an example for all who would dare to protest against the actual criminals. The lunatics really are in charge of the asylum.

The Leftists/Marxists/Globalists/Deep State Rinos and Demonicrats are simply doing what they do. Calling plays out of the Marxist playbook and/or Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Accusing their most feared political opponent of doing not what he is actually doing but what they are actually doing. But it goes beyond that; this is also about vengeance.

Trump has made many threats about taking down the Deep State, and now the denizens of the swamp are going to do whatever it takes to ensure that D.J. Trump never again has another chance even to attempt to do something so audacious as delaying or disrupting any part of their vain and sinister plan to re-create the world in their own image.

Ironically, even when he had the chance, Mr. Trump did very little in regard to his boasting of or his promises to Drain the Swamp.

The Swamp People always had one of their shills with acting skills ready to “advise him,” and he fell for it more than once.

A huge mistake for Trump was giving audience to one whom the devil has been using mightily, a Mr. Bill Gates, who convinced him that the mRNA experimental gene therapy “vaccines” were a wonderful scientific achievement that would benefit everyone.

The monumental mistake that followed that fateful meeting with the snake, I mean mega farmland buyer and owner Bill Gates, was when Trump could be seen standing aside and behind with his arms folded while the globalists’ own Dr. Wormtongue, aka puppy torturing Spawn of Mengele, aka funder of Gain of Function Research, aka serial liar and mass-murderer Anthony Fauci, an unelected appointee, took over the reins of leadership in America and began dictating to free American citizens globalist policies, and with Trump’s naive approval.

The rest, as we say, is history, including the lockdowns, mask mandates, vax mandates that cost thousands of people their livelihoods, and the deadly hospital protocols of remdesivir and ventilators that killed thousands of the elderly. (97% of people over the age of 65 placed on ventilators died on those Fauci-mandated ventilators.)

Then there was the massive sociological damage to children that has now warped into an aggressive and intentional perversion of children by the perverts in power. Let us not forget Operation Warp Speed, that quick untested rollout that helped the globalists mass inject their genocidal bioweapon into millions of arms sooner rather than later.

Worldwide, millions have died, and millions more have had their health and ability to reproduce drastically compromised by the poisonous shots. It is no coincidence that cases of myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, severely compromised immune systems, and healthy young people in their 20s dropping dead on athletic fields have increased drastically since 2021 when Jab Madness really took over. Those are just a few of the now-known side effects.

All that for a flu bug with a 99% recovery rate and three weeks to flatten the curve. It has also been revealed by records kept by Pfizer and Moderna that 30% of the shots were placebos used as a smokescreen to make it appear that side effects and deaths were rare.

There is a great deal of evidence and proof of these things at this point as we enter the final four months of the year 2023. These findings have been published by highly educated and respected medical researchers who are not in the pocket of the globalists. Honest people who are actual real scientists. Not arrogant, yet very dangerous egotists who believe that it is they who are the science.

Of course, the bought and paid for corrupt mainstream media will report none of this and will continue to demonize anyone spreading around that one thing all hard-core leftists are highly allergic to. Truth.

In the land of Isaiah 5:20, truth is called misinformation. In that far away and yet in your face at all times virtual reality known as Social Mediaville, quite often leftist programmed AI bots will decide for you what is truth and what is fiction.

To this day, Trump appears unable to see or admit the damage, loss of life, and flat-out ruination of so many lives as a result of a few of his own misguided decisions. You would think the swamp creatures would love him for handing them the opportunity to kill and maim people, and with zero accountability under the seemingly legal guise of the system and the “wise council” of the CDC and the NIH.

It is worth noting that when all of these things transpired in the U.S.A., the WEF, the WHO, and the U.N., along with the young global leaders trained by good old Uncle Klaus, were making the same things happen worldwide.

It was a globalist global enterprise. It was planned.

It was planned quite a long time ago, and videos exist of Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and Obama predicting ahead of time that a worldwide pandemic was on its way. How did they know that? What sorcery was at play?

But Trump was an advocate for taking the clot shots voluntarily, and that is an unforgivable offense to the murderous genocidal elitists. The goal of these sociopaths is to mandate and force these ungodly chemicals into everyone, one way or another.

They are diabolically compelled and motivated to achieve their 2030 Agenda of reducing the world population from 8 billion-plus to about 500 million.

To say that these elitist blasphemers have what we call a God complex would be a mighty understatement.

They appear to have a vile and burning need to control all of us, not just some of us.

So, even though they were successful in manipulating Trump in some cases, overall, they do not trust him. He proved, at times, to be able to hurl large monkey wrenches into the gears of their well-oiled machine.

Some readers might be wondering at this point what any of the above has to do with the Bible, or the Rapture, or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Actually, it has a lot to do with it. The title of this article is “Justice.” In these last of the last days this side of the Rapture when justice has been so compromised, it sure would be nice to see at least a tiny portion of it.

I mean, watching Gunsmoke, I admit, does give me some relief in my quest for justice. However, I wouldn’t complain just to see even a smidgeon of honest-to-goodness justice in the real world.

Good news and bad news. The bad news is we are going to see little or no justice at all before the Rapture.

The good news is that the justice of God Almighty will prevail in the end, and the end is not that far off.

At the rate that Satan and his lying, murderous minions are throwing down the gauntlet of wickedness, the world is running out of time at a breathtaking pace.

The Seven-Year Tribulation is hurtling toward us like a 100-plus-mile-an-hour fastball from Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson, or the kid from Taiwan in the 2023 Little League World Series who throws the equivalent of 105 miles per hour.

It is really hard to get the bat around in time to hit a pitch coming that fast. Those who are adamant about rejecting God’s free gift of salvation that He offers to all are being set up to strike out.

The Seventh Week of Daniel is approaching just that quickly, and the Rapture must take place before it can begin.

Though none know the day or hour of the Rapture except our Heavenly Father, all who are paying close attention to the prophetic word of God can see that we really are quickly running out of time here on the third rock from the sun, aka, Planet Earth.

True believers need to be as focused as the batter facing the 100-mph fastball or, better yet, like any one of the five virgins with their lamps full at all times. We need to keep our hearts and our souls filled with the Holy Spirit and do like Jesus said to do when we see these things take place. Watch.

Stay vigilant and keep looking up, for our redemption draws nigh (Luke 21:28).

When the restrainer (Holy Spirit) is removed from the world with the remnant church, the vile spirit of injustice will kick into an extremely hideous high gear until the time of the Second Coming of Jesus.

For those left behind, life will become a living nightmare, much worse than what is taking place right now. And right now, it is sickening and exceedingly hard to watch.

Just as the Assyrians (724 BC) and the Babylonians (598 BC) were allowed by God to take down ancient Israel and ancient Judea when they had rejected Him to the point of allowing wickedness to reign supreme in the promised land God had given them, God is now allowing these globalists in real-time to take down the free world, including America, which has also rejected Him by allowing wickedness and depravity to reign supreme.

He is allowing the globalist cabal to bring about the fulfillment of end-times prophecy. It is a hideous, evil task, but the participants, who, like their father Satan, are liars and ruthless murderers, seem to be up for that task.

Just as God dealt with the Babylonians and Assyrians after they had acted as agents to fulfill prophecy, He will likewise deal with the evil globalists during, and especially at the end of the seven-year Tribulation.

God’s justice is exact, and vengeance belongs to Him to repay those who embrace and commit evil acts. (Romans 12:19)

Injustice will be taken down by God’s perfect justice, and at the end of the seven years of tribulation, the King of Kings will return to earth to put a most welcome end to the sinister plans of Satan, the antichrist, the false prophet, the globalist elitists, the entire Synagogue of Satan and all of his minions in high places.

If Klaus Schwab has survived up to that point, it will most likely be in a cave where he had been cursing God and begging the rocks to fall on him, and Klaus will, quite likely, have plenty of famous company in that cave (Revelation 6:15).

When the Lord administers serious justice during the Tribulation, a lot of very evil people are not going to like it one bit.

At some point, the Luciferian worshipping elite will realize how greatly they have miscalculated the power of the Creator, as well as how badly they have miscalculated their own imagined power.

No politician or political party can fix this evil mess that Satan and his devotees have created here on the earth.

In fact, not all, but a very large number of politicians of all stripes the world over, are bought and paid for and owned by the fellas in the Multi-Billionaires Club. You know, the robber barons, the international banksters, the heads of international corporations, the elitist of the elite. You know, the Old Boys Club, the Club of Rome, the Club of the filthiest of the filthy rich.

Only the Lord can fix it now, and because He said He would fix it, He will.

Individuals, as long as the Lord tarries, can and should try and fight back in the sense of speaking out against evil and speaking truth, even if the reprobates call it misinformation. “The truth is foolishness to those who perish” (1Corinthians 1:18).

However, as far as turning everything around on our own goes, without intervention from the Lord our God, it just is not going to happen, and end-times prophecy confirms it.

The situation on earth now coincides (Matthew 24:37) with what Jesus described as the same conditions that existed just before catastrophe struck in the “days of Noah” and (Luke 17:28) the “days of Lot,” as well as lining up numerically with God’s “Week of Creation” and the seven millenniums He has allotted to complete His plan, 2 Peter 3:8 and about 43 other Bible verses.

Some believers still seem to think there will be a massive revival, and we can get all the evil reprobate people to repent as in the days when Jonah preached repentance in the streets of Nineveh.

And that the church itself will usher in a time of peace, when justice will once again shine bright, and Jesus would then feel comfortable returning to earth.

Once again, according to the scriptures, it just is not going to happen that way. Reference the entire Book of Revelation to confirm.

Realistically, with the precious little time left before the Rapture, the top priorities should be keeping our lamps full at all times, watching and longing for His appearing, and doing the work of the great commission to help as many people as possible to find salvation before that trumpet blows.

The great catching away. A radical departure from this world. The sounding of a trumpet only true believers will be able to hear. The shout of the archangel. The calling from the Lord Jesus Himself for the dead in Christ to rise first, and then all who are alive called up to join them and meet Jesus in the sky. In the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17).

To receive eternal bodies like the resurrected body of Jesus, who was the first to conquer death. Then to be escorted by the Son of the Most-High God, the Messiah, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Alpha and Omega and our dearest best friend, to the place He has prepared for all those who love Him and trust Him (John 14:3).

“No ear has heard, no eyes have seen, and no heart has conceived of the wonders that God has planned for those that love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Sound impossible or too good to be true? With God, all things are possible, and every promise He has ever made, He will keep. Every single last one.

Believe in and trust in Jesus with every fiber of your being, with every ounce of your heart, mind, soul and strength. He is coming soon.

[whereareroo]

THE FACTS PLEASE

WF THOUGHTS (8/14/23).

“People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.”

That’s a famous line that has been used by many intellectuals. It became popular in the 1980s when it was repeatedly used by a scholarly U.S. Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The quote did not originate with him. Intellectuals had been using various versions of the quote since the 1940s.

Regardless of origin, it’s impossible to disagree with the point of the quote. Facts are facts. You’re not entitled to change the “facts” because the truth gets in the way of your opinion.

We have a major problem in America. It’s very difficult to get a firm fix on the facts. It should be easy. We should be able to get the true facts from all media outlets. We can’t. To suit its needs, every media outlet plays games with the facts. It’s extremely annoying. It’s also dangerous. Democracy depends upon an informed citizenry. Citizens cannot be properly informed if they can’t get the straight facts.

As an example, let’s talk about oil production in the United States.

Conservative and Republican news outlets constantly claim the U.S. oil production was reduced by Obama, greatly increased by Trump, and that it has now significantly fallen due to Biden’s “green policies” and his war on energy. That claim is repeated over and over again. I’m sure that you’ve heard the spiel.

Because it’s such a controversial topic, Progressive and Democratic news outlets don’t report on U.S. oil production. They happily report about green energy and climate change. Seeking to avoid problems, they don’t talk about oil production. Why talk about a topic that might hurt Biden?

The facts about U.S oil production recently came to my attention. I’ll give you the facts. You’ll see why I’m so frustrated with the media. I’m sick of the games.

President George W. Bush was the former governor of Texas and he had deep ties to the oil industry. Nonetheless, oil production was higher under his successor, President Obama. In fact, it hit record highs under Obama. Our latest oil production record was set in 2019 under Trump. This year, with Biden in the White House, that record will be beaten by more than 500,000 barrels per day. Our oil output in 2023 will be 12.8 million barrels per day. In 2024, also with Biden in the White House, we’ll set another new record at 13.1 million barrels per day. We produce more oil than any other country in the world. Saudi Arabia, the #2 oil producer, only produces 10 million barrels per day.

Do you see the point? Oil production is rising in America. Biden isn’t killing oil production. I only discovered these facts because I’m a nerd and I read the fine print. Why is it so difficult to find the facts about this important issue? Why don’t we all know that, by far, we’re the #1 oil producer in the world?

Because the media plays games with the facts, Americans are frequently in the dark. With the facts, we can see the whole picture. With respect to overall energy policy, the picture is quite positive. The facts show that America can do two things at the same time. In addition to fighting climate change and actively pursuing green energy, it can be the #1 oil producer in the world. Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t advance the political agendas of the media outlets.

We all need to be smarter about our media consumption. Try to ignore the “spin” that is embedded in media reports. Look for facts. Dig for the facts. Check multiple sources. Develop the skills that are necessary to separate the facts from the opinions. Armed with the facts, we can be better citizens.

[creekfiend]

if you don't mind sharing, what sorts of precautions did you take wrt disability/chronic illness for going to the protest? i'd like to go to one but i'm in a city where a) demonstrations are big and b) cops are using tear gas so i'm nervous. i've been thinking about going to one a little ways away with a friend who lives in a smaller area where they haven't had any issues w/ cops but i'm SickTM and want to try to prepare myself for it

I knew ours would be safe bc its a tiny-ass town and we live in an area thats majority white :/ I would not go to one in Atlanta because Shit Happens There because the cops have different priorities in areas like mine and areas like ATL. I donated to the ATL bail fund instead. Do what you can do that will help but don't feel obligated to risk your health by being there physically if your health is precarious, is my advice.

[antoine-roquentin]

Downwardly mobile white blue-collar workers and upwardly mobile white small business owners met in the grassroots of the conservative movement. The most substantial failing of The People, No is that it adheres to Frank’s thesis in What’s the Matter with Kansas: that elites manipulated “ordinary people” into the movement with pseudo-populist culture-war rhetoric while enacting their real economic agenda behind the scenes. In fact, when rank-and-file conservatives repudiated the New Deal order, the economic and cultural were so thoroughly intertwined as to be inseparable.

Before they were loyal to national politicians, many workers were loyal to particular firms and employers. The economy that replaced the New Deal order was built by industries that kept alive the capital-P Populist dream of small proprietorship and dignified, autonomous work, even as good jobs in manufacturing and family farming became increasingly scarce. “We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited,” Populist leader William Jennings Bryan thundered in 1896. “The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer” — that is, if his work was productive and self-directed. For many ordinary people, heirs to the Populist tradition, “business man”–style wage work was an appealing alternative to the welfare state dependency — or union dependency — that the contemporary left was depicted as pushing. For all of Frank’s rhetorical sympathy for white “working people,” he is oddly disinterested in the places where they actually worked.

Displaced small farmers had moved into long-distance trucking since the early New Deal period, but it was in the 1960s and 1970s that independent trucking came into its own as one of the great blue-collar romances. An apparent alternative to the corporate bureaucracy and heavy-handed Teamsters union that dominated the industry, the independent trucker burst onto the scene, innumerable country ballads extolling him as one of the last species of American male who truly worked for himself. (“I’m independent,” Kris Kristofferson’s trucker character proclaimed in Sam Peckinpah’s 1978 film Convoy. “There ain’t many of us left.”) Pressure from rank-and-file independent truckers then complemented the manufacturing and shipping lobbies’ successful attempt to deregulate transportation during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The siren song of right-wing working-class populism was not only heard in trucking. Franchised fast food, another artifact of the New Deal order’s investment in auto infrastructure, offered the promise of rapid advancement from menial work to management or even bona fide small business ownership — one of the excuses for keeping wages for entry-level work at poverty levels. Even as corporate franchisees emerged to buy up licenses for dozens of locations at a time, the franchise structure distanced particular sites from the international brand and preserved a simulacrum of community embeddedness.

Up-and-coming retail firms like Amway also used organizational methods to offer employees a taste of what the management literature sometimes called “simulated entrepreneurship.” Amway’s multilevel marketing structure flushed its liability downstream to its often-indebted sales force, but this organizational approach did, at least on paper, provide the opportunity to “build your own business.” Amway’s intensely evangelical Christian internal culture is infamous today. But it’s not as if — extrapolating from Frank’s story about Republican Party culture-war tactics — Amway used Christianity to get unwitting employees in the door to do its economic bidding. On the contrary, Amway’s history is a reminder of the deep intertwining of American Christian culture with economic values of hard work, personal responsibility, and self-ownership. At the end of his life, William Jennings Bryan himself was most famous not for his Populist advocacy but for his outspoken biblical literalism.

The most important post–New Deal retail firm was Walmart. Here too, as the historian Bethany Moreton has written, economic and cultural populism were inseparable. Walmart’s leaders understood the anxieties about proletarianization that its predominantly rural workforce had inherited from the Populist period. Managers worked diligently to encourage employees to conceive of themselves as “associates” rather than workers. They would not simply sell products but would “serve” customers, in an explicitly Christian fashion. Walmart’s practice of hiring wives to work in sales and husbands to work in distribution sought to reforge the family as an economic unit, as it had been before the late 19th-century wave of industrialization and incorporation. Wages were low, but the result was “always low” prices for the stores’ community-based clientele — including its workforce.

As Walmart expanded, the middle-class consumers of Sun Belt suburbia also came to benefit from its always low prices. For the cowboy capitalists, low prices were a hedge against government dependency. By supporting supply chain deregulation and resisting unionization and minimum-wage hikes, consumers could continue to enjoy the “American standard of living” without having to rely on government handouts or high wages attained through class struggle. Behind middle-class consumerism lay the producerism of the Populists’ favorite scripture verse: “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” Low prices were prices that the middle class could pay, ostensibly, with the sweat of their brow.

Walmart workers and shoppers were not loyal to Walmart “because of” Walmart’s cultural conservatism and “despite” its economic conservatism. Rather, Walmart formed a nexus where economic and cultural conservatism were inseparable and even indistinguishable. As with Amway and McDonald’s, Walmart’s strategy was masterminded by elite leaders capable of astonishing cynicism. But the cynicism of elite leaders does not entail, as Frank and other contemporary left-populists often imply, that the commitment of “ordinary working people” to institutions like Amway, McDonald’s, and Walmart — or the Republican Party — is shallower than it appears. Rather, conservative populism fed on the powerful compatibility between widely and firmly embraced cultural values and the economic interests of particular capitalists.

Like many white blue-collar workers, middle-class Sun Belters also dreamed the Populist dream of family capitalism. Instead of the independent trucker, their cultural heroes were the new class of billionaires that historian Steve Fraser calls “populist plutocrats.” These men were not anonymous corporate overlords but charismatic leaders of empires that they religiously kept in the family. Some of them, like Charles and David Koch and — yes — Donald Trump, inherited their fortunes. But others, like Sam Walton and Amway’s Richard DeVos, could convincingly mythologize themselves as self-made.

What the populist plutocrats held out was simultaneously cultural and economic. They offered a seductive glimpse of an economic order where even the most successful captains of industry were hardworking, personally invested owner-operators, not parasitic money manipulators. “Family values,” as Melinda Cooper has emphasized, were neoliberal economic values, and vice versa. Post–New Deal capitalism, its boosters argued, would be controlled neither by out-of-touch Washington bureaucrats nor by robotic, gray-flannel-suited managers, but by families embedded in their communities. This same logic functioned on the level of public policy: even icy-veined technocrats like the Chicago “human capital” prophet Gary Becker justified rollbacks to the welfare state on the grounds that families would have no choice but to pick up the slack, through debt if necessary, returning the family to the central place in the economic order it once occupied. These same family values were at the heart of the renewed plausibility and attractiveness of the conservative vision of work and success. When Sam Walton drove his old Ford pickup truck around Bentonville every day, it represented a promise that any Bentonville Ford driver could become Sam Walton. It was a cynical move, to be sure. But Walton’s gesture worked not just because liberal elites offered no alternatives but because it perfectly played on his employees’ deepest anxieties and beliefs.

[feelingbluepolitics]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/

Much of this article is trash, written by a mewling conservative trying to distinguish Republicon policies and Republicon ideology as beyond and separate from "trump precursors" for "the last 30 years." Try 60 years, or more. Go all the way back to them with their fury and screams over Social Security as an evil Communist plot.

Kagan is a Never-trumper attempting to sound reasonable despite being a mental conservative, who thinks -- much like poor, beleaguered Joe Manchin -- that Democrats "need to let good Republicons" help them save the country.

He's one of those types of fools who, when he speaks of officials with integrity, is alluding to Mr. Anti-vote Raffensperger, who is to voting like so many white male Republicons are to immigration -- none too happy about illegal or legal. His hero Raffensperger is also one of the leading architects of the Republicon rash of Jim Crow 2.0 laws which Kagan points to as a prime symptom of Nazi-type fascism threatening American right now...but logical consistency fares extremely poorly on the Right.

However, there are some useful points in this article. The criticism leveled toward the Right by a [pre-trump] insider is one. And the insistent urgency of our nation's crisis is another.

"The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

"First, [t]rump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running. [Or legal problems. Or even better, in order to be a bit safer, both].

"Second, [t]rump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. [t]rump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

"Meanwhile, the amateurish 'stop the steal' efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that [t]rump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to 'find' more votes for [t]rump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may 'revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election' by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed 'technical infractions,' including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

"The stage is thus being set for chaos.

..."Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating [t]rump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if [t]rump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, [t]rump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year...

..."Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which [t]rump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride [t]rump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business.

..."From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during [t]rump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of [t]rump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

..."With the party firmly under his thumb, [t]rump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.

"The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield [t]rump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the [t]rump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.

..."Even [t]rump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized [t]rump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving 'regular order' and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that [t]rump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

"The result is that even these anti-[t]rump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the [t]rump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties...

"The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, [t]rump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, [t]rump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

"But this time, [t]rump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the [t]rump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then?

..."[Republicons] have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?

[They, just like trump, want and intend to be in power at all costs.

..."We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-[t]rump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans [sic] even as they oppose [t]rump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis."

[uboat53]

"I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation."

-- Draft Resignation Letter written by Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to then-President Trump

Source:

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images]

For all that the news these days is faster and more furious than ever—and that much of it is horrifying—it is clear to me that those of us eager to protect our democracy are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

These Letters from an American began in September 2019 as a response to questions people asked about the confusion swirling around us. At the time, we had just heard about a whistleblower complaint that then–acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire was illegally withholding from Congress. Then–House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) had written an angry letter to Maguire demanding that he hand over the complaint, as the law required, and suggested the complaint was likely about an important figure in the Trump White House. We were all trying to piece together what on earth was going on.

Within days, we were in the midst of what would become the first impeachment of former president Trump for refusing to release money to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated to enable Ukraine to fight Russian occupation unless Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky helped Trump smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

We are now more than four years into these letters, and the contours of the national crisis we are facing are ever so much clearer than they were when we started.

But what has remained the same is that this project, along with the new book that grew from it, really belongs to you. While I do the legwork of trying to explain the politics of these turbulent times, and my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual, it is your voices that inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up. You bring in related material, ask questions, and correct my stupid errors.

Above all, it is you who are helping to model what we so desperately need in America: a respectful community based in facts, rather than in anger and partisanship, a community that can defend our democracy and carry it into a new era.

And we are only one community out of many dedicated to the same principles.

Until the past two months of travel across this country, I did not realize how deep and wide this movement has become.

One thing and another conspired to make my family have to put off our Thanksgiving until today, so I am a day late in telling you all how honored I am to be walking this road alongside all of you and how very proud I am of what we are building together.

Thank you, for all of it.

Heather Cox Richardson :: Letters From An American

[jewish-privilege]

...We reached out to black Jews (...) to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us.

...April Baskin is a diversity consultant and racial justice director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable.

Personally in terms of my energy right now, I’m just exhausted. Just seeing all the suffering particularly in light of the people going out into the streets without a plan or adequate protections in place (friends, march marshalls, legal aid contact info, etc.), the poignancy of people whose politics otherwise have them mostly sheltering in place during the worst pandemic we’ve seen in over a hundred years, that they are compelled to take action — at their and our own peril. But it seems their thought is, “How can we not stand up?” As a Jewish social justice leader, I have a visceral, fundamental concern for people’s well-being in this moment — that people are very triggered and that this is all in the context of pre-existing heightened anxiety and stress because of the pandemic. And for black folks, whether it’s conscious or not, the sense of terror we feel for when is the shoe going to drop for someone we know, someone in our town, for us?

I am experiencing more white Jews sending me private messages. A lot of them are saying “What can we do?” and in time I hope we can advance our collective knowledge and education enough so it can become more of “I’ve been proactively learning from people of color and here is what I am doing,” or “These are the things I’m considering. I’m mostly leaning towards this one, does that sound like it’s in alignment with your vision?”

That said, it’s a step forward and it’s good, but it’s asking more of us as Jews of color to not only figure out how to maintain our jobs and do additional leadership and activism in this moment, but then also being asked to support and manage white Jews’ work during a time in which many of us are traumatized and heartbroken. But this is progress, and I would rather people reach out, however they best know how, than apathy and not doing anything or paralysis from fear.

...Yitz Jordan is the founder of

TribeHerald

, a publication for Jews of color, and a hip hop artist also known as Y-Love.

What am I feeling? Anxiety. That’s what I’m feeling. I had an anxiety attack on Friday. I live in the ‘hood, I live in Bushwick, so I’m not really geographically in the Jewish community, but I know that somebody on Friday for instance was shot not too far from me and I was terrified as to what the response to that was going to be, were cops going to respond and was rioting going to happen in my neighborhood?

And in the Jewish community, this is the kind of fight that I’m having: “This didn’t happen after the Holocaust, why are black people acting like this?” It’s that role of explaining over and over again to people who quite often don’t want to listen.

I feel like there’s the same split that’s going through America in ideological lines, is going through the Jewish community … whatever percent of Orthodox Jews that support Trump, you see it more from these people. When we say the Jewish community in general that also consists of people like JFREJ [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice] and Jewish Voice for Peace and these other organizations, but in the Orthodox world, the pro-Trump wing is where I’m hearing these types of conversations. And I’m seeing this, ranging from lack of knowledge to callousness regarding people of color. There are some people who genuinely don’t know, and to whom a lot of these issues are very new. Especially Hasidish people, for instance, this just isn’t part of the Shabbos-table conversation — police brutality, inequality, systemic racism. But you have some people who just show callousness.

Gulienne Rishon is a diversity expert and chief revenue officer for TribeHerald Media.

I am thankful for true allies, who understand that this is not the time to center their own experiences. I am thankful for true allies, who understand that the experiences they and their ancestors have had are to be used in this moment as empathy, and that no one is denying them their experiences in asking them to listen and learn.

But mostly, if one more white-presenting Jew tries to tell me today that they don’t have white privilege (not that they aren’t White, but that they don’t have white privilege) because they’re Jewish/the Holocaust/Jews got kicked out of schools, I might lose my mind. I should not have to deal with people telling me that my story (the Black part) doesn’t exist because my story (the Ashkenazi experience) exists. But I do. And I am confident that part of why G-d put me in the skin of a biracial Jewish woman descended from a kindertransport survivor, a WWII veteran who was kicked out of his Hamburg Gymnasium for being Jewish, and two Southern Black Virginians, is to help us as a people face our sinat chinam and take responsibility for being the light unto the nations by helping, not closing our ranks and denying the pain others feel because of the freshness of ours.

Facilitating difficult conversations about race is literally my profession. Yet, some days, I’m just a person behind a keyboard on Facebook who came out of our day of rest hearing that the world erupted in flames, and I look at the beautiful brown skin of my daughter and her parents, and I’m angry and afraid. I’ve worked so hard to have these conversations with grace when you’re caught up in your feelings about the complexity. On a day when it’s not about the complexity, but processing and mourning actual death, can you please give the same grace to mine?

...Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is

a musician

who blends traditional Yiddish and African-American music.

Let’s get real here, American Jews: You are living in an Old Country, whether you choose to recognize it or not. The state-sanctioned violence visited upon Black communities happens in ghettos you can easily pronounce, in towns you visit without the aid of a tour guide and cities you reside in without a granted law of return.

So, who are you in this narrative, this country from which there is no real option of flight, this century which is your own, your heartless ruler, hands slick with the blood of children and refugees, the cavalries, maintaining “order” on your behalf over a people whose mere existence for centuries has been deemed disorderly?

Solidarity with Black people doesn’t require a radical act of historical imagination. You are here. We are here. You know what to do. Do it. Now.

Tema Smith is a writer and the director of professional development at 18Doors, an organization for interfaith families.

I’m deeply upset about George Floyd and also that he is not the first and not the last, and that it’s taken a murder so egregious to really get people out into the streets in this way, and get a lot of people to wake up to what happens unfortunately too frequently.

I also have deep gratitude for the moment that we’re in, for so many people who hadn’t previously spoken out are speaking out.

As far as the Jewish community, the number of people who either have spoken out publicly or who have reached out privately as people who just care and want to make sure that me and other Jews of color are feeling OK right now — and I think most of my friends who are Jews of color are experiencing similar things from their friends — is huge. Frankly, I’ve gotten messages from people who I’ve never corresponded with beyond public tweets, just reaching out saying ‘Are you OK?’ and a recognition that is in many ways at a new level.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. This is the first time I’ve received messages from so many people and that makes me hopeful for that grassroots community level being there to support each other, and that is huge. And the fact that there is a growing chorus of voices in the Jewish community speaking up, that’s huge, and that people are showing up at protests, I can’t say enough of how meaningful it is to see that...