#florida is dangerous because of white supremacy in government

[reasoningdaily]

Yahoo News: Civil rights groups warn tourists about Florida in wake of 'hostile' laws

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The NAACP over the weekend issued a travel advisory for Florida, joining two other civil rights groups in warning potential tourists that recent laws and policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state's largest job sectors.

The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP's board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida "devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

An email was sent Sunday morning to DeSantis' office seeking comment. The Republican governor is expected to announce a run for the GOP presidential nomination this week.

Florida is one of the most popular states in the U.S. for tourists, and tourism is one of its biggest industries. More than 137.5 million tourists visited Florida last year, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Visit Florida, the state's tourism promotion agency. Tourism supports 1.6 million full-time and part-time jobs, and visitors spent $98.8 billion in Florida in 2019, the last year figures are available.

Several of Florida's Democratic mayors were quick to say Sunday that their cities welcomed diversity and inclusion.

“EVERYONE is always welcome and will be treated with dignity and respect,” tweeted Mayor Ken Welch of St. Petersburg in a message echoed by the mayor across the bay in Tampa.

“That will never change, regardless of what happens in Tallahassee,” tweeted Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa.

The NAACP's decision comes after the DeSantis' administration in January rejected the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies course. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers also have pressed forward with measures that ban state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as critical race theory, and also passed the Stop WOKE Act that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in schools and businesses.

In its warning for Hispanic travelers considering a visit to Florida, LULAC cited a new law that prohibits local governments from providing money to organizations that issue identification cards to people illegally in the country and invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses held by undocumented immigrants, among other things. The law also requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to include a citizenship question on intake forms, which critics have said is intended to dissuade immigrants living in the U.S. illegally from seeking medical care.

“The actions taken by Governor DeSantis have created a shadow of fear within communities across the state,” said Lydia Medrano, a LULAC vice president for the Southeast region.

Recent efforts to limit discussion on LGBTQ topics in schools, the removal of books with gay characters from school libraries, a recent ban on gender-affirming care for minors, new restrictions on abortion access and a law allowing Floridians to carry concealed guns without a permit contributed to Equality Florida's warning.

“Taken in their totality, Florida’s slate of laws and policies targeting basic freedoms and rights pose a serious risk to the health and safety of those traveling to the state,” Equality Florida's advisory said.

[ausetkmt]

Reuters reports that the Trump regime is implementing a new change to America’s domestic terrorism programs that will officially install religious profiling against Muslims and remove the dangerous white supremacist extremist groups who are responsible for much violence across the United States from the watch lists.

The program, “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, would be changed to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States. Just in the past two years, authorities blamed radical and violent ideologies as the motives for a white supremacist’s shooting rampage inside a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina and Islamist militants for shootings and bombings in California, Florida and New York.

A reporter at ThinkProgress tweeted that eliminating the tracking of America’s homegrown extremists similar to the Ku Klux Klan, certain far-right “patriot” groups and neo-Nazi groups will also eliminate the crucial tracking that the CVE program does to monitor the ranks of these hate-crime gangs and criminal enterprises.

As part of the Republican Party’s efforts to institute Islamophobia into public policy, terrorism will only be referred to as “radical Islam.” This is a clear strategy by the Trump regime that provides false justification to the Muslim ban that affects one of every eight Muslims worldwide from seven countries whose residents have never committed an act of terror on American soil.

Removing the white supremacist and violent extremist groups from federal tracking programs is an obvious power play by the Bannon regime to encourage racial hate and religious discrimination. The Trump regime has already removed the CVE’s previous 5-point counterterrorism strategy page from the State Department’s website, which we recovered via Archive.org.

Strategically, Trump’s efforts to brand terror as something solely Islamic are impractical and extremely unproductive, as Reuters’ report notes:

Hoda Hawa, director of policy for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said she was told last week by people within DHS that there was a push to refocus the CVE effort from tackling all violent ideology to only Islamist extremism. “That is concerning for us because they are targeting a faith group and casting it under a net of suspicion,” she said. Some Republicans in Congress have long assailed the program as politically correct and ineffective, asserting that singling out and using the term “radical Islam” as the trigger for many violent attacks would help focus deterrence efforts. Others counter that branding the problem as “radical Islam” would only serve to alienate more than three million Americans who practice Islam peacefully. Some proponents of the program fear that rebranding it could make it more difficult for the government to work with Muslims already hesitant to trust the new administration, particularly after Trump issued an executive order last Friday temporarily blocking travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

The fact is, American law enforcement (chart below) has consistently reported that their greatest concern is white supremacists or terrorists like the KKK, neo-nazis and their white supremacy enablers, not extremist groups like al-Qaeda, which has refocused its effort on exploiting the instability in the Middle East and not on Osama bin Laden’s delusions of “global jihad.”

It’s without question that America has reason to be vigilant about ISIS-inspired attacks today, and also to guard steadfastly against another major attack.

Trump’s voters may not have taken him seriously, but now they’ll have to grapple seriously with an energized group of violent, racist groups flourishing openly in America. Trump’s Islamophobic executive orders only play into the hands of extremists like ISIS and help to foster the atmosphere of ostracization and disenfranchisement that serve as breeding grounds for extremist ideologies.

This is just day 13.

[citylightsbooks]

Presidential Election Crisis 2020: An Interview with Alan Hirsch

Alan Hirsch is the author of A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Interview conducted by Greg Ruggiero, editor at City Lights Publishers.

***

In what ways has the 2020 presidential election been unprecedented?

The pandemic led to exponentially greater use of mail-in voting.  And because some state legislatures refused to authorize the counting of absentee votes before Election Day, the process of counting votes (never mind re-counting them) has taken longer. Also, because voting by mail was primarily by Democrats, President Trump was way ahead in several critical states on Election Day, only to see Biden come roaring back—fueling Trump’s claims of fraud.  Of course, Trump created this situation by discouraging his base to vote by mail. 

This election has also been unprecedented in the sense that one of the candidates was complaining about fraud months before Election Day.

On November 10, 2020, the New York Times reported "President Trump, facing the prospect of leaving the White House in defeat in just 70 days, is harnessing the power of the federal government to resist the results of an election that he lost, something that no sitting president has done in American history,” and that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

What concerns should these unprecedented developments be raising?

In context, it appears that Pompeo was joking, but it's a scary joke that seems to reflect the denialism among the Trump administration and many of his supporters.  This is frightening and unprecedented.  One major difference between this situation and the post-election crises of 1876 and 2000 is that, in those situations, the incumbent president was not one of the candidates.  Here, we have a defeated president who is nevertheless fighting for a second term.  Will he abuse the office to make that happen?  This is the man with the armed forces and nuclear codes at his command.  

What is your assessment of President Trump’s news conference on November 5, his statement of Nov 7, and his ongoing insistence that he, not Joe Biden, has won the 2020 Presidential election “by a lot”?

It is mind boggling, and that’s understatement.  The new conference started with his false claim that he won the election, and went downhill from there.  The President apparently considers “legal” votes and “illegal” votes as synonymous with Trump votes and Biden votes respectively. 

The big lie at the heart of Trump’s complaint is that he had Pennsylvania and other key states easily won until the suspicious onslaught of Biden votes.  The only reason for both Trump’s huge lead and Biden’s big comeback was the fact that Democrats voted largely by mail and most Republicans voted in person.

What would happen if Trump refuses to accept the election’s outcome and refuses to leave? 

Fortunately, the winner of this election seems fairly clear, and no recounts or lawsuits seem likely to change the outcome.  If Trump refuses to leave, he will presumably be escorted from his office—by force if necessary.   

It’s not often taught that the Electoral College was a compromise the North made with the South. In the process, white slave owners were able to count each black person they enslaved as 3/5 a person, and thereby gained greater representation in the Electoral College.

The legacy of that compromise continues to distort our democracy today. As Wilfred Codrington III writes in The Atlantic, “The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote” made the difference in the election outcomes.  In some ways, Trump’s 2016 victory was a direct result of baking white supremacy into the electoral process.

Given this history, are there any civic arguments to keep the Electoral College?

The argument one hears most often is that the Electoral College protects the interests of small states.  The senate protects the interests of small states (since every state, even the least populated, gets the same two senators), and no one proposes abolishing the senate.  It is argued that, without the Electoral College (ensuring that even the tiniest state has 3 electoral votes), candidates would never visit small states.  This gets things backwards.  Without the Electoral College, candidates would have at least some incentive to campaign in all states.  Because of the Electoral College, they spend almost all of their time in a handful of swing states (whether or not small).

How might Trump’s lawsuits succeed in altering the election outcome?

It appears that he would need to reverse the outcome in several states.  In other words, he’d need three or four Bush v. Gores, and even that doesn’t capture the desperation of his situation.  Florida in 2000 was essentially a tie, and the legal arguments on both sides had at least some merit.  Trump has offered no semi-convincing reason why the outcomes in any of the close states should be reversed. 

In addition to litigation, might there be other routes Trump could take to derail the election result or attempt to stay in power?

The one being pushed by Trump allies is to try and convince Republican legislatures in several states to substitute a Republican slate of electors for the Democratic slate that was chosen in the election.  After all, the Constitution empowers state legislatures to choose the “manner” in which electors are chosen. The problem for Trump is that these electors did choose the manner—popular elections.  They can’t just substitute their will for that of the people because they don’t like the result.

Outlandish as it may sound, could Trump somehow use an act of war or claim of insurrection to maintain power? After all, he threatened to use the Insurrection Act in June 2020.

He can try, but there’s no legal basis or precedent for a president remaining in power after his term was over. 

Of the past presidential election crises, do any resemble the situation we are in now?

It resembles both 1876 and 2000 in that the election came down to a few states with narrow margins.  And, like 2000, recounts and litigation will extend the period of uncertainty.  But the Biden margins appear to be large enough that we will probably avoid the chaos that ensued after those elections.  

Can you go into more detail about parallels between the current moment and the election crises of 1876 and 2000? What form did corruption take then? How might it manifest now?

As the 2020 post-election crisis unfolds, we must learn from history—specifically the presidential election chaos in 1876 and 2000.  In each of these three elections, the outcome came down to one or more disputed states.  Most history books claim the 1876 election was resolved by a fifteen-man commission that voted along party lines.  In truth, Democrats were prepared to ignore the commission’s determinations, and the threat of duel inaugurations and another civil war loomed ominously.  The resolution came only when Republicans assured Democrats in Congress that, if they went along with Rutherford B. Hayes’s election, would cease implementing Reconstruction.  The nation paid a terrible price for the backroom dealing.  In 2000, the election was resolved by the Supreme Court – with five conservative Justices intervening to assure the election of George W. Bush.

Today, both of these threats are present—political deal-making and/or a partisan Supreme Court could determine the outcome.  There are additional parallels to 1876 and 2000 that need to be explored.  In both 1876 and 2000, as in 2020, the election took place against the backdrop of voter suppression.  In 1876 and 2000, like today, there were calls for state legislatures to intervene and nullify the results of their state’s popular vote.  In 1876, states sent competing slates of electors that Congress had to choose between.  Today, the possibility of competing slates of electors cannot be ruled out.  Ditto the threat of the conservatives on the Supreme Court intervening.  

To prevent these destructive outcomes, we need to understand how things unfolded during the prior election crises.

In your latest book, A Short History of Presidential Election Crises, you write: “Abolition of the Electoral College would reduce but not eliminate the dangers of a presidential election marred by fraud and post-election chaos.”  How would your proposed Presidential Election Review Board potentially help eliminate the dangers of post-election instability?

Trump’s various claims of election irregularities would be resolved by a tri-partisan (Democrats, Republicans, and independents) commission rather than the courts.  Because many judges are seen as partisan, the public would rightly have more confidence in the process and outcome.

***

Special thanks to Essential Information. Alan Hirsch, Instructor in the Humanities and Chair of the Justice and Law Studies program at Williams College, is the author of numerous works of legal scholarship and many books including A Short History of Presidential Election Crises (And How to Prevent the Next One), Impeaching the President: Past, Present, and Future and For the People: What the Constitution Really Says About Your Rights (Free Press, coauthored with Akhil Amar). He received a J.D. from Yale Law School and B.A. from Amherst College. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Newsday, and the Village Voice. Hirsch also serves as a trial consultant and expert witness on interrogations and criminal confessions, testifying around the nation. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.   

[espanadiarywriter]

Hope is an act of resistance

Well, it’s been quite a week hasn’t it? I feel like that time Rob and I came back from Christmas vacation in Florida and our friends asked us how it was, and we answered “What do you want to hear about first, the robbery or the hurricane?” (Okay, it was actually a tropical storm, but we were in a canoe, so it FELT like a hurricane.)

I’ll admit I’ve been glued to the news. I don’t watch TV news, so I’m definitely doomscrolling. I’m reading not just about the riot at the Capitol but also the vaccine roll-out. I read that as of last Friday, about 30% of the vaccine distributed in January has gotten into people’s arms. I wish that we had a federal roll-out plan so each health care organization did not have to decide how to become efficient at doing this. Every human vaccinated is one step closer to hospitals that are not overwhelmed and a health care system not on the brink of collapse.

I am still unspeakably mad at how people are willfully ignoring the danger of this disease. The fact that the federal government once again completely absolved itself of all responsibility, this time for getting the shots into people’s arms, is absurd. And the refusal of large numbers of front line staff to get the vaccine is also a reflection of the challenged public health response. We had months to plan a media and communications campaign targeting at risk populations with information about vaccine safety and side effects. (And it’s not just countering the C-19 deniers; we know certain messages work well for messaging to populations about preventive health care.)

Instead the massive effort of organizing a mass vaccination was pushed to the very hospitals and state agencies that are running on empty with no reinforcement. So rules vary state by state, hospital by hospital, and county by county. On Wednesday, while the country was in the midst of a violent act of white supremacist terrorism, I received my first dose of COVID-19 vaccine at OHSU. I am incredibly proud to be working for a health care organization that has been vaccinating ~150 people an hour seven days a week (~12,800 as of January 8th ) and is now trying to double that number and rolling out vaccination clinics to high risk groups in the community. I consider myself part of the test run of how fast, safely, and efficiently can OHSU put arms in chairs and deliver doses. And as soon as they have openings for non-medical volunteers to help, I’ll be able to sign up. (Someone needs to sit at a desk and point people to the right line after all.)

Honestly, I thought about not saying anything public about my vaccination—because the media has had a field day with the decisions about vaccine roll-out. But I also am a) not in charge, and b) so proud of the work that has gone into OHSU getting through their front line staff (who are now receiving Dose #2) and figuring out how to ramp up the doses administered daily. They are working with the state to coordinate outreach to essential workers and high risk groups outside the organization. They told me to sign up and help, and I signed up. The people working the clinic were so professional and efficient and giddy about each person getting a dose. Even if news of my vaccination gives one person hope they will get theirs sooner, or one person who is doubtful about safety the confidence to get the jab (as the Brits say), then it’s worth sharing my story. (Yes, my arm still hurts. No I didn’t have any other side effects.) It’s really easy to criticize, but ultimately there should have been a federal mobilization to distribute vaccines and without that, let’s support the organizations who came up with a plan and are executing it. (OHSU has distributed 70% of its vaccines and now has staff ready to outreach to the community and Kaiser has done 24% but with better PR—which is better? I’m not making that call. And it doesn’t matter, both organizations are trying with very limited federal support.)

Which brings me to my next point: the sheer gross incompetence of the executive branch has been staggering.  Something has been haunting me since Wednesday, that there’s a dangerous American notion that someone’s uneducated opinion is equivalent to someone who is an expert. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect and it is literally killing America. This is a cognitive paradox where people who have no knowledge of something overestimate their knowledge or ability in an area. So people who do not know a thing about health or immune systems, judge a vaccine to be unsafe because they saw a YouTube video about someone having a side effect. It’s tragic.

Ultimately, this is the heart of what is happening on a political level. The lack of respect for people with actual expertise in government has lead to the shambles of this political administration. And now even the incompetent people are leaving. Not to digress too much, but what kind of a statement are you really making if after months of blatant election falsehoods it takes a literal armed rebellion to make you leave Trump’s cabinet? You aren’t winning any awards, sorry. What did you think he meant when for weeks he was telling his armed supporters to descend on Washington? He has been stoking white supremacy since before he won the presidency. (I hope people who weren’t Jewish noticed all the Holocaust references on the t-shirts of America’s dumbest insurgents.) But I digress.

Hatred and fear are the product of years of sowing doubt about science, expertise, and good governance. If people doubt the real facts, then you can make up whatever facts suit your political position. The political situation at the federal and state levels in this country are in dire need of repair. But I’m going to circle back to the hope that I started this blog post with. The people in the room giving vaccines were all volunteers, and they and hundreds others are going to volunteer to distribute them to as many people as possible for as long as it takes. Is it going to be perfect? No. But it’s going to get done even with an uneven start. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that hundreds of other volunteers got out the vote in Georgia and took back their franchise that was being forcibly suppressed. One person can make a difference—each volunteer matters. Maybe you are like me, paralyzed by doomscrolling. But I’ve made a commitment to help support vaccine distribution in whatever way I can, and I’m grasping to the hope that change will come. Maybe it will come in fits and starts, but I can see it on the horizon.

[andrewrpierce]

“I spent two years researching the Christian Right. I traveled across the country, spending time in megachurches, creationist seminars, right-to-life retreats, and even took a course taught by D. James Kennedy in Florida called Evangelism Explosion. I conducted a few hundred interviews, and I met many evangelicals of good will and good intentions, but I came away believing that the leadership of the Christian Right cruelly manipulates the despair of its followers and poses a danger to our open society. Doctor James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the Christian Fascists. The warning, given to me more than three decades ago, came at a moment Pat Robertson and other radio and tele-evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations, and finally the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. It was hard at the time to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Fascists, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and Brownshirts. Their ideological heirs would wrap fascism in the Christian cross and the American flag and hold mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. Adams was not a man to use the word Fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained, interrogated by the Gestapo, and expelled from Germany. He left on a night train, with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase, to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so called "German Christian Church," which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer, and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge. Adams saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church. Similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability accompanied by economic decline, see American Fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the Open Society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil, nor the cold reality of how the world worked. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil (a fight that, for him, was a fundamental part of the Biblical call) would come from the Church or the liberal secular elite. Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to ethnic and religious minorities, as well as those who did not adhere to rigid sexual stereotypes. He watched the Nazis use "moral" values to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Thousands of volumes from the Institute's libraries were tossed into a bonfire. The assault was cheered by the German churches. Adams said that the GBLTQ community, Muslims, immigrants, and poor people of color would be the first deviants singled out by the Christian Right, but we would be the next. I remember thinking his warning was perhaps too apocalyptic. But nearly four decades later, the power brokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the White House, the judiciary, and major government departments. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, gave 245 members of congress a perfect 100% for votes that support the agenda of the Christian Right. The Family Research Council, which called on its followers to pray for God to "vanquish the demonic," that's their quotes, "forces behind Trump's impeachment," is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of its campaigns to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Trump has elevated members of the Christian Right to prominent positions of power, including Mike Pence to the Vice Presidency, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, William Barr as Attorney General, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the tele-evangelist Paula White, who promises her donors their own personal angel, to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. Frank Amedia, the Trump campaign's Liaison for Christian Policy, claims to have raised an aunt from the dead. And the Christian Right, which makes up as much of a quarter of the country, or close to 80 million people, has its own version of the Brownshirts: the four higher mercenary armies and private contractors amassed by people such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos. Reason, science, facts, and verifiable truth are useless weapons against this belief system. I think the Christian Right is best understood as what anthropologists will call a crisis cult. Crisis Cults arise in most collapsing societies. They promise, through magic, to recover the lost grandeur of a mythologized past. This magical thinking banishes doubt, anxiety, and feelings of dis-empowerment. Traditional social hierarchies and rules, including white, male supremacy, will be restored. Those blamed for our decline: intellectuals, artists, liberals, immigrants, undocumented workers, poor people of color, feminists, will be dis-empowered. America, freed from the contamination of these "degenerate forces," will be restored. The Christian Right propagates its magical thinking through a selective Biblical literalism. They hold up as sacrosanct Biblical passages that buttress their ideology and ignore or grossly misinterpret the ones that do not. They live in a binary universe. They see themselves as eternal victims, oppressed by dark and sinister groups seeking their annihilation. They alone know the will of God. They alone can fulfill God's will. They seek total cultural and political domination. The secular reality-based world, one where Satan, miracles, divine edicts, angels, and magic do not exist, destroyed their lives and their communities. This secular world took away their jobs and their futures. It destroyed the social bonds that gave them purpose, dignity, and hope. In their despair, they often succumbed to alcoholism, drug, gambling, and pornography addictions. They endured familial breakdowns, divorce, jail, evictions, unemployment, and domestic and sexual abuse. And then from the depths of suicidal despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them; God will save them; God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out His holy mission in the world, and to be rich, powerful, and happy. The only thing that saved them was their conversion, the realization that God had a plan for them, and would protect them. These believers were pushed by the wreckage caused by neoliberalism into the arms of charlatans. All who attempt to reach them through the rational language of fact and evidence are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to force believers back into what they call the "culture of death" that nearly destroyed them. Trump has handed veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts, to the Christian Right. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. Almost all of these justices were vetted by The Federalist Society and the Christian Right. Many have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country's largest non-partisan coalition of lawyers. Trump has moved to ban Muslim immigrants. He has rolled back Civil Rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. Trump was the first president to address the radical anti-choice March For Life event in person. He permits discrimination against LGBTQ community people in the name of "religious liberty." He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches which are tax exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees routinely use Biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including: environmental deregulation, endless war against Muslims in the Middle East, tax cuts, and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private "Christian" schools. The iconography and language and symbols of American Nationalism are intertwined with the iconography, language and symbols of the Christian faith. Megapastors will often share Trump's narcissism, rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms. They make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the despair and desperation of their congregations. They distort the Bible to champion unfettered capitalism, the cult of masculinity, the belief that violence can purge the world of evil, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism, and conspiracy theories. Those within the evangelical movement, such as the editors of the magazine Christianity Today, who have attempted to state the obvious about Trump, that he is corrupt, inept, and immoral, and should be removed from office, are brutally attacked. Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former representative Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Ralph Reed, signed a joint letter denouncing the Christianity Today editorial. Evangelical Christians who criticize Trump are as swiftly disappeared as Republican politicians who criticize Trump. Trump received 80% of the white, evangelical vote in the 2016 presidential election, and in a poll during the House impeachment proceedings, 90% of evangelicals said they opposed the impeachment and ouster of the president. Among Republicans who identified as white evangelical protestants, that number rises to 99%.”

-Chris Hedges, 24 Feb 2020 

[artelingua]

'We have a once-in-century chance': Naomi Klein on how we can fight the climate crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/14/crisis-talk-green-new-deal-naomi-klein

On a Friday in mid-March, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an act of truancy. The little streams emptied on to grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting children and teens. Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal. Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

There was no student strike in Mozambique; on 15 March the whole country was bracing for the impact of Cyclone Idai, one of the worst storms in Africa’s history, which drove people to take refuge at the tops of trees as the waters rose and would eventually kill more than 1,000 people. And then, just six weeks later, while it was still clearing the rubble, Mozambique would be hit by Cyclone Kenneth, yet another record-breaking storm.

Wherever in the world they live, this generation has something in common: they are the first for whom climate disruption on a planetary scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. Oceans are warming 40% faster than the United Nations predicted five years ago. And a sweeping study on the state of the Arctic, published in April 2019 in Environmental Research Letters and led by the renowned glaciologist Jason Box, found that ice in various forms is melting so rapidly that the “Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th-century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but also beyond the Arctic.” In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published a report about the startling loss of wildlife around the world, warning that a million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said the chair, Robert Watson. “We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now.”

It has been more than three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve “the children,” “the grandchildren,” and “generations to come”. Yet global CO2 emissions have risen by more than 40%, and they continue to rise. The planet has warmed by about 1C since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up; the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, humans didn’t exist.

As for those children and grandchildren and generations to come who were invoked so promiscuously? They are no longer mere rhetorical devices. They are now speaking (and screaming, and striking) for them selves. Unlike so many adults in positions of authority, they have not yet been trained to mask the unfathomable stakes of our moment in the language of bureaucracy and overcomplexity. They understand that they are fighting for the fundamental right to live full lives – lives in which they are not, as 13-year-old Alexandria Villaseñor puts it, “running from disasters”.

On that day in March 2019, organisers estimate there were nearly 2,100 youth climate strikes in 125 countries, with 1.6 million young people participating. That’s quite an achievement for a movement that began eight months earlier with a single teenager deciding to go on strike from school in Stockholm, Sweden: Greta Thunberg.

The wave of youth mobilisation that burst on to the scene in March 2019 is not just the result of one girl and her unique way of seeing the world, extraordinary though she is. Thunberg is quick to note that she was inspired by another group of teenagers who rose up against a different kind of failure to protect their futures: the students in Parkland, Florida, who led a national wave of class walkouts demanding tough controls on gun ownership after 17 people were murdered at their school in February 2018.

Nor is Thunberg the first person with tremendous moral clarity to yell “Fire!” in the face of the climate crisis. Such voices have emerged multiple times over the past several decades; indeed, it is something of a ritual at the annual UN summits on climate change. But perhaps because these earlier voices belonged to people from the Philippines, the Marshall Islands and South Sudan, those clarion calls were one-day stories, if that. Thunberg is also quick to point out that the climate strikes themselves were the work of thousands of diverse student leaders, their teachers and supporting organisations, many of whom had been raising the climate alarm for years.

As a manifesto put out by British climate strikers put it: “Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we’re the wildfire.”

For a decade and half, ever since reporting from New Orleans with water up to my waist after Hurricane Katrina, I have been trying to figure out what is interfering with humanity’s basic survival instinct – why so many of us aren’t acting as if our house is on fire when it so clearly is. I have written books, made films, delivered countless talks and co-founded an organisation (The Leap) devoted, in one way or another, to exploring this question and trying to help align our collective response to the scale of the climate crisis.

It was clear to me from the start that the dominant theories about how we had landed on this knife edge were entirely insufficient. We were failing to act, it was said, because politicians were trapped in short-term electoral cycles, or because climate change seemed too far off, or because stopping it was too expensive, or because the clean technologies weren’t there yet. There was some truth in all the explanations, but they were also becoming markedly less true over time. The crisis wasn’t far off; it was banging down our doors. The price of solar panels has plummeted and now rivals that of fossil fuels. Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshalled for endless wars, bank bailouts and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition. There had to be more to it.

Which is why, over the years, I have set out to probe a different set of barriers – some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin contemporary western culture. And I have investigated the kinds of responses that might succeed in toppling those narratives, ideologies and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises (economic, social, ecological and democratic) into a common story of civilisational transformation. Today, this sort of bold vision increasingly goes under the banner of a Green New Deal.

Because, as deep as our crisis runs, something equally deep is also shifting, and with a speed that startles me. Social movements rising up to declare, from below, a people’s emergency. In addition to the wildfire of student strikes, we have seen the rise of Extinction Rebellion, which kicked off a wave of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, including a mass shutdown of large parts of central London. Within days of its most dramatic actions in April 2019, Wales and Scotland both declared a state of “climate emergency,” and the British parliament, under pressure from opposition parties, quickly followed suit.

Humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts

In the US, we have seen the meteoric rise of the Sunrise Movement, which burst on to the political stage when it occupied the office of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, DC, one week after her party had won back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. They called on Congress to immediately adopt a rapid decarbonisation framework, one as ambitious in speed and scope as Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the sweeping package of policies designed to battle the poverty of the Great Depression and the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.

The idea behind the Green New Deal is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s lives in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to surging white supremacy to the collapse of our information ecology. Challenging underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.

In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of goods jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee healthcare and childcare, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.

This vision is not new; its origins can be traced to social movements in ecologically ravaged parts of Ecuador and Nigeria, as well as to highly polluted communities of colour in the United States. What is new is that there is now a bloc of politicians in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, some just a decade older than the young climate activists in the streets, ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times. Most prominent among this new political breed is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at 29, became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress. Introducing a Green New Deal was part of the platform she ran on. Today, with the race to lead the Democratic party in full swing, a majority of leading presidential hopefuls claim to support it, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. It had been endorsed, meanwhile, by 105 members of the House and Senate.

The idea is spreading around the world, with the political coalition European Spring launching a green new deal for Europe in January 2019 and a broad green new deal coalition of organisations in Canada coming together (the leader of the New Democratic party has adopted the frame, if not its full ambition, as one of his policy planks). The same is true in the UK, where the Labour party is in the middle of negotiations over whether to adopt a green new deal‑style platform.

Those of us who advocate for this kind of transformative platform are sometimes accused of using it to advance a socialist or anticapitalist agenda that predates our focus on the climate crisis. My response is a simple one. For my entire adult life, I have been involved in movements confronting the myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit. No Logo, published 20 years ago, documented the human and ecological costs of corporate globalisation, from the sweatshops of Indonesia to the oil fields of the Niger Delta. I have seen teenage girls treated like machines to make our machines, and mountains and forests turned to trash heaps to get at the oil, coal and metals beneath.

The painful, even lethal, impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and colour.

I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localised market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

[sirabisunkenplace]

My (Almost) Short Afrofuturism Story

Lucy Aylmer, left, and Maria Aylmer are bi-racial twins who look nothing alike.

So until I chickened out, I had talked myself into writing a short story instead of an analytical essay for my final assignment in Introduction to Afrofuturism. Finally, I decided to heed Professor Due's advice to reconsider maybe writing fiction since I hadn't already done so in the past. I'm proud of the essay I ended up turning in, but I can't help but kick myself a little bit for not putting myself out there and trying something new. So instead, I've decided to share my short story idea in the form of a blog post to ease my regret and get myself used to the concept of other folks reading my work. Here is the synopsis I was working on before clucking.

The year is 2042.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s never happened. Instead, Garveyism and Pan-African ideology swept through Black communities across the nation, with most Black Americans supporting the Return to Africa. White mob violence and lynchings steadily rise throughout the 20th century, further enticing Black Americans to flee the country instead of attempting to dismantle the white supremacy rule of the nation. As a result, racist legislation and legal segregation continued unabated throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Interracial relationships are strictly outlawed and punishable by police brutality, lengthy prison sentences, and deportation. Immigration is no longer allowed, with exceptions for immigrants from Western European countries. The Southern states continue being the most heavily segregated parts of the nation: all remaining people of color in Southern/Red states like Alabama, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee are forced into segregated ghettos. Much of the nation operates under an apartheid regime, similar to the state of South Africa before Mandela's interventions.

In the West, a flourishing, racially integrated metropolis attracts refugees fleeing from the oppressive atmosphere of the heavily segregated Southern states. Every year, droves of interracial couples, mixed-race people, LGBTQ+ folks, and others considered deviant in the eyes of the white patriarchy make the perilous trek to the remnants of a California resort town. However, racial intermixing and especially interracial relationships are still federal crimes, making the city a dangerous and flagrant hub for government attention with its outright defiance of the law. This city, known as the Salton Sea, is where our two protagonists hope to escape the racial terror of their Floridian hometown and find their long-lost father, a famous white musician whom they've never met.

Throughout the quarter, I was intrigued by so much of the material Professor Due provided for us. I hoped to weave the inspiration I gathered from stuff like Reginald Hudlin's The Space Traders, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Janelle Monae's emotion picture Dirty Computer. You see, the proposed main characters of my story are a set of fraternal twins. They look nothing alike. However, their distinct appearances go beyond being different heights or hair textures. Inspired by a real-world genetic anomaly, one twin is white, and the other is Black. Truly, the twins are both bi-racial, born to a Jamaican mother and an Irish father. But because of Jamaica's colonial ties to Europe, the DNA of most Caribbean folks contains remnants of European ancestry. In sporadic cases of fraternal, bi-racial twins, these European genes are split unevenly between the two developing fetuses, resulting in one Black child and one white.

Inspired by Hudlin's examination of the importance of melanin in determining who constitutes "Black enough" to be sent off the planet, in the world of my short story, tentatively titled Rockstar Blood, the twins' unique appearances create a predicament in their lives. They have been unable to connect and intertwine their experiences as all twins typically do throughout their lives. Growing up in a heavily segregated society, where racial intermixing is strictly outlawed, Rowdy and Fallon were never able to attend the same schools or participate in any aspect of the community together. Their neighbors and school districts were aware of their situation, and Rowdy and Fallon's mother, Angela, tried to send them to kindergarten together. By the end of the first week, the taunts, strange looks, and sheepishness from teachers and other students quickly led Angela to separate the twins. Although they could prove their kinship if prompted by the authorities, being together in public grew dangerous and nearly impossible as they got older, as scathed onlookers instantly assumed they were a couple.

Butler's dystopian novel inspired me to think about what our world would look like if courageous leaders hadn't fought the powers that be back in the civil rights era. Her description of a crumbling society led me to imagine America in this dystopian state, where race becomes the driving force behind the nation's eventual collapse instead of corporate greed and environmental disaster.

Finally, Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer made me think about the criminalization of otherness in a white-dominated dystopia. I wanted to invoke a tangible fear within my protagonists at the prospect of being spotted on the move together, as interracial mixing of any kind is harshly punished by violent cops and a racist judicial system, kind of like the robot cops and cleansing institutions in Dirty Computer.

It was a lot to flesh out, even for this blog post, so you can see why I shied away from trying to fit all these wacky ideas in 1,800 words. However, the idea is still something that percolates in my mind, and I am grateful to have taken a course that has left me with so many visions to work with.

[reasoningdaily]

Arkansas appears to be trying to compete against Florida and Texas in the White and Fragile Red State Olympics, and, specifically, the sport of stifling Black history.

Earlier this month, we reported that the Arkansas Department of Education just up and decided two days before classes started that it would not recognize a new Advanced Placement course on African American history for course credit for the 2023-24 school year. Now, the department is demanding that every K-12 school in a six-district radius turn over all of their African American studies materials so they can be scanned for violations of the state’s anti-critical race theory law.

MORE: The Importance Of African American Studies

Related Stories

Here’s another way to put that: Arkansas and its governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, are out here confiscating Black history because it might violate anti-CRT standards they propagandized into anti-CRT legislation. It’s basically iron sharpening iron if both blades of iron are actually white supremacy.

But seriously, is government officials using anti-“woke” propaganda as a green light to invade places of learning and demand educational materials be turned over for inspection not exactly the kind of thing that links right-wingers to fascism? Please tell me the same people who boast that the government would have to pry their guns from their “cold dead hands”—despite no notable effort by government officials to confiscate citizens’ guns anywhere in America—are not going to stand for history books being taken by way of government overreach. (Yes, I understand that they’re public schools. No, that doesn’t make the optics any less Orwellian, not to mention racist AF.)

Ok, but let’s be fair here. After all, maybe the department has some reason to believe dangerous messages are being spread to indoctrinated school students. Perhaps schools are teaching step-by-step “kill whitey” instructions or, as conservatives often suggest, teaching Black kids to hate America and white kids ot hate themselves.

Let’s just take a look at what they’re so concerned about.

“Given some of the themes included in the pilot, including ‘intersections of identity’ and ‘resistance and resilience,’ the Department is concerned the pilot may not comply with Arkansas law, which does not permit teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), (See Ark. Code Ann. § 6-16-156, as amended by Section 16 of the LEARNS Act),” the letter sent out to the superintendents of the districts reads.

“To assist public school employees, representatives, and guest speakers at your district in complying with the law, please submit all materials, including but not limited to the syllabus, textbooks, teacher resources, student resources, rubrics, and training materials, to the Department by 12:00 pm on September 8, 2023, along with your statement of assurance that the teaching of these materials will not violate Arkansas law or rule. Items can be scanned and emailed to ade.commissioner@ade.arkanasas.gov.”

Well, there you have it, good people. The Arkansas Department of Education has important work to do here! The school districts in this great state simply cannot be left to their own devices lest the children—the precious, impressionable children—be insidiously indoctrinated by horrific lessons on—God, I can hardly even say it���”intersections of identity” and “resistance and resilience.”

Again, Arkansas wants to be Florida so bad. The Sunshine (or sundown) state is requiring lessons about enslaved people benefiting from slavery, and accepting “educational” materials from PragerU, a demonstrably racist organization that teaches children that Frederick Douglass would agree slavery was a necessary evil to preserve America. Now, Arkansas is picking up the white nationalist indoctrination tiki torch by eliminating Black studies materials that teach about the “resistance” and the “resilience” of oppressed people.

This is white supremacy at work. This is exactly what critical race theory was created to examine.

SEE ALSO:

Florida Approves Teaching Students That Slaves Benefited From Slavery

Florida’s New Black History Curriculum Whitewashes Slavery, Victim-Shames African Americans, Critics Say

[forsetti]

On Guns In America: Full Mental Jacket

America loves its guns.  It loves them so much, it is willing to overlook the damage they inflict on individuals, families, and society.  It loves guns so much, it denies evidence from around the world that supports the conclusion that fewer guns = fewer gun-related injuries and deaths.  It loves guns so much, it eagerly looks for ways to make them more dangerous, more lethal, more accessible.  It loves guns because, in spite of being the world's superpower, its past and present have been steeped in insecurity, fear, and a false sense of superiority.  Schools shootings are a microcosm of the problem of guns in America-A dangerous weapon in the hands of insecure, angry, testosterone-riddled, white males whose brains and moral compasses are at best not yet fully developed and at worst, seriously and permanently fucked up.

The problem with guns in America isn't that there aren't enough of them. The problem isn't “God has been taken out of schools and society.” The problem isn't immigrants, minorities, or Muslims.  The problem is mental health-the mental health of white, male America.  To be more specific, the problem is, and always has been white supremacy. If you don't understand the role white supremacy has and does play in how America views and loves it guns, you are part of the problem. This includes a lot of “good guy” gun owners who provide cover for their not-so-good guy gun-owning brethren.

The common thread from the first European white settlers to a large number of current gun owners in America is white supremacy.  The first white men on this continent used guns to steal land, resources, and life from the Native Americans.  The 2nd Amendment was written, in part, to ratify slavery.  It was important for guns to be readily available for whites to keep slaves in line, to be able to fend off any slave rebellion, to protect their women from “violent, sex-crazed” black men.  When slavery was abolished, the heavily armed Klan came to power to ensure white rule and supremacy was maintained.  The Mulford Act in California was passed in 1967 and signed by then-governor, Ronald Regan, repealing open carry in response to members of the Black Panthers carrying guns while they patrolled the streets of Oakland to make sure the police did their jobs properly.  Gun sales went through the roof when the first black president was elected.  Right-wing media pushes gun ownership with threats of marauding bands of Mexican gangs, Muslim terrorists, race wars, and imaginary government operations that will imprison God-fearing, gun-owning, PBR-drinking, tobacco chewing, white Americans.  

The fact that America has 5% of the world's population and almost 50% of the world's guns isn't by mistake, isn't to protect it from foreign powers, isn't to defend itself from its own government.  America has the most guns because it was built on white supremacy.  Guns were the tools used to take the land from its native inhabitants.  Guns were the tools used to keep the economic resource of slavery in line. Guns were used against fellow countrymen in order to maintain the right to own other people.  Guns were used to inflict fear, harm, and death in order to preserve and enforce Jim Crow Laws.  White supremacy doesn't carry as much power without means and threat to commit violence.  Guns and racism in America go together like Dylann Roof and a Glock .45, like Mom and apple pie.

The main reasons mass shootings are more prevalent in America now than in the “Good Old Days,” are two-fold: First, white America is losing its demographic and cultural power; Second, there are exponentially more guns now than in its mythologized past.  This explosion in the number of guns in circulation is not distributed equally among the population.  While the number of guns being manufactured and sold has skyrocketed, the percentage of households that own guns has been steadily declining.  This means those who do own guns are owning more and more of them.  I'm pretty sure the Venn Diagram of homes with guns and racists is damn near one, complete circle.  

I'm not saying all gun owners are racists but a lot of the ones who own multiple guns, who purchase semi-automatics, bump stocks, high capacity magazines, push for open carry, are pro-Stand Your Ground laws, reject even the most sensible background checks, are racist as fuck.   The NRA, right wing radio, FOX News, and Republican politicians have fed these people a steady diet of fear since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  They've latched onto anything and everything non-white that can be peddled as a threat.  They've done this with to great success.  If you don't think so, just look at the spike in gun manufactured and sold starting the second Barack Obama was elected in 2008.  At no point did he discuss taking anyone's guns during the campaign but the mere fact a black man became president scared the living fuck out of white supremacists to where they went on a weapons-buying spree that would make Adnan Khashoggi blush. There was a small spike in guns sold after Bill Clinton was elected but it went back down to normal levels during his second term.  New guns in circulation hit a record high in 2008 and the number more than doubled by the end of Obama's second term.  If you don't think race and white supremacists' fears were not the cause of this, you aren't too bright.

This relationship between guns and white supremacy in America is why you can't have a rational discussion about gun control.  Racist fears will always override common sense, logic, evidence, social well-being, decency.  To make matters worse, their irrational fears have filtered down to a lot of other gun owners.  Every day I hear someone say, “I'm a responsible gun owner and I don't do....” or “I know a lot of gun owners who are responsible and they don't do...,” as a rationalization and justification to not only defend the status quo but to argue for access to more guns.  A lot of the “good gun owners” are sure carrying a lot of water for the “bad gun owners,” right now to the point it is impossible for me to discern which is which.  Practically speaking, there isn't much difference, politically, between an overweight, shirtless red neck posting pictures of himself holding his AR-15 in front of a Confederate Flag and the gun-owning Republican next door who is a CPA who drives a KIA Soul because both are obstacles to any gun reform. The CPA might not think he is giving cover for and be providing support to Cletus's white supremacy when he parrots NRA talking points but he sure as fuck is.  If this wasn't true, you'd see these “good gun owners” come out against their fellow gun-owning brethren whenever there was a school shooting or some other horrible run-related incident.  The silence of “good gun owners” tells you where they stand and to me, it seriously calls into question just how “good” they really are.

A good person doesn't stand quietly by as children are gunned down in schools, as families are worshiping in church, as people are watching a movie in a theater.  A good person doesn't parrot conspiracy theories about gun confiscation, Jade Helm, FEMA camps, race wars... A good person doesn't look at the overwhelming evidence from the American Medical Association, the CDC, and every other industrialized country in the world and come away with the ideas that more guns are needed and teachers should be armed.  You can say and think what you will about the people you know and love who own guns about how “good” a person they are but my definition of what constitutes a good person doesn't cover this kind of moral failing.

I never see any of these “good gun owners” coming to the defense of black victims of gun violence at the hands of the police.  When 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot within microseconds by the police for having an air rifle in an open carry state, none of these “good gun owners” came out in his defense.  Instead, they parroted the same talking points as white supremacist websites and talking heads.  The same for Michael Brown in Ferguson, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Walter Scott in South Carolina...  Unarmed black men and boys who are killed by the police are always labeled with negative terms. Meanwhile, white mass shooters are “mentally unstable,” “misunderstood,” “a good neighbor”...  Not only are white shooters talked about in better terms, they are treated with more respect when apprehended.  Tamir Rice laid dying in the park, he received no assistance from the police who shot him.  In fact, they prohibited Tamir's sister from getting help.  When the black church shooter, Dylann Roof, in S. Carolina was caught, the police stopped by Burger King to get him food before taking him in.  When the school shooter in Florida was finally nabbed, he was taken unharmed, wrapped in a blanket, and courteously placed into a car.  Not a single “good gun owner” said a peep about any of these situations.  Instead of seeing the built-in, systemic racism of how we view and treat black victims compared to white killers, they automatically rolled out their NRA-approved talking points.  When it is time to speak up about injustice, racism, inequality, if guns are involved even remotely, these “good gun owners” always seem to stand up on the wrong side of the moral fence, if they stand up at all.  My definition of “good person” doesn't encompass this kind of shitty behavior.  At no point does an inanimate object take precedence, priority over a human being.  That many of those defending guns as THE ANSWER are also 'pro-life,” is as ridiculous as it is hypocritical.

The other main factor in America's obsession with guns is toxic masculinity.  I know the term “toxic masculinity,” has gotten pushback from a lot of people for being “too demeaning,” “too mean,” “detrimental to the discussion.”  My response to this criticism is, I don't fucking care.  If you are male and your ego is so fragile you can't handle a negative label and need to rage about it, you've pretty much proved the need for the description.  Don't #NotAllMen at me either.  This is a lazy, dishonest response.  When people use “toxic masculinity,” they are referring to very specific characteristic traits.  If you don't fit the description, then shut the fuck up about it so you don't risk joining their ranks.

Men are more violent than women.  Some men more so than others.  Insecure men of this type, even more so.  Add in a heavy dose of white and gender supremacy and you get a toxic mixture.  Throw deadly weapons designed to kill and maim at high rates and you often get very dangerous outcomes.  The more of these traits a man has, the more likely they are to be violent.  Take just about any mass shooter in America the past fifty years and you will find someone who has a history of violence against women and/or racial animus.  Men who exhibit toxic masculinity traits are mentally unstable.  They do not know how to properly process and deal with a world where they are not the king of every hill by the mere fact they are white men.  This is a cognitive problem.  To be okay with people like this having access to high powered weapons designed to kill is an epic public safety failure.  People in hospitals, jails, halfway homes...who are deemed dangerous are not allowed belts, shoestrings, anything that can be used to harm themselves or others.  Yet, we as a society have decided it is okay for mentally screwed up white men to not only own guns but make it easy for them to get as many as they want and almost whatever kind they want.  This is fucking insane.

Imagine being in charge of policy for a mental health hospital, coming up with the position that the residents who exhibit violent tendencies, believe they are naturally superior to others, and who are prone to conspiracy theories should have almost unlimited access to things that will inflict the most pain, injury, and death on others.  What Board of Directors would vote or this policy?  What rational person on the outside looking in would say, “This seems like a great idea”?  The easy answer is, “No one,” because it is so fucking stupid.

This brings us to the “the left shouldn't be so critical of the right” stage of the discussion.  Every day, I read some article or comment that claims if the left would only stop the name calling, the harsh criticism, the sense of superiority, then the right would “do the right thing.”  This argument is so fucking stupid it really doesn't deserve a response but since I'm feeling generous, here goes...  

Either your arguments and positions are supported by evidence and tethered to reality and morality or they are not.  If they are not, then it doesn't matter what the left says or thinks about you, they are still fucked up.  If you don't want to be on the wrong side of an issue, of history, of morality, then the ONLY choices you have is to either continue to be on the wrong side or mea culpa the fuck out of yourself and get on the right side.  There IS NO OPTION where you get to believe the wrong things and also get to be on the right side. These are the fucking rules of logic, of morality, of history.  Don't blame liberals because you are wrong.  Don't blame anyone but yourself for being on the wrong side.  Suck it up. Take the personal hit.  Learn a fucking lesson.  Just don't blame others for your intellectual, moral failings.

If you really believe guns are the answer and the more the merrier, you are a deeply damaged, cognitively delusion person and a big part of the reason why America is so entrenched in a culture of guns.  You are mentally unhinged and a danger to everyone around you and to society, in general.  And, I'll bet, if I scratched the surface of your personality even the slightest, I'd uncover a whole lot of racism and bigotry just beneath the surface. You can say that guns aren’t the problem, which may be true. The real problem is racism mixed with toxic masculinity.  I am all for doing everything possible to address these problems. However, until we do, I think keeping weapons out of their hands that can and do inflict massive damage to others is the very fucking least we can do. To do...to think otherwise is the very definition of “crazy.”

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Johnson and Trump now share the same covid policy: Pretend it doesn't exist

By Jonathan Lis

It is perhaps no coincidence that, before they became world leaders, both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump made cameo appearances as themselves on soap operas. In 2009 Johnson propped up the bar of the Queen Vic, while in 2005 Trump appeared in Days of Our Lives. Both men have short attention spans and love performing. The main appeal of soap, of course, is that things constantly happen but never for too long. New characters arrive, storylines get tidied up, and events that captivate viewers one month are well forgotten the next. A mystery killer virus on Brookside once killed a couple of minor characters and then vanished.

The reality of politics actually has quite a lot in common with soap. News cycles are episodic, major figures can be quickly dispatched, and newspapers will cast a protagonist as hero and then villain in the same month. Politicians, like scriptwriters, depend on short memories. But here’s the problem. Real life actually is not soap, and coronavirus is not a storyline. And yet both Johnson and Trump are behaving as though it is – and urgently want to wrap it up.

In Johnson's press conference last week he announced that pubs, restaurants and cinemas would reopen on July 4th, and social distancing would be reduced to 'one metre plus'. He has urged people to return to shops and bars almost as a patriotic duty. Trump, meanwhile, has all but ignored the new record highs in daily cases, blaming the spike on increased testing. The two countries' outbreaks are different, but the political tactics broadly the same. The virus, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. The leaders have declared we must move on, so move on we must.

The reason is straightforward enough. Soaps, like demagogues, exist to be popular, and when push comes to shove, coronavirus isn't very entertaining. It grabbed people's attention, and was certainly dramatic, but it wasn't comfort viewing. It was also a story seemingly without end. For the government, that has made it both boring and dangerous. The answer, on both sides of the Atlantic, is simply to cancel it.

Part of this is narcissism. Both Johnson and Trump are gripped by the myth of their own greatness and their delusion of total control. In the mould of all strongmen, they want to believe they can dictate and decree their countries' fortunes. This is the Brexit model of fantasy: you can engineer any defiance of reality if you simply believe hard enough. What these men cannot control must simply disappear.

But it is also more practical and political than that. Johnson and Trump believe they can write the narrative of coronavirus quite literally. From the start, covid has been treated like a political campaign, conducted in soundbites. The focus is always the script and the stage, never the work behind the scenes. In Britain it is about war rhetoric, massaging figures, and presenting every fresh disaster as a government triumph against the odds. In America it is about safeguarding Trump's election chances, bashing the Democrats and opening a new front in the culture war. In both countries public relations have trumped public health. Nothing really matters provided the government is winning.

When you treat the virus as drama, everything becomes presentation. The key means of communicating to the public – press briefings and national addresses – have been measured not by clarity of communication but by ratings. Trump boasted about the viewing figures for his press conferences as though they were just another reality show, while the British government ditched the weekend briefings because of low ratings. Now the pandemic storyline is over, of course, there is no need for the conferences – and so last week Downing Street scrapped them altogether. The message to viewers was plain enough: move on, because there’s nothing to see here.

Certainly, Johnson wasn't blatant enough to declare the pandemic literally finished. He has not reprised his March 19th exhortation to "get the virus done", like an epidemiological Brexit. Not everything will open on Saturday and things that do will not be as they were before. But the prime minister knows people are not reading the small print. The messaging is more important than the substance, and could not be clearer: social distancing is out, the pubs are back, July 4th is our independence day and everything is back to normal.

Of course, we are all desperate to return to normality. No doubt many of the government’s critics will be enjoying a pint on Saturday.  Lockdown has now lasted for almost four months. People want to have their families round for dinner, hug their friends, and go for a drink. In short, people want not to be afraid anymore, and the government is notionally giving them what they want.

Except this isn't actually about what people want. This is about what the government wants. Johnson is tired of the virus, panicked by the polls, and desperate to get back to entertaining the public. Fist-banging about Brexit is fun, mitigating a pandemic is not.

And so here is where things become even more toxic. Of course people will crowd the beaches. Of course they will loosen up in the pub. Of course, after months of hardship, some will behave excessively. But those people have also followed the government's nudge-and-wink messaging. So when cases begin to rise, as they inevitably will, it will be the fault of the people who were confused, not the people who confused them. Ministers are, in effect, setting up the public to fail.

This way the government can have its cake and eat it. First, it gets to distract people and pretend the virus no longer exists. Then, when the virus turns out very much to exist, they can blame the public for not navigating the tightrope they laid out for them. It is a double-whammy of cynicism that allows the government to absolve itself of responsibility in all circumstances.

It is no consolation that Trump's version of this tactic is even more extreme: to pretend the virus has disappeared by concealing the numbers of cases. The president openly declares his intention to cut the number of tests, and his government is ending the federal funding of 13 testing sites. Vice-President Mike Pence, the marginally less unhinged face of the administration, has insisted that cases are only rising because tests have, but that is simply untrue. New York is conducting 50% more tests than last month and getting 60% fewer positive results, while Florida is testing 22% fewer people and getting 341% more positives. The virus in America is not over, and in some states it is barely getting started.

And so now begins the great project of old power-grabs and new distractions. The UK government is offering the generational shake-up of the civil service, a Brexit 'shock and awe' campaign, and a bogus promise of grand public investment. The US administration is returning to the promotion of white supremacy and the excitement of Trump's re-election battle. Johnson and Trump are desperate to be strongmen, but like their counterparts Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, they just happen to be presiding over the world's worst outbreaks.

We all wish this virus would go away and, indeed, that it had never arrived at all. As humans we instinctively seek to curb nature's greatest dangers and struggle to accept our own weakness. But covid is not a storyline our leaders can ditch when it gets too dull or convoluted, and the writers can't subsequently pretend it never happened. Johnson and Trump love drama and love entertaining, but what they love most of all is themselves. The people they lead have never even come close.

Jonathan Lis is deputy director of the pro-EU think tank British Influence and a political writer and commentator.

[rawstreetjournal-blog]

Black Looters Justify ‘White Supremacy’ to Loot Sports Stores After Hurricane Irma

A group of black looters smashes the windows at the Simon's Sportswear store in Fort Lauderdale, after Hurricane Irma passed through the area.

Orlando, FL - As Hurricane Irma beats down on Miami and travels up the peninsula, an overwhelming number of sporting goods stores have been marauded by black looters. You would think that in a hurricane, people would be looting high value items such as TVs and electronics. Instead, it seems that nothing matters more in a hurricane than a pair of fresh sneakers. Despite the fact that sneakers would get ruined in floodwaters, black looters raided a Simon's Sportswear in Fort Lauderdale. At least a dozen black looters were captured by a news team's camera, breaking into and entering the sporting goods store and making off with athletic apparel and footwear. Perhaps the athleisure trend has made a pair of sneakers worth more than a flat screen TV, but we highly doubt it.

Black looters avoided the supermarket nearby which was also shuttered and went straight for the sneakers at the Simon's Sportswear store in Fort Lauderdale.

Besides the Simon's Sportswear store, black looters also skipped past the nearby supermarket and headed straight for the nearby Foot Locker, hoping to score the latest pair of trainers and maybe a track suit to go with the hurricane weather.

Earlier on Sunday, two groups of black looters were caught on camera ransacking two separate sporting goods stores in South Florida with one shot and at least 12 more arrested.

In midtown Miami, a local TV reporter watched in horror as at least a dozen black looters undertook what appeared to be a well-coordinated theft of sporting goods at another shop on Sunday. At least a dozen people were seen walking out of the store with boxes of shoes and other supplies taken from the shop.

Black looters arrived in a relatively new Chevrolet Malibu sedan and in a co-ordinated manner which suggested pre-planning proceeded to loot the Foot Locker store for sneakers. A black looter can be seen carrying an entire stack of shoe boxes. 

Local residents are appalled with the marauding gangs of black looters. According to Meredith Griffin, a hairdresser from Fort Lauderdale,

"I can understand if it was water or food, people can get desperate, but they're stealing sneakers and tracksuits?"

The looting of sporting goods stores also has local law enforcement officials puzzled. According to a Polk County deputy who asked not to be identified, because his opinion may encourage looters to target higher value targets,

"We're not talking about looting TVs or stereos, they're sneakers for crying out loud, how much can they be worth? $300? A TV goes for a grand easy and is much easier to sell!"

Although some extremely rare sneakers such as Adidas Yeezys can easily sell for over $1,000, generic sporting goods stores, of the kind that were looted by the black looters would not carry such rare merchandise. The Foot Locker and Simon's Sportswear tend to carry mid-range items, between $100-$200, which suggests that the black looters were stealing trainers for their own use.

Griffin adds,

"It doesn't make any sense, wouldn't you have to try on the shoe for fit and comfort before making off with it? Isn't that sort of a dumb thing to loot because you'd be stuck there for a long time?"

However, members of the black community in Fort Lauderdale offer an alternative explanation as to why the black looters may have targeted sneakers and sports apparel. According to Shaniqua Brown, a single-mother who's unemployed,

"You white folk just don't get it. A fresh pair of white sneakers means that you're fly, fresh clothes, they make the whole package."

Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Rick Maglione was less sanguine in his assessment of the black looters, in a statement posted on Twitter, Maglione said,

"Going to prison over a pair of sneakers is a fairly bad life choice."

"Stay home and look after your loved ones and be thankful they are safe."

The looters who were arrested by Fort Lauderdale police. Almost all the looters were black males except for one Latino.[/caption]

There is a growing sense of indignation among the local community, as the vast majority of looters tend to be black. According to Amy, a Fort Lauderdale resident who lives in the eclusive Seven Isles neighborhood where houses go from upwards of $3 million and who declined to give her last name for fear of being targeted,

"That they would take to using a natural disaster to loot and to steal, it's just disgraceful. People's houses and lives are being destroyed and all they can do is take."

One of the black looters who was carrying several boxes of brand new sneakers was stopped by a local news crew and when asked why he was stealing, he quickly blurted before running off,

"Why shouldn't I take it? The f*cking government is white supremacist, I'm just taking back what's mine."

If the black looter's warped logic regarding property ownership is reflective of a greater malaise across the black community, there is reason to be concerned.

Since the Ferguson riots in 2014, which occurred following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, many blacks have used "Black Lives Matter" and other left-wing protests as cover for looting. Many writers have also written in defense of black looting of white businesses. Willie Osterweil, writing in "Defense of Looting" for The New Inquiry, writes,

"White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite."

"Looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners’ profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days."

Osterweil seems to suggest that paid work, is a form of "theft" from blacks, which justifies looting, especially since looting is a dangerous activity. Looting is a dangerous activity because it is illegal. Since Hurricane Irma made landfall, several looters have already been shot, not because they were heroes in defense of some higher ideal, but because they were lazy, dregs of society who are looking to profit off another human being's misfortune.

As Hurricane Irma tears up the Florida Panhandle, there will no doubt be even more cases of black looters tearing up businesses and raiding homes for any valuables they can find. Although property loss through looting is a significant individual cost, the black looter's sense of self-entitlement to the property of others is the greater cost to our society.

[teachanarchy]

Augustus Invictus is a libertarian, you see — you can tell by his name.

The august and invincible politician is representing the Florida Libertarian Party in his run for Marco Rubio’s US Senate seat.

Invictus first entered the media spotlight in October 2015 when details of his hobbies came to light: The libertarian politician has been accused of supporting eugenics and of being expelled from a cult for “sadistically dismembering a goat in a ritualistic sacrifice.”

Nothing to see here, you know, just that typical libertarian drama — eugenics and animal sacrifices.

In March 2016, Canada barred Invictus from entering the country because of his ties to neo-Nazis. A 32-year-old lawyer, Invictus represented Marcus Faella, the former head of the neo-Nazi group American Front, in court on domestic terrorism charges.

“What is a libertarian doing defending a notorious neo-Nazi leader?” one might wonder. A glance at Invictus’ official campaign website might raise a few more questions:

Yes, the symbol Augustus Invictus openly uses on his site is a bird perched atop the fasces, the Imperial Roman weapon used by founder Benito Mussolini to symbolize fascism.

The world is witnessing the dangerous rise of a new — or perhaps not so new — libertarian-fascist alliance. Invictus is by no means the only example.

Case Studies

Investigative journalist Jane Mayer caused quite a stir in January 2016 when she revealed that Fred Koch, the father of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, helped build the third-largest oil refinery in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His project was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, and the oil refinery fueled German planes, helping the Nazis carry out a campaign of genocide and destruction across Europe.

Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right also divulges that Fred Koch was such an admirer of Nazism, he “hired a fervent Nazi as a governess for his eldest boys,” as the Washington Post puts it. The newspaper of record describes libertarian leader Charles Koch as having been “toilet trained by a Nazi.”

As I detailed in an article about the Koch-Nazi collusion, Koch senior joins a long list of US business elites and corporations — many of whom are libertarian-leaning, naturally — who have worked directly with the Nazis.

Other examples abound. In June 2014, shooters in Las Vegas shot and killed two police officers before leaving a swastika and a “Don’t tread on me” flag on their bodies. The latter is of course the infamous Gadsden flag, a prominent sign of libertarianism. The fact that the shooters willingly juxtaposed the two symbols does the work for us.

Again, this raises the question: What are libertarians doing aligning themselves with Nazism? Libertarians are — or at least purport to be — opposed to state tyranny, and fascists embrace it, the trope goes (I use the term “libertarian” here in the American sense, which is invariably right-wing, not in the ostensibly left-wing European or Latin American sense). How, then, are these views reconciled?

Part of it can be explained by reducing the alliance to realpolitik, to a congruence of right-wing interests, to the finding of a common enemy in the Left.

Another case study involving the Kochs is instructive here.

Journalist Mark Ames detailed in an investigation for Pando how, in the 1970s, the libertarian publication Reason repeatedly gave a platform to Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers. The Koch Brothers have given millions of dollars to the Reason Foundation, and David Koch sits on its board of trustees. Moreover, an article by Charles Koch appeared next to one by Holocaust denier James J. Martin in a 1976 issue of Reason, Ames revealed.

In previous reports, Ames also documented how Charles Koch funded a libertarian school called the Rampart College, where the Holocaust-denying Martin taught pseudo-history, euphemistically referred to as “historical revisionism.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website that the Koch-funded libertarian school’s publication Rampart Journal published articles “claiming that the Allies overstated the extent of Nazi atrocities in order to justify a war of aggression against the Axis powers.”

Despite its putative anti-government ideology, Reason and many in the libertarian movement have ahistorically characterized the mass-murdering Nazis as supposed victims in World War II because of their brutal defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. For much of the war, historian Richard Vinen notes “the eastern front was the scene of almost all the serious fighting,” and, between 1941 and 1943, Soviet “troops were the only ones to fight German forces on European soil.” Vinen estimates that it was in fact the Red Army, not the U.S. or the U.K., that was responsible for approximately 75 percent of the Nazi soldiers killed, wounded or captured in World War II. Right-wing historical revisionists like Martin portray the crushing of Nazism as a crime of communism.

This phenomenon is not isolated to the US. Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom, along with the far-right Freedom Party of Austria and UK Independence Party, among others, all employ libertarian rhetoric. So too does the “alt-right” website Breitbart, and its star Milo Yiannopoulos.

More and more self-declared libertarians want their respective states to harshly crack down on (non-Western) immigration, deport “undesirables,” and systematically discriminate against Muslims — all in the name of “protecting freedom.”

Nor is the West alone. In India, one sees another prominent example of the burgeoning libertarian-fascist alliance in figures like Narendra Modi, a simultaneous diehard neoliberal and Hindu nationalist.

Yet the problem runs even deeper than this. It is not just that fascism and libertarianism share a common enemy; actually existing libertarianism ultimately strives for the same, or at least similar, social relations endorsed by fascists.

Theorization

Fascism, in a nutshell, is the wielding of the bourgeois state in order to crush the progressive elements of liberalism (e.g., capitalism’s inherent tendency toward globalization and the destruction of feudal relations), replacing liberal capitalism with an authoritarian capitalism that embraces capitalism’s most reactionary elements.

Fascists seek to return to a capitalism unblemished by liberalism, one that wholeheartedly embraces its roots in white supremacy (or, in the case of India, Hindu supremacy) and patriarchal right, in which white men can exercise their “superiority” and face no resistance from more highly skilled immigrant workers, from better educated women, from exploited laborers in the Global South who will do the same work just as well for significantly less pay.

The notion that libertarians are actually, in principle, opposed to state tyranny rests perilously on a false presumption.

In US reality, actually existing libertarianism similarly opposes the progressive elements of liberalism enforced by the bourgeois state. The hatred of both the fascists and actually existing libertarians is ultimately directed at the bourgeoisie, not the bourgeois state, because the former is the defender of liberalism.

The means by which this phenomenon works itself out differs, but produces the same results.

Fascists hate the bourgeoisie because it is imposing liberalism upon the masses, while libertarians hate the bourgeoisie simply because it is imposing something on capital — yet, at the end of the day, both hate the bourgeoisie, even if for distinct reasons.

More basically, then, from a pragmatic perspective, libertarian ideology conveniently grants the fascist just the alibi they need. A fascist can justify their desire for a segregated, white-only community with an appeal to libertarian principles (“It’s our right to do so; if you try to stop us it’s aggression, force, tyranny”).

Gun-toting white separatists can build their communes and rail against government tyranny when it tries to stop them. They can organize their “decentralized” Patriot paramilitaries (the quintessence of the libertarian-fascist alliance) to hunt down Latina/o workers who are crossing the border in search of a job, because neoliberal policies destroyed both of their respective local economies on behalf of international capital.

Murray Rothbard, the founder of so-called “anarcho-capitalism,” exemplifies how this intersection of interests and ideology works itself out.

As he worked his ideas out more and more over the years, Rothbard eventually came to identity as a “paleolibertarian” — that is to say, a libertarian who openly rejects the progressive elements of liberalism and fervently embraces the most reactionary elements of capitalism.

Rothbard idolized individualist anarchist (the uniquely American strand) Lysander Spooner, who was an abolitionist yet simultaneously insisted the revolutionary war against slavery led by Abraham Lincoln was one of “militarism, mass murder and centralized statism.” The Austrian School libertarian hero associated himself with white supremacists and fascists.

As the New York Times put it, “Rothbard applauded the ‘right-wing populism’ of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member [and leader] who ran for governor of Louisiana, and ridiculed ‘multiculturalists,’ lesbians and ‘the entire panoply of feminism, egalitarianism.'”

In his 1992 essay “Right-Wing Populism,” libertarian founding father Rothbard spoke highly of the fascist David Duke and articulated an eight-point program. Point 4 follows:

Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or “inside traders” but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

This is actually existing libertarianism in action.

To the fascist and the libertarian, the Left is trying to combat this tyranny of capital, so the Left is the enemy.

In both fascism and actually existing libertarianism, it only capital that has rights. In Western white fascism, it is only white men who have capital; in actually existing libertarianism, it is preponderantly white men who control the vast majority of capital.

The means by which the tyranny of capital manifests itself in each system differs, in form, but the same social relations exist, in essence.

Just as capitalism degenerates into fascism in times of crisis, so too does libertarianism.

Update (March 27, 2017):

I was notified that this essay had been posted on the “anarcho-capitalism” subreddit. The thread immediately became a cesspool — and textbook example — of the libertarian-fascist alliance.

A user, aptly named “TheAwakenedSaxon,” exemplified the points I articulated above, declaring openly, “Fascism is a response to communism and as Mises (a Jew) pointed out, fascism is infinitely better from any remotely right-wing pro-property perspective than communism.”

“Why did capitalists in the Spanish Civil War side with “fascists”? Because they were opposed to communism,” the user added.

TheAwakenedSaxon, who uses the “Don’t tread on me!” slogan and snake symbol, also defended repressive state anti-Muslim policies, writing, “Yeah, protecting freedom by keeping out Muslims is such a contradiction, right? Oh, wait, no, that’s just basic logic, because when people who support Sharia law become the largest demographic in your country, little boys are going to enjoy the freedom to be molested, women are going to enjoy the freedom to be property, and fags are going to enjoy the freedom to take a one-way flight off the top of the tallest building. Such freedom, wow!”

“A Nazi is better than a leftist who is happy to allow in millions of Muslims for no other reason than ‘because diversity’ or ‘tolerance’ or some nonsense justification for dooming their entire nation to being majority Muslim in 40-100 years,” the anarcho-capitalist subreddit user continued, while riffing on the fascist’s favorite myth, that of “white genocide.”

Another user, likewise appropriately named “Pinochet-Heli-Tours,” posted a link to a lecture on “Reactionary Liberty,” by libertarian writer Robert Taylor.

Taylor, an erstwhile contributor to PolicyMic, runs a website and penned a book called “Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution.” He wrote clearly on his website that he is “thrilled by the rise of the AltRight.”

“In their root-and-branch rejection of liberalism, combined with an identitarian (rather than abstract) approach to the Right, I see them as natural allies to reactionary libertarians,” Taylor said of the so-called alt-right — a euphemism for the contemporary white supremacist, neo-fascist movement, coined by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

“Although less popular than the AltRight, the NeoReactionary (NRx) movement has also had a tremendous influence on me, adding much-need iron to the anemic philosophy that passes for libertarianism today,” Taylor added. “A large number of those that make up these movements are former libertarians as well.”

Robert Taylor is the poster boy of the libertarian-fascist alliance. He concluded the “About” section of his website explaining, “In just over a decade, I started off as a traditionalist conservative and went from a nihilistic, atheistic libertarian to a radical reactionary who only attends the Latin Mass.”

And this brings us full circle. Augustus Invictus, that goat-sacrificing eugenicist, is back! In February, the libertarian fascist wrote on Facebook that he was reading Robert Taylor’s “Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution.”

Accompanying the Facebook status, Invictus quoted extreme-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who wrote, “To . . . call oneself ‘reactionary’ is a true test of courage.”

The name of Julius Evola, a self-declared “superfascist” with extensive links to the genocidal Nazi regime, came up in February, when The New York Times exposed that President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had cited Evola in a 2014 speech at a Christian conference at the Vatican.

As I previously wrote in an article on the far-right, white supremacist views of Steve Bannon, Trump’s right-hand man and the former head of Breitbart:

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, greatly admired Evola. The Italian leader of the extreme right-wing Traditionalist movement wrote for fascist publications and journals, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas. Evola was virulently racist and anti-Semitic and openly claimed that non-European races were inferior. He also condoned patriarchal domination of women and advocated rape.

A big fan of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, Evola spent years in Nazi Germany, where he gave lectures. He personally welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters. In a post-war trial in 1951, Evola denied being part of Mussolini’s fascist movement, which was apparently not bombastic enough for his tastes; instead, he proudly declared himself to be a “superfascist.”

There is no longer any need to dig to find libertarians’ links to fascism; libertarian leaders are making those links very clear.

[backroombuzz]

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BluePillSheep.com knows there's never enough time in the day to search for the best Conservative News and Opinion articles. Along with our stories on BluePillSheep.com, on this page, we linked stories from some of our favorite political websites publishing quality news and information. We don't think of these sites as our competition, we believe they are colleagues. Together, we are all working to help spread the truth and expose the Democrat hypocrisy that we all know far too well.

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[bountyofbeads]

All the Things Trump Is Blaming for El Paso

The president buried his rare condemnation of white supremacy beneath an avalanche of other factors.

David A. Graham | Published August 5, 2019 12:04 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted August 5, 2019 12:53 PM |

President Donald Trump has allowed mention of white supremacy to escape his lips on only two occasions in his political career. The first came in February 2016, when under questioning from Jake Tapper he declined to reject an endorsement from the former KKK leader David Duke. The second came in August 2017, after a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white-supremacist and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear,” he said in an August 14 statement.

After his claim at a press conference the following day that “not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch” set off a firestorm of criticism, he reverted to his earlier formula, quoting the original statement again a week later at a rally in Arizona. Since then, white supremacy has gone unmentioned.

So it was notable that Trump once again used the phrase this morning, speaking about massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend.

“The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate,” Trump said at the White House. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.”

It was a strange speech, with Trump sticking closely to prepared remarks and uttering words—malice, barbaric, cruelty—that are unusual for him. He spoke from the Diplomatic Reception Room, the same place where he spoke after the Charlottesville violence, trying to clean up his widely condemned comments.

Yet Trump complicated his call for Americans to speak with one voice against white supremacy by also blaming a slew of other factors for the shootings. In an early-morning tweet today, Trump blamed the press for mass shootings, and in his remarks at the White House, he spent more time talking about the internet and social media, video games, and mental illness than he did about racist violence. In doing so, he largely missed, or was distracting from, the point. It’s like a physician diagnosing a sucking chest wound, and then offering some aspirin and recommending exercise to a patient.

Of the other causes Trump named, some stand up to scrutiny and others do not. Consider mental illness. “We must reform our mental-health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment but, when necessary, involuntary confinement,” he said. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.” Some mass shooters are mentally ill, but scholars have found little correlation between mental illness and violence, and tightening laws around the mentally ill and guns has had, at best, small effects in the past.

Trump largely danced around the issue of guns per se, blaming other factors, as he has in the past. In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre, he heralded the passage of new laws, as well as an executive order banning bump stocks. “Republicans and Democrats have proven that we can join together in a bipartisan fashion to address this plague,” Trump said today. “Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside.” But the persistence of attacks even after these changes demonstrates the challenge, and as the president knows, Republicans have repeatedly blocked further action, including expanded background checks, which is wildly popular with voters.

Trump devoted as much time to “gruesome and grizzly video games” today as he did to white supremacy, but as my colleague Ian Bogost writes, the evidence about links between real-life violence and video games is shadowy at best.

Trump is on firmer ground talking about the internet. “We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” he said. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”

Scholars of extremism broadly agree that the internet is a powerful vector for encouraging extremism, including its most violent forms. It is not clear, however, what Trump recommends be done about the internet. Political campaigns have had some success in pressuring private companies. Yesterday, after the El Paso shooter’s manifesto appeared on the website 8Chan, the hosting company Cloudflare announced that it would no longer support the site. But any government campaign risks running into First Amendment issues.

Trump has not shown particular understanding of the importance of free speech, and his tweeted attack on the media is as disturbing on First Amendment grounds as it is nonsensical. “Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!” he tweeted. Following this idea to its logical conclusion, and given Trump’s previous complaints about the press, the suggestion is that news coverage skeptical of Trump or sympathetic to immigrants provoked the massacre in El Paso.

But the emphasis on the internet as a vector for extremism overlooks the important point that, like cable TV and newspapers, it’s a medium—in this case, for racist hatred, much of it coming from or amplified by the president himself. It’s the content, more than the medium, that matters.

After the March massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, the president was asked whether he worried about white-nationalist violence. “I don’t, really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems,” he said. Trump says he has now changed his mind, though treating this as a serious, permanent change is difficult. In the past, he has often quickly reversed condemnations of hatred, especially when he speaks off-the-cuff after scripted speeches.

George P. Bush: White-nationalist terrorism must be stopped

But Trump can’t condemn white nationalism too thoroughly, because that would require repudiating his own words and political platform. Appealing to racism is at the heart of his political strategy, ever more explicitly as the 2020 election nears. Polls show that most Americans believe Trump’s actions and words encourage white supremacists.

The manifesto posted by the El Paso shooter speaks of an “invasion” of immigrants, echoing Trump’s own language. A researcher for the liberal group Media Matters for America found that the Trump reelection campaign has run more than 2,200 Facebook ads that mention an “invasion” over the past 15 months. The president has also laughed at, and declined to condemn, suggestions of shooting unauthorized immigrants.

“The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored and they will not be ignored,” Trump said today. If he means it, he can start by looking at his own Twitter account.

[djgblogger-blog]

I teach ethics at the university where Richard Spencer spoke

http://bit.ly/2zBSt1x

Once in a while, life provides us with the kind of dramatic moral dilemma that even the most imaginative ethics textbook writer couldn’t think up.

Presently, my community – the University of Florida and the city of Gainesville – faces a dangerous and complicated series of dilemmas as a result of a visit from white supremacist Richard Spencer. This is his first speaking engagement after his supporters killed one woman and injured 19 people in Charlottesville in August. Spencer was not invited by anyone at UF, but he rented a lecture hall in our performing arts center, as nonuniversity groups do all the time.

As a social ethicist, I frequently teach moral dilemmas, perhaps involving a runaway trolley or a rogue army officer in a remote jungle. These scenarios are meant to give concreteness and urgency to an enduring question: How do we choose the right option when all options will cause harm?

How we respond

Dilemmas like these prompt lively class discussions, often around the two options that the philosophy textbook offers.

On the one hand, there is the Kantian option: Moral laws, such as that against killing an innocent person, must be valid without exceptions. Thus we may not push the fat man into the path of the trolley to save other lives.

On the other hand, there is the Utilitarian model, which tells us to choose the option whose total consequences generate more good and less evil. On this account, we should sacrifice one life in order to save many.

Our real lives almost never force us to choose the lesser of two evils in such dramatic ways, but Spencer’s visit does pose some hard moral choices – although one of them is not whether Spencer’s racist ideology is morally acceptable. There was no debate about that in Gainesville; our community is united in rejecting Spencer’s ideology. The dilemmas, as I see them, are rather about how institutions and individuals should respond in a situation when it seems we must choose among important values such as free speech, peace, racial justice and social equality.

UF denied Spencer’s initial request to speak. He threatened to sue, as he has successfully done at other institutions, including Auburn University. After extensive legal negotiations, administrators accepted his visit as an inevitability. They put their energy into minimizing harm, following the strategy of administrators at other universities, including my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley.

UF and local government officials pursued two simultaneous strategies: actively denouncing Spencer and his message, while also reducing the risk of violence with draconian security procedures throughout campus and downtown Gainesville.

Spencer came to Gainesville because the Supreme Court takes a Kantian approach: Constitutional rights to free speech are universal moral rules, permitting no exceptions, even when following the rule seems likely to generate negative consequences. In a famous example, Kant argued against the “supposed right to lie from benevolent motives.” It is “a sacred unconditional command of reason” always to tell the truth, even to a murderer asking the location of his intended victim. Judicial interpretations of the First Amendment follow the same logic: The right to free speech must be universal, with no exceptions. Thus, Nazis and white supremacists must be allowed to speak freely, even at a university campus where no one seems to want them, and even when their speech openly rejects other core values, such as the dignity of all persons.

Some nations have modified the right to free expression with a form of “free speech consequentialism,” which permits governments to regulate certain kinds of speech in order to preserve other social goods. In 1972, for example, France made it illegal to incite racial hatred or to use language that was racially defamatory, contemptuous, or offensive. Under the Gayssot Law, passed in July 1990, it is illegal to deny publicly the occurrence of the Nazi Holocaust.“ And in 1990, it became illegal to publicly deny the Holocaust. These laws have not ended either racism or struggles over free speech in France, but they do make it easier for institutions to limit the free speech rights of people like Richard Spencer.

The U.S., in contrast, permits limits on free speech rights only in rare cases of "fighting words” that pose an imminent threat of violence. No one has yet used the “fighting words” argument against Spencer, despite Charlottesville and the fact that UF virtually closed the campus and expects to spend about US$500,000 on additional security for the event.

Competing claims

Spencer’s free speech rights pose real dilemmas for individuals in places like Gainesville. Should we ignore Spencer, as the university desperately wants us to do? Or do we protest, to show Spencer and the world that we categorically reject white supremacy?

As an ethicist, I find little help from the standard choice between Kantian and Utilitarian models. The textbook dilemmas where those options are applied are devoid of the concrete details that influence our real-life ethical decisions, and also of the larger political impact of words and deeds. This political context shapes the questions my community has been struggling with for the past week.

Are Spencer and those who protest him not only legally but also morally equivalent, as Ted Yoho, our congressional representative, implies? Yoho describes all those who oppose Spencer as “Antifa, a so-called ‘anti-fascist’ group comprised of radical Marxists and anarchists.” He sees no possibility that people who are not “radicals” would reject white supremacy. By denying substantive differences in the values of white supremacists and those who protest them, this approach avoids meaningful moral reflection and, in this case, reinforces Spencer’s frequent claim that he is a victim of people who want to “stifle” his free speech.

Another kind of moral equivalence is suggested by protesters who accuse those who stay away from campus, in a deliberate effort to deny Spencer more publicity, of acting like “good Germans,” a phrase that was used regularly in discussions prior to Spencer’s visit. Do those who ignore tacitly enable white supremacists to gain power? Do those who protest strengthen Spencer by following his playbook of confrontation? There is no easy answer to this question, and no theoretical one. The only sure answer will be the practical one – what happened? And that we will have only in retrospect.

As I finish this article, Richard Spencer has finished speaking. Protesters managed to fill many of the seats inside the Phillips Center, drowning him out much of the time. Many other people protested outside, and nobody was hurt. Now we wait for the white supremacists to go home, and ponder what has changed because they came.

Anna L. Peterson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

[succorcreek]

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Most topics are expanded in the 10 books by Dr. Bunch:http://bit.ly/2qsf6zC Click Here: Catalog of Books Kindle Hypnosis Binaural Subliminal CDs Gateway Articles linking to Article Series of 4-12 Parts: Narcissists Use Military Strategies to: Divide Conquer and Rule Actors / Singers: New Civil Rights Suffragettes Trump Builds The Mexico Wall but designs it Food Truck Wall with Ivanka Style 6 articles Golden Age of Pirates and Dictators with documentary video links Trump in Bed with Alt Business Right: ALEC alec.org Koch Brothers Smaug from Lord of Rings Smog: Trump to shred you if by his Gold Pile Trump the Robin Hood that Steals from Poor Gives to Rich: 6 parts Gidget and Donald Trump's Minions Spend Spring Break in Moscow Can you repackage and Evil Clown like Trump? Rise All Mocking Jays. Now. President Trump = President Snow of Hunger Games Symbolism of Beheading: Trump removing the voice of people Trump to Decompile Federal Government for Divide Conquer Rule Trump and Minions: Fairy Tale Hen House Thieves No eggs for you Bully Enslavement of the Voice and Soul: Hoodwinked Defined Trump Verbal Violence is intended to destroy Part 1 Cut your heart outhttp://ift.tt/2k1ZlRM Part 2http://ift.tt/2k1ZlRM Part 3 Refusing the kiss of the vampirehttp://ift.tt/2y5kyAz Part 4 Schumer took the Love Bait will you?http://ift.tt/2k16oKR Part 5 We're all on his shit list including ESPNhttp://ift.tt/2y67nj1 What is age 17 Regressed? It is an adult acting like a 17 year old boy regressed to that age In: actions beliefs goals ideals and even language.... Bullies and psychopaths don't grow up they become more skilled at what they do. And we state in articles and books we have nothing against 17 year old boys. They just should not be presidents statesmen and leaders. These are the 12 Tools to stop bullies: catalog Diverse articles on Age Regressed 17 Year Old behavior ideals goals languageArticles on the similar goals of Kim Jong-un Putin Dutarte and Trump See more in the Topic Cloud Below Be sure to sign up for articles by email. See our confidential promise on submitting your email for this: we'll never give it out or EVEN see it. Sign up because we'll have many more posts on Bullies World Genocide Age Regressed Psychopaths and Narcissists Bullies: Pt 1http://ift.tt/2jZReFG Pt 2http://ift.tt/2y67on5 Pt 3http://ift.tt/2k23HZd Pt 4http://ift.tt/2y67oDB Pt 5http://ift.tt/2k0xnpF Mythomania Part 1 When men think they are Savior Christhttp://ift.tt/2y5kAZd Mythomania Part 2 When your president is Mythomanichttp://ift.tt/2k0iAvh Mythomania Part 3 Trump psychopath but not psychotichttp://ift.tt/2y5kBfJ Mythomania Part 4 Trump's fantastical inner storyhttp://ift.tt/2k1ZnsS Mythomania Part 5 Mythomania in India: the rapist guruhttp://ift.tt/2y67qeH Mythomania Part 6 Juggaloes Counter to Evil Clownhttp://ift.tt/2k1EzBN Mythomania Part 7 Kim Jong-Un Dininghttp://ift.tt/2fPDJ6E other info on mythomania: 1. Two Books in catalog above on that:catalog of tools 2. other references here:http://ift.tt/2jYc73M . Heart of Stone: GOP and Trump Healthcare Article 1 Don't move to Idahohttp://ift.tt/2y67qLJ Article 2 NO CBOhttp://ift.tt/2k0rLM1 Article 3 Killing those you lovehttp://ift.tt/2y5kErV Article 4 Psychopaths Delight in Depriving Othershttp://ift.tt/2hwqZlG Article 5 You're screwed if you live in one of these states http://ift.tt/2huLEKm Article 6 Rapehttp://ift.tt/2k0rNU9 Article 7 America's pooresthttp://ift.tt/2y67rPN Article 8 Soup Nazi http://ift.tt/2k0rLM1 Series When Wives and Lovers are "Turned" into junior vampires or co-criminals: Psychopaths (or Vampires) Select victims (Vampires "glamour" hypnotize prey and select persons are "turned" into a vampire with drops of the vampire's blood) Groom them Punish and Reward cycles bring submission See in the Books by Dr. Bunch this whole process plus there are different types of "minions" a. some just insanely jump on board like Kellyanne Conway b. some are selected groomed and trained in the Abuse Cycle like Donald Trump and most Psychopaths with their wives and lovers. 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